Meta has been fined nearly 800 million euros ($844.6 million) by Brussels after regulators accused Facebook’s parent company of stifling competition by “tying” its free Marketplace services with the social network.

Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s outgoing competition chief, said on Thursday that by linking Facebook with its classified ads service Meta had “imposed unfair trading conditions” on other providers.

She added: “It did so to benefit its own service Facebook Marketplace, thereby giving it advantages that [others] could not match. This is illegal.”

Meta said it would appeal against the 797.72 million euro fine levied by regulators. “We built Marketplace in response to consumer demand—this decision ignores the market realities, and will only serve to protect incumbent marketplaces from competition.”

It added: “The European Commission’s decision provides no evidence of competitive harm to rivals or any harm to consumers.”

The EU’s long-running antitrust probe into Meta was launched in 2019 following accusations from rivals that the tech giant was abusing its dominant position by offering free services while profiting from data it collects on the platform.

In December 2022, the European Commission issued initial charges against Facebook for allegedly using the data it gathered for free—mostly from businesses—to then sell ads to users.

It also marks one of the final investigations overseen by Vestager, who is set to leave the commission in the next few weeks after a decade of antitrust enforcement against Big Tech.

During her tenure, Vestager has repeatedly targeted the world’s biggest tech companies, with some of the toughest actions against tech giants such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft.

The EU Commission on Thursday said Meta is “dominant in the market for personal social networks (...) as well as in the national markets for online display advertising on social media.”

Facebook Marketplace, launched in 2016, is a popular platform to buy and sell second-hand goods, especially household items such as furniture.

Meta has argued that it operates in a highly competitive environment. In a post published on Thursday, the tech giant said marketplaces in Europe continue “to grow and dominate in the EU,” pointing to platforms such as eBay, Leboncoin in France, and Marktplaats in the Netherlands, as “formidable competitors.”

Meta’s fine comes at a period of political transition both in the EU and the US.

Brussels officials have been aggressive both in their rhetoric and their antitrust probes against Big Tech giants as they sought to open markets for local start-ups.

In the past five years, EU regulators have also passed a landmark piece of legislation—the Digital Markets Act—with the aim to slow down dominant tech players and boost the local tech industry.

However, some observers expect the new commission, which is set to start a new 5-year term in weeks, to strike a more conciliatory tone over fears of retaliation from the incoming Trump administration.

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The social media app Bluesky just reached the top of the free download charts for Apple’s app store in the United States, making it—for the moment, at least—more popular than Meta’s Threads and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The decentralized social media platform has received a fresh influx of users over the past week as more X users sour on Elon Musk’s political ambitions and abandon his social media platform for an alternative. Over a million new users have joined Bluesky since the 2024 US presidential election on November 5, which was shaped by Musk's influence.

First launched in 2019 as a project within Twitter, Bluesky gained independence from the company before Musk’s acquisition and its subsequent name change. Bluesky also captured the attention of some ex-tweeters back in 2023, when new users were only able to sign up through an invite system. Now you no longer need to have a code to join, and anyone can sign up. Interested in giving Bluesky a try? Here’s some advice for creating an account, finding who to follow, and tidying up your new home.

Get Started

The social media platform is available in your browser at bsky.app or through a mobile app (Android, iOS). I’m still getting the hang of it, but I do know that Bluesky will give you almost an overwhelming amount of choices right when you sign up, like the option to host your own server. That's cool, and it keeps the platform decentralized, but it's probably more involved than you want to be if you’re just online looking for sports scores and shitposts.

As you're creating an account, you’ll probably want to leave Bluesky Social as your hosting provider, as it’s what most people use. Next, enter your email address, create a strong password, and enter your birth date to verify that you're over the minimum age of 13. After this, you’ll need to come up with some witty user handle. Keep in mind that the complete name will be expanded to @examplehandle.bsky.social. Continue setting up your profile by filling out your bio and uploading a photo or creating an avatar.

Before we start following anyone, go ahead and open Settings to switch on the toggle for two-factor authentication, which will keep your account more secure. Next, click on the Moderation tab to add any words you’d like to mute. Here’s also where you can choose whether you’d like to see or block any adult content in your feed.

Find People to Follow

One of the platform’s highlights is the freedom of choice you get when deciding what you want to see. First up are the Discover and Following feeds, which should be familiar to users of X. Respectively, they show you an algorithmically generated feed of popular posts and a reverse-chronological feed of posts from people you follow. As a new user, you'll see a list of popular accounts to follow right off the bat.

You can also curate your own shareable lists of users to follow, or choose to follow lists of feeds curated by other Bluesky users. Following one of these curated lists—called starter packs—is a great way to follow large groups of accounts at once based on a niche or specific interest.

For example, WIRED put together a starter pack for readers to easily follow our reporters and staff members who are on the platform. You can visit this web page for a searchable database of all the available starter packs. There are starter packs available for heavy metal bands, gardening, science fiction authors, queer transit nerds, and so much more. All of this makes it easy to plug right into communities of folks with shared interests.

Manage the Flow

Navigating back to the home tab, the Discover feed of posts will look familiar at first glance to anyone who’s been on Twitter this decade. The look, layout, and even the mechanics are mostly the same. Tap the heart to like a post, press the two arrows to repost it to your followers, or click the little chat bubble to reply to the post. It’s worth noting that your likes are public on Bluesky and viewable by anyone. (Looking at you, Ted Cruz.)

Going next into your Settings, you may want to open Chat Settings to make some adjustments to the way direct messages work in Bluesky. The standard setting is to receive direct messages only from users you follow. You can open up this setting to receive messages from anyone on the platform if you want, or you can turn off DMs entirely if you’d rather just be left alone.

While you’re under the hood tweaking the settings on your new account, might I also suggest opening the Accessibility Settings and opt into requiring alt text descriptions on images before your post. Alt text is crucial to help blind or low-vision users understand what’s in an image, and it’s an essential tool for helping everyone navigate and enjoy Bluesky. This setting will serve as a solid reminder to take a few seconds and add some descriptive text to any visual media posts on the platform.

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It's Half-Life 2 week at Ars Technica! This Saturday, November 16, is the 20th anniversary of the release of Half-Life 2—a game of historical importance for the artistic medium and technology of computer games. Each day up through the 16th, we'll be running a new article looking back at the game and its impact.

There has been some debate about which product was the first modern “triple-A” video game, but ask most people and one answer is sure to at least be a contender: Valve’s Half-Life 2.

For Western PC games, Half-Life 2 set a standard that held strong in developers’ ambitions and in players’ expectations for well over a decade. Despite that, there’s only so much new ground it truly broke in terms of how games are made and designed—it’s just that most games didn’t have the same commitment to scope, scale, and polish all at the same time.

To kick off a week of articles looking back at the influential classic, we’re going to go over the way it was made, and just as importantly, the thought that went into its design—both of which were highly influential.

A story of cabals and Electronics Boutique

Development, design, and production practices in the games industry have always varied widely by studio. But because of the success of Half-Life 2, some of the approaches that Valve took were copied elsewhere in the industry after they were shared in blog posts and conference talks at events like the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC).

Valve is famous for influencing many things in gaming, but it was most influential in its relatively flat and democratic team structure, and that played out even during Half-Life 2’s development in the early 2000s. While many studios are broken up into clear departments big and small for different disciplines (such as art, level design, combat design, narrative design, AI programming, and so on), many parts of Valve’s Half-Life 2 team consisted of a half-dozen multi-disciplinary small groups the company internally called “cabals.”

Each major chapter in Half-Life 2 had its own unique four-to-five-person cabal made up of level designers and programmers. These groups built their levels largely independently while frequently showing their work to other cabals for feedback and cross-pollination of good ideas. They all worked within constraints set in a pre-production phase that laid out elements like the main story beats, some of the weapons, and so on.

Additionally, similarly sized design cabals worked on aspects of the game’s design that crossed multiple levels—often made with representatives from the chapter cabals—for things like weapons.

There was even a “Cabal Cabal” made up of representatives from each of the six chapter teams to critique the work coming from all the teams.

Many game designers—especially back in the '80s or '90s—worked largely in isolation, determining privately what they thought would be fun and then shipping a finished product to an audience to find out if it really was.

By contrast, Valve put a great deal of emphasis on playtesting. To be clear: Valve did not invent playtesting. But it did make that a key part of the design process in a way that is even quite common today.

The Half-Life 2 team would send representatives to public places where potential fans might hang out, like Electronics Boutique stores, and would approach them and say something along the lines of, “Would you like to play Half-Life 2?” (Most said yes!)

The volunteer playtesters were brought to a room set up like a real player’s living room and told to sit at the computer desk and simply play the game. Behind them, the level’s cabal would sit and watch a feed of the gameplay on a TV. The designers weren’t allowed to talk to the testers; they simply took notes.

Through this process, they learned which designs and ideas worked and which ones simply confused the players. They then made iterative changes, playtested the level again, and repeated that process until they were happy with the outcome.

Today’s developers sometimes take a more sophisticated approach to sourcing players for their playtests, making sure they’re putting their games in front of a wider range of people to make the games more accessible beyond a dedicated enthusiast core. But nonetheless, playtesting across the industry today is at the level it is because of Valve’s refinement of the process.

For a game as ambitious as Half-Life 2 was, it’s surprising just how polished it was when it hit the market. That iterative mindset was a big part of it, but it extended beyond those consumer playtests.

Valve made sure to allocate a significant amount of time for iteration and refinement on an alpha build, which in this case meant a version of the game that could be played from beginning to end. When speaking to other developers about the process, representatives of Valve said that if you’re working on a game for just a year, you should try to get to the alpha point by the end of eight months so you have four for refinement.

Apparently, this made a big impact on Half-Life 2’s overall quality. It also helped address natural downsides of the cabal structure, like the fact that chapters developed by largely independent teams offered an inconsistent experience in terms of the difficulty curve.

With processes like this, Valve modeled several things that would be standard in triple-A game development for years to come—though not all of them were done by Valve first.

For example, the approach to in-game cutscenes reverberates today. Different cabals focused on designing the levels versus planning out cutscenes in which characters would walk around the room and interact with one another, all while the player could freely explore the environment.

The team that focused on story performances worked with level designers to block out the walking paths for characters, and the level designers had to use that as a constraint, building the levels around them. That meant that changes to level layouts couldn’t create situations where new character animations would have to be made. That approach is still used by many studios today.

As is what is now called greyboxing, the practice of designing levels without high-effort artwork so that artists can come in and pretty the levels up after the layout is settled, rather than having to constantly go back and forth with designers as those designers “find the fun.” Valve didn’t invent this, but it was a big part of the process, and its in-development levels were filled with the color orange, not just gray.

Finding the DNA of Half-Life 2 in 20 years of games

When Half-Life 2 hit the market via the newly launched Steam digital distribution platform (more on that later this week), it was widely praised. Critics and players at the time loved it, calling it a must-have title and one that defined the PC gaming experience. Several of the things that came out of its development process that players remember most from Half-Life 2 became staples over the past 20 years.

For instance, the game set a new standard for character animations in fully interactive cutscenes, especially with facial animations. Today, far more advanced motion capture is a common practice in triple-A games—to the point that games that don’t do it (like Bethesda Game Studios titles) are widely criticized by players simply for not taking that route, even if motion capture doesn’t necessarily make practical sense for those games’ scope and design.

And Half-Life 2’s Gravity Gun, which dramatically built on past games’ physics mechanics, is in many ways a  concept that developers are still playing with and expanding on today. Ultrahand, the flagship player ability in 2023’s The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, could be seen as a substantial evolution from the Gravity Gun. In addition to offering players the ability to pick and place objects in the world, it gives them the power to attach them to one another to build creative contraptions.

There’s also Half-Life 2’s approach to using environmental lines and art cues to guide the player’s attention through realistic-looking environments. The game was lauded for that at the time, and it was an approach used by many popular games in the years to come. Today, many studios have moved on to much more explicit player cues like the yellow climbing holds in so many recent triple-A titles. As you’ll see in an upcoming article this week written by someone who played Half-Life 2 for the very first time in 2024, Half-Life 2’s approach may have set the stage, but modern players might expect something a little different.

One thing about the environment design that Half-Life 2 was praised for hasn’t been replaced these days, though: a commitment to subtle environmental storytelling. World-building and vibes are perhaps Half-Life 2’s greatest achievements. From BioShock to Dishonored to Cyberpunk 2077, this might be the realm where Half-Life 2’s influence is still felt the most today.

A legacy remembered

Looking back 20 years later, Half-Life 2 isn’t necessarily remembered for radical new gameplay concepts. Instead, it’s known for outstanding execution—and developers everywhere are still applying lessons learned by that development team to try to chase its high standard of quality.

Even at the time, critics noted that it wasn’t exactly that there was anything in Half-Life 2 that players had never seen before. Rather, it was the combined force of quality, scope, presentation, and refinement that made an impact.

Of course, Valve and Half-Life 2 are also known for multiple memorable cultural moments, some of the industry’s most infamous controversies, and playing a big part in introducing digital distribution. We’ll explore some of those things as we count down to the "Red Letter Day" this Saturday.

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"When something is broken, you fix it. When something is wrong, you make it right. And if things aren’t good enough, you make them better," says Warcraft RTS team senior manager Brad Chan during the broadcast.

The update brings overhauled lighting effects, environments, and a fresh UI to Warcraft 3: Reforged. As for in-game assets, Blizzard has improved the resolution of the classic Warcraft III models and levels to HD quality. This means anyone who dislikes the look of the Reforged assets can now appreciate the classic assets in much higher resolution than before.

A brand-new graphics options menu to switch between the available assets has been added too, letting fans individually customize their game's look. If players want to keep the original visual style of the heroes but update the environments and buildings to be from Reforged, while also keeping the icons classic, all of this is now possible.

"There are also new quality-of-life improvements such as in-game hotkey customization, updated ladder, and much much more," adds Blizzard.

The Warcraft 3: Reforged 2.0 update is out now for all owners. Blizzard also announced remasters for Warcraft I and Warcraft II today, going on to surprise release them both during the anniversary broadcast, read about them here.

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Warcraft I: Remastered brings the 30-year-old to current audiences with a fresh coat of paint, modernized controls, widescreen support, an overhauled UI, and more upgrades. While the gameplay will remain authentic to the classic experience, benefits like health bars, higher unit selection amount, hotkey indicators, and even a gallery full of never-before-seen artwork.

Moreover, players can toggle between the classic artwork and the remastered visuals, depending on their tastes. Here's a short description from Blizzard:

Experience the inciting war between Orcs and Humans that shook Azeroth to its core. Defend the realm as the noble Alliance, or seek to conquer it as the bloodthirsty Horde across thrilling faction campaigns or custom skirmish games. Whichever side you take, there has never been a better time to charge into the legendary battles of Azeroth’s greatest heroes in the Warcraft universe.

Next, 1995's Warcraft II: Remastered comes in touting both the Tides of Darkness campaign and the Dark Portal expansion's storyline. It also has modernized controls, hand-painted artwork, widescreen support, and accessibility options, just like the first game. Adding to that, uncompressed and re-balanced music from the original and even multiplayer support is here now, too, with support for up to eight players.

Blizzard has even kept support for custom maps that were made for the original game. The campaign description on the store page reads:

War between orc and humans rages on across the seas, and the fate of the world hangs in the balance as the great tacticians of the Horde and the Alliance clash. Only one thing is certain: winning this war will demand unprecedented cunning, courage, and nerves of steel.

Available via the Battle.net store, Warcraft I: Remastered comes in at $9.99, while Warcraft II: Remastered costs $14.99. A Battle Chest bundle containing both remasters, the original two games, plus the Warcraft III: Reforged edition is also available with a $39.99 price tag.

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For those unfamiliar, Mists of Pandaria Classic will bring forward the Pandaren race of monks to the game. It's a favorite expansion among many MMO fans, too. Blizzard hasn't yet announced what sort of changes the Classic release of the expansion will be compared to the original. In 2012, aside from introducing a new continent, race, and class, the expansion also raised the game's level cap to 90 and added a pet battle system.

Meanwhile, as Blizzard slowly moves forward through the expansions, it also has some news for players looking to jump back into the "classic" World of Warcraft Classic experience. Warcraft Classic 20th Anniversary Edition realms land on November 21.

"It's never too late to go back and re-experience World of Warcraft anew and gain the edge with a clean start on a level playing field, with fresh economies, on large realms, and just in time to celebrate 20 years of adventures in Azeroth," says Blizzard about this version. "And the journey doesn't stop there—for our PvP and PvE realms, conquer the heat of Outland when these realms progress to the Burning Crusade Classic."

The studio promises quality-of-life updates from later versions of Classic in these realms, while a Classic Guild UI toggle will also be present. A 'looking for group' tool, a dedicated services chat, and other features are being implemented, too.

To access these realms, World of Warcraft Classic players can choose to enter them when launching the MMO, with PvE, PvP, and Hardcore modes available starting next week.

As for the standard World of Warcraft, Blizzard also dropped a small teaser for the next installment in the Worldsoul Saga. Its second expansion, dubbed Midnight, will be unveiled fully next summer, and it will bring an official housing system to the MMO.

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About a decade ago, a college professor asked if I knew about the RISC vs CISC debate. I did not. When I asked further, he said RISC aimed for simpler instructions in the hope that simpler hardware implementations would run faster. While my memory of this short, ancient conversation is not perfect, I do recall that he also mentioned the whole debate had already become irrelevant by then: ISA differences were swept aside by the resources a company could put behind designing a chip. This is the fundamental reason why the RISC vs CISC debate remains irrelevant today. Architecture design and implementation matter so much more than the instruction set in play.

Some Key Terms

• CISC and RISC

  • CISC stands for Complex Instruction Set Computer. Historically, the CISC philosophy aimed to accomplish a task with fewer, more complex instructions. In the 1970s, the x86 instruction set was designed with the CISC philosophy in mind.

  • In contrast, the Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) philosophy wanted to use fewer and simpler instructions to make hardware design easier. Hopefully simpler hardware could run faster and be more performant. MIPS and ARM were originally designed following the RISC philosophy in the 1980s.

• Superscalar

  • A superscalar CPU can execute more than one instruction per clock cycle, in contrast to a scalar one that can only execute one instruction at a time.

• Out-of-order execution

  • A CPU with out-of-order execution can internally execute instructions as their dependencies become ready, irrespective of program order. It means independent instructions can begin execution ahead of a stalled one, improving execution unit utilization and mitigating the impact of cache and memory latency.

But What Are Modern CPUs Really Like?

Here are block diagrams outlining the microarchitecture of two unrelated CPUs, developed by different companies, running different instruction sets. Neither CPU core is simple, but both have a lot in common.

Cortex X2 and Zen 4 both use superscalar, speculative, out-of-order execution with register renaming. Beyond the core, both Cortex X2 and Zen 4 use complex, multi-level cache hierarchies and prefetchers to avoid DRAM access penalties. All of these features have everything to do with maximizing performance, especially as compute performance keeps outpacing DRAM performance. They have nothing to do with the instruction set in play.

Where the Problem Doesn’t Lie

Hackaday mentions the complexity of fetching and decoding instructions, but this isn’t a problem unique to x86. No modern, high-performance x86 or ARM/MIPS/Loongarch/RISC-V CPU directly uses instruction bits to control execution hardware like the MOS 6502 from the 1970s. Instead, they all decode instructions into an internal format understood by the out-of-order execution engine and its functional units.

Decoding is expensive for RISC architectures too, even if they used fixed length instructions. Like Intel and AMD, Arm mitigates decode costs by using a micro-op cache to hold recently used instructions in the decoded internal format. Some Arm cores go further and store instructions in a longer, intermediate format within the L1 instruction cache. That moves some decode stages to the instruction cache fill stage, taking them out of the hotter fetch+decode stages. Many Arm cores combine such a “predecode” technique with a micro-op cache. Decode is expensive for everyone, and everyone takes measures to mitigate decode costs. x86 isn’t alone in this area.

Hackaday further takes issue with instruction set extensions and increasing instruction count, but neither are distinctly x86 features. ARM has similarly been through numerous revisions and extensions. Where x86-64 has SSE, AVX(2), and AVX-512 vector extensions, 64-bit ARM (aarch64) has ASIMD, SVE, and SVE2 vector extensions. MIPS has a similar story with a MSA SIMD extension. MIPS didn’t get more extensions as ARM and x86 did, but that’s because no one was using it anymore. LoongArch is derived from 64-bit MIPS, but uses incompatible instruction encodings. Loongson has extended LoongArch with the LSX and LASX vector extensions.

ISAs also receive updates that have nothing to do with vectors. aarch64 got updates to accelerate atomic memory operations and speed up `memcpy`/`memset` routines. x86 sees similar updates from time to time, though in different areas. That’s because more transistor budget lets engineers do more things in hardware, and adding more instructions for specific workloads is a great way to speed them up.

mpsadbw is fine

Next, Hackaday focuses on x86’s mpsadbw instruction, noting that it’s doing “at least 19 additions but the CPU runs it in just two clock cycles.” The author should think of why that instruction exists by looking at its use cases. Video codecs strive to efficiently use bandwidth and disk space by representing most frames in terms of how they differ from previous ones, rather than storing the entire frame. Calculating the sum of absolute differences (SAD) is a good way to see how much a block has changed, and is a vital part of video encoding. ARM has similar vector instructions.

The author then suggests adding more instructions (like mpsadbw) makes register renaming and instruction scheduling more complex. That makes intuitive sense, but doesn’t match reality. Even though mpsadbw does more low-level operations, it only requires two register inputs and one destination register. The renamer therefore only needs to read two values from the register alias table to determine where to get inputs from, and allocate one free register to store the result.

The author looked at an instruction, noted that it does multiple calculations, and therefore concludes it looks scary, but let’s consider the alternative. We can perform the vector SAD calculation with RISC-like instructions (excluding the selection part of mpsadbw). Each simple RISC instruction would require the same degree of register renaming as the “complex” msadbw instruction. Each input requires a lookup in the register alias table, and a free register has to be allocated to hold each result.

Contrary to the author’s claims, complex instructions actually lower register renaming and scheduling costs. Handling an equivalent sequence of simple instructions would require far more register renaming and scheduling work. A hypothetical pure RISC core would need to use some combination of higher clocks or a wider renamer to achieve comparable performance. Neither is easy. As shown above, the same register may be renamed multiple times in quick succession, so a wider renamer must cope with a longer potential dependency chain. Beyond a wider renamer, a pure RISC design would need larger register files, schedulers, and other backend buffers to mitigate the impact of having to track more instructions.

Changes Have Already Come

Of course, people designing ARM CPUs understand the importance of efficiently using fetch/decode/rename bandwidth. They also understand the importance of economizing usage of backend resources like register files and scheduler entries. That’s why ARM today has plenty of complex instructions that perform many low-level operations under the hood. Vector instructions may be the most prominent example, but it’s easy to find other examples, too. aarch64 has long supported loading a value from memory with an address generated by shifting an index register, and adding that to a base register. That’s a chain of three dependent operations under the hood, but it simplifies array addressing.

On the other side, simple instructions often make up the majority of an executed program’s instruction stream. That’s especially applicable for programs that are hard to parallelize, like file compression or web browsing. CPUs today therefore have to be good at executing simple operations quickly. At the same time, they benefit from having complex instructions to speed up specific workloads.

Instruction sets today have changed with that reality in mind. The “CISC” and “RISC” monikers only reflect an instruction set’s distant origin. They reflect philosophical debates that were barely relevant more than three decades ago, and are completely irrelevant now. It’s time to let the CISC vs RISC debate die, forever.

Where Problems Actually Lie

Hackaday mentions x86’s real mode, leading to another important point: compatibility. When gushing over different CPUs and the performance they offer, it’s all too easy to forget what that performance is needed for: running software. If a CPU doesn’t run the software you need, it’s a tiny brick. x86-64 CPUs keep real mode around so that operating systems can keep booting in the same way. Today, you can create a single OS install drive that works on a modern Zen 4 system, a Phenom system from 15 years ago (just make sure you use MBR boot) and everything in between. That 15-year-old Phenom system can run recent operating systems like Windows 10 or Ubuntu 22.04. Of course there are limits, and you can’t run Windows 10 out of the box on a Northwood Pentium 4. But real mode support is part of what makes the same OS boot code work across so many CPUs. It’s part of the PC compatibility ecosystem that gives x86 CPUs unmatched compatibility and longevity.

Other ecosystems present a sharp contrast. Different cell phones require customized images, even if they’re from the same manufacturer and released just a few years apart. OS updates involve building and validating OS images for every device, placing a huge burden on phone makers. Therefore, ARM-based smartphones fall out of support and become e-waste long before their hardware performance becomes inadequate. Users can sometimes keep their devices up to date for a few more years if they unlock the bootloader and use community-supported images such as LineageOS, but that’s far from ideal.

Intel and AMD correctly realized that spending extra effort on compatibility is worthwhile. Doing so streamlines software distribution, and lets users hang onto their expensive hardware for longer.

Of course, compatibility can’t be maintained forever. ISAs have to evolve. AMD and Intel probably want to save some money by reducing the validation work needed to support real mode. Intel is already planning to drop real mode. Any ISA has to receive updates as requirements change over time. But compatibility breaks should be kept to a minimum, to avoid shoving users onto an upgrade treadmill with no clear benefit.

Conclusion

The CISC vs RISC debate seems to reignite every few years, often with claims that x86 should die. That debate was most compelling in the early 1990s while I was learning to walk. Alpha’s EV5, for instance, was a four-wide core from 1994 that ran at 266 MHz. Intel’s best 1994 CPU was the two-wide, 120 MHz Pentium. But soon Intel showed they could develop high performance designs of their own, and we know what happened by the end of the decade.

The 2000s saw Intel themselves try to push x86 to the side. Itanium was designed around the principles Hackaday’s author believes so strongly in. It used a set of 128 architectural registers to avoid register renaming. It used simple, fixed-length instructions. It dropped out-of-order execution to move scheduling responsibilities to the compiler. All of those ideas failed because increasing transistor budgets allowed better branch prediction and larger out-of-order execution structures. Hardware out of order execution could adapt to changing program behavior and naturally generate more optimal instruction schedules. Since out-of-order execution was necessary for high performance anyway, there was little point in keeping Itanium around.

Toward the late 2010s, Marvell’s ThunderX3 and Qualcomm’s Centriq server CPUs tried to find a foothold in the server market. Both used aarch64, and both were terminated by the end of the decade with little to show for their efforts. That’s not to say aarch64 is a bad ISA, or that ThunderX3/Centriq were doomed by it. Rather, a CPU needs to combine high performance with a strong software ecosystem to support it.

Today, aarch64 has a stronger software ecosystem and better performing CPU cores. Ampere Altra chips are deployed across Google, Microsoft, and Oracle’s public cloud offerings. Amazon is also using Arm’s Neoverse cores in their cloud. aarch64 is in a place where it can compete head on with x86 and challenge the Intel/AMD duopoly, and that’s a good thing. But Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS/LoongArch will have to succeed through the merits of their hardware design and software ecosystems. All of those instruction sets are equal enough in areas that matter.

Going forward, I hope we’ll have more productive, well-researched discussions on the merits of various CPU designs. Of course, ISA can be part of the debate, as various ISA extensions can have a tangible impact on performance. Licensing and royalties should also be discussed, as both regularly kill all sorts of promising technologies. But utterly incorrect claims like “In RISC architectures like MIPS, ARM, or RISC-V, the implementation of instructions is all hardware” need to get thrown out. The year isn’t 1980 anymore.

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As I’m sure many of you know, x86 architecture has been around for quite some time. It has its roots in Intel’s early 8086 processor, the first in the family. Indeed, even the original 8086 inherits a small amount of architectural structure from Intel’s 8-bit predecessors, dating all the way back to the 8008. But the 8086 evolved into the 186, 286, 386, 486, and then they got names: Pentium would have been the 586.

Along the way, new instructions were added, but the core of the x86 instruction set was retained. And a lot of effort was spent making the same instructions faster and faster. This has become so extreme that, even though the 8086 and modern Xeon processors can both run a common subset of code, the two CPUs architecturally look about as far apart as they possibly could.

So here we are today, with even the highest-end x86 CPUs still supporting the archaic 8086 real mode, where the CPU can address memory directly, without any redirection. Having this level of backwards compatibility can cause problems, especially with respect to multitasking and memory protection, but it was a feature of previous chips, so it’s a feature of current x86 designs. And there’s more!

I think it’s time to put a lot of the legacy of the 8086 to rest, and let the modern processors run free.

Some Key Terms

To understand my next arguments, you need to understand the very basics of a few concepts. Modern x86 is, to use the proper terminology, a CISC, superscalar, out-of-order Von Neumann architecture with speculative execution. What does that all mean?

Von Neumann architectures are CPUs where both program and data exist in the same address space. This is the basic ability to run programs from the same memory in which regular data is stored; there is no logical distinction between program and data memory.

Superscalar CPU cores are capable of running more than one instruction per clock cycle. This means that an x86 CPU running at 3 GHz is actually running more than 3 billion instructions per second on average. This goes hand-in-hand with the out-of-order nature of modern x86; the CPU can simply run instructions in a different order than they are presented if doing so would be faster.

Finally, there’s the speculative keyword causing all this trouble. Speculative execution is to run instructions in a branching path, despite it not being clear whether said instructions should be run in the first place. Think of it as running the code in an if statement before knowing whether the condition for said if statement is true and reverting the state of the world if the condition turns out to be false. This is inherently risky territory because of side-channel attacks.

But What is x86 Really?

Here, you can see block diagrams of the microarchitectures of two seemingly completely unrelated CPUs. Don’t let the looks deceive you; the Zen 4 CPU still supports “real mode”; it can still run 8086 programs.

The 8086 is a much simpler CPU. It takes multiple clock cycles to run instructionsa: anywhere from 2 to over 80. One cycle is required per byte of instruction and one or more cycles for the calculations. There is also no concept of superscalar or out-of-order here; everything takes a predertermined amount of time and happens strictly in-order.

By contrast, Zen 4 is a monster: Not only does it have four ALUs, it has three AGUs as well. Some of you may have heard of the Arithmetic and Logic Unit before, but Address Generation Unit is less well known. All of this means that Zen 4 can, under perfect conditions, perform four ALU operations and three load/store operations per clock cycle. This makes Zen 4 a factor of two to ten faster than the 8086 at the same clock speed. If you factor in clock speed too, it becomes closer to roughly five to seven orders of magnitude. Despite that, the Zen 4 CPUs still supports the original 8086 instructions.

Where the Problem Lies

The 8086 instruction set is not the only instruction set that modern x86 supports. There are dozens of instruction sets from the well-known floating-point, SSE, AVX and other vector extensions to the obscure PAE (for 32-bit x86 to have wider addresses) and vGIF (for interrupts in virtualization). According to [Stefan Heule], there may be as many as 3600 instructions. That’s more than twenty times as many instructions as RISC-V has, even if you count all of the most common RISC-V extensions.

These instructions come at a cost. Take, for example one of x86’s oddball instructions: mpsadbw. This instruction is six to seven bytes long and compares how different a four-byte sequence is in multiple positions of an eleven-byte sequence. Doing so takes at least 19 additions but the CPU runs it in just two clock cycles. The first problem is the length. The combination of the six-to-seven byte instruction length and no alignment requirements makes fetching the instructions a lot more expensive to do. This instruction also comes in a variant that accesses memory, which complicates decoding of the instruction. Finally, this instruction is still supported by modern CPUs, despite how rare it is to see it being used. All that uses up valuable space in cutting-edge x86 CPUs.

In RISC architectures like MIPS, ARM, or RISC-V, the implementation of instructions is all hardware; there are dedicated logic gates for running certain instructions. The 8086 also started this way, which would be an expensive joke if that was still the case. That’s where microcode comes in. You see, modern x86 CPUs aren’t what they seem; they’re actually RISC CPUs posing as CISC CPUs, implementing the x86 instructions by translating them using a mix of hardware and microcode. This does give x86 the ability to update its microcode, but only to change the way existing instructions work, which has mitigated things like Spectre and Meltdown.

Fortunately, It Can Get Worse

Let’s get back to those pesky keywords: speculative and out-of-order. Modern x86 runs instructions out-of-order to, for example, do some math while waiting for a memory access. Let’s assume for a moment that’s all there is to it. When faced with a divide that uses the value of rax followed by a multiply that overwrites rax, the multiply must logically be run after the divide, even though the result of the multiply does not depend on that of the divide. That’s where register renaming comes in. With register renaming, both can run simultaneously because the rax that the divide sees is a different physical register than the rax that the multiply writes to.

This acceleration leaves us with two problems: determining which instructions depend on which others, and scheduling them optimally to run the code as fast as possible. These problems depend on the particular instructions being run and their solution logic gets more complicated the more instructions exist. The x86 instruction encoding format is so complex an entire wiki page is needed to serve as a TL;DR. Meanwhile, RISC-V needs only two tables (1) (2) to describe the encoding of all standard instructions. Needless to say, this puts x86 at a disadvantage in terms of decoding logic complexity.

Change is Coming

Over time, other instruction sets like ARM have been eating at x86’s market share. ARM is completely dominant in smartphones and single-board computers, it is growing in the server market, and it has even become the primary CPU architecture in Apple’s devices since 2020. RISC-V is also progressively getting more popular, becoming the most widely adopted royalty-free instruction set to date. RISC-V is currently mostly used in microcontrollers but is slowly growing towards higher-power platforms like single-board computers and even desktop computers. RISC-V, being as free as it is, is also becoming the architecture of choice for today’s computer science classes, and this will only make it more popular over time. Why? Because of its simplicity.

Conclusion

The x86 architecture has been around for a long time: a 46-year long time. In this time, it’s grown from the simple days of early microprocessors to the incredibly complex monolith of computing we have today.

This evolution has taken it’s toll, though, by restricting one of the biggest CPU platforms to the roots of a relatively ancient instruction set, which doesn’t even benefit from small code size like it did 46 years ago. The complexities of superscalar, speculative, and out-of-order execution are heavy burdens on an instruction set that is already very complex by definition and the RISC-shaped grim reapers named ARM and RISC-V are slowly catching up.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t hate x86 and I’m not saying it has to die today. But one thing is clear: The days of x86 are numbered.

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Starting with handhelds: Xbox is not launching one anytime soon, but Spencer’s team is experimenting with prototypes. For now, they’re focused on making the Xbox app run smoother on existing handhelds like the ASUS ROG Ally. Spencer admitted the Xbox app experience is “good, not great” on these devices, so they’re tweaking it to make it feel more natural and responsive.

Phil's interest in handhelds fits right in with a booming market, with devices like the Nintendo Switch already selling over 125 million units and Valve’s Steam Deck making PC gaming portable. This market is worth billions, and gamers want high-quality gaming that they can take on the go. If Xbox does release a handheld, it could bring Game Pass and xCloud right into players’ hands, appealing to both Xbox fans and new users who want console-level gaming wherever they are.

On the acquisition front, Xbox isn’t done. Spencer hinted they’re eyeing opportunities in Asia, especially after working with Tencent to launch a mobile version of Age of Empires. But Xbox isn’t in a rush for big buys; they’re still busy settling in Activision Blizzard and its mobile hits like Candy Crush and Call of Duty Mobile.

Xbox’s new mobile game store is also in the works, though it’s on pause as the team figures out what’ll make it stand out against Google Play and the Apple App Store. Spencer admitted they’d need a good hook to attract both gamers and creators to a new platform.

Xbox is making some surprising moves in the console world, too. They’re putting more games on rival platforms like PlayStation and Nintendo Switch, with Phil Spencer open to future cross-platform releases. Despite a tough year that included 2,500 layoffs and closing three game studios, Spencer is optimistic about Xbox’s future. With growth in cloud gaming, PC gaming, and strong console usage, he sees a bright path forward—one he hopes won’t rely on $1,000 consoles to reach more players.

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The PC system requirements that have been floating around for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl in the past few weeks have been the same classic options the developer GSC Game World put out a long while ago, back when it was supposed to launch in 2022. Now, the studio has pushed out the official updated hardware specifications for the title, which fans may want to look over to see if their rigs can handle the game.

The studio shared four graphics presets and what sort of hardware will PC players need to run the game at those targets, starting from 1080p at 30fps to 4K at over 60fps. Judging from the wide range of GPU and CPU parts the company lists in its specifications, it at least looks like the game will be an optimized experience at launch.

However, the RAM and space recommendations from GSC Game World may catch low-end gamers a bit off-guard. 16GB of memory and at least 160GB of free space, specifically on an SSD, are needed by the game across all presets shown today.

Here's the complete picture:

To produce even more frames, the studio has confirmed AMD FSR and Nvidia DLSS upscaling tech for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl. In Nvidia's latest driver release, which adds support for the title, the company confirmed that it ships with support for DLSS 3 Frame Generation as well as Reflex latency reducing tech. It's unclear what version of FSR will the game use though.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl is launching on November 20 across Xbox Series X|S consoles of Microsoft as well as on PC via Steam, GOG, Microsoft Store, and the Epic Games Store. The title will also be a day-one release on Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass services.

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The report comes from Board Channels (via Videocardz). Sources close to the company have said that the AD107 is the single product from the Ada Lovelace architecture that is still in production, and even that, only temporarily. The AD107 is what powers the RTX 4050 mobile GPU and the RTX 4060 lines. Production for everything above that has seemingly been stopped, affecting AD102, 103, 104, and 106 chips.

"According to sources upstream, NVIDIA has completely shut down the AD106 production line, with all its capacity reallocated to the RTX 50 series lines," says the report from Board Channels. "Only a single AD107 line is temporarily retained. As a result, the RTX 40 series has entered its final quarter of clearance, with mid-to-high-end RTX 40 GPUs gradually halting production and supply. The transition is accelerating, and AIC (Add-in Card) brand partners will face decreasing availability in the market."

In early October, another report dropping from China stated that Nvidia had discontinued its production of the RTX 4090, the current performance king in the GPU space. The report also predicted that Nvidia would be killing off more of its RTX 40 series lineups, with the 4080 SUPER being the next on the chopping block. If the latest reports from today are accurate, much more than that has gone out the door.

While Nvidia has not officially announced the Blackwell architecture-based RTX 50 series just yet, many rumors have pointed toward an early 2025 launch, at least for the top-end models. The company plans to have a CES 2025 keynote in January, which could be where it unveils the highly-anticipated next-generation models.

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This test was done on a Samsung device running Windows 11, and it got 14 cores, split into 4 performance cores, 8 efficiency cores, and 2 low-power cores. The Ultra 5 225H is about 13.5% faster than the old Ultra 5 125H (2,547 vs 2,223) and 7.5% quicker in multi-core (12,448 vs 11,543). The base clock is 1.7 GHz, but it can boost up to 5 GHz while keeping the 28W TDP low, making it more efficient. During testing, it hit a peak of 4.87 GHz.

Intel has been facing some issues lately. Their 13th and 14th-gen Raptor and Arrow Lake chips had problems like instability under heavy load, and some users reported voltage issues. Intel tried to fix it with updates, but it’s been messy. Plus, the excitement around Arrow Lake’s E-cores (efficiency cores) hasn’t fully lived up to the hype, and people are wondering if these chips will actually deliver.

Also, don’t forget Intel’s Lunar Lake processors, which are aimed at ultra-light laptops. These chips are getting good reviews for their battery life and decent integrated graphics, making them great for light gaming. But right now, all eyes are on the Arrow Lake 200H series, and based on these early benchmarks, Intel might have a winner on their hands.

We’ll probably see more benchmarks soon—and maybe even better scores. But for now, the Core Ultra 200H chips look like a solid upgrade for anyone wanting a good mix of power and efficiency in their next laptop or tablet. Just keep in mind that early Geekbench tests might not show the full picture since they could be based on prototype hardware or early samples.

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Amazon is poised to roll out its newest artificial intelligence chips as the Big Tech group seeks returns on its multibillion-dollar semiconductor investments and to reduce its reliance on market leader Nvidia.

Executives at Amazon’s cloud computing division are spending big on custom chips in the hopes of boosting the efficiency inside its dozens of data centers, ultimately bringing down its own costs as well as those of Amazon Web Services’ customers.

The effort is spearheaded by Annapurna Labs, an Austin-based chip start-up that Amazon acquired in early 2015 for $350 million. Annapurna’s latest work is expected to be showcased next month when Amazon announces widespread availability of ‘Trainium 2,’ part of a line of AI chips aimed at training the largest models.

Trainium 2 is already being tested by Anthropic—the OpenAI competitor that has secured $4 billion in backing from Amazon—as well as Databricks, Deutsche Telekom, and Japan’s Ricoh and Stockmark.

AWS and Annapurna’s target is to take on Nvidia, one of the world’s most valuable companies thanks to its dominance of the AI processor market.

“We want to be absolutely the best place to run Nvidia,” said Dave Brown, vice-president of compute and networking services at AWS. “But at the same time we think it’s healthy to have an alternative.” Amazon said ‘Inferentia,’ another of its lines of specialist AI chips, is already 40 percent cheaper to run for generating responses from AI models.

Gadi Hutt, senior director of business development, with Trainium chips.

Credit: Financial Times

“The price [of cloud computing] tends to be much larger when it comes to machine learning and AI,” said Brown. “When you save 40 percent of $1,000, it’s not really going to affect your choice. But when you are saving 40 percent on tens of millions of dollars, it does.”

Amazon now expects around $75 billion in capital spending in 2024, with the majority on technology infrastructure. On the company’s latest earnings call, chief executive Andy Jassy said he expects the company will spend even more in 2025.

This represents a surge on 2023, when it spent $48.4 billion for the whole year. The biggest cloud providers, including Microsoft and Google, are all engaged in an AI spending spree that shows little sign of abating.

Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta are all big customers of Nvidia, but are also designing their own data center chips to lay the foundations for what they hope will be a wave of AI growth.

“Every one of the big cloud providers is feverishly moving towards a more verticalized and, if possible, homogenized and integrated [chip technology] stack,” said Daniel Newman at The Futurum Group.

“Everybody from OpenAI to Apple is looking to build their own chips,” noted Newman, as they seek “lower production cost, higher margins, greater availability, and more control.”

“It’s not [just] about the chip, it’s about the full system,” said Rami Sinno, Annapurna’s director of engineering and a veteran of SoftBank’s Arm and Intel.

For Amazon’s AI infrastructure, that means building everything from the ground up, from the silicon wafer to the server racks they fit into, all of it underpinned by Amazon’s proprietary software and architecture. “It’s really hard to do what we do at scale. Not too many companies can,” said Sinno.

After starting out building a security chip for AWS called Nitro, Annapurna has since developed several generations of Graviton, its Arm-based central processing units that provide a low-power alternative to the traditional server workhorses provided by Intel or AMD.

“The big advantage to AWS is their chips can use less power, and their data centers can perhaps be a little more efficient,” driving down costs, said G Dan Hutcheson, analyst at TechInsights. If Nvidia’s graphics processing units are powerful general purpose tools—in automotive terms, like a station wagon or estate car—Amazon can optimize its chips for specific tasks and services, like a compact or hatchback, he said.

So far, however, AWS and Annapurna have barely dented Nvidia’s dominance in AI infrastructure.

Nvidia logged $26.3 billion in revenue for AI data center chip sales in its second fiscal quarter of 2024. That figure is the same as Amazon announced for its entire AWS division in its own second fiscal quarter—only a relatively small fraction of which can be attributed to customers running AI workloads on Annapurna’s infrastructure, according to Hutcheson.

As for the raw performance of AWS chips compared with Nvidia’s, Amazon avoids making direct comparisons and does not submit its chips for independent performance benchmarks.

“Benchmarks are good for that initial: ‘hey, should I even consider this chip,’” said Patrick Moorhead, a chip consultant at Moor Insights & Strategy, but the real test is when they are put “in multiple racks put together as a fleet.”

Moorhead said he is confident Amazon’s claims of a 4-times performance increase between Trainium 1 and Trainium 2 are accurate, having scrutinized the company for years. But the performance figures may matter less than simply offering customers more choice.

“People appreciate all of the innovation that Nvidia brought, but nobody is comfortable with Nvidia having 90 percent market share,” he added. “This can’t last for long.”

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Three years later, a fresh update has hit the collection that aims to improve the lighting of the remastered releases. As reported by RockstarIntel, the graphics options menu now features the Classic Lighting toggle, which is available in the remastered versions of Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

Classic Lighting is not a brand-new development, however. It first appeared in the mobile port of the Definitive Trilogy, which arrived in late 2023.

The updated lighting is said to restore "the look and feel of the sky in the original games." It is now enabled by default in all versions of the game. The update is also said to include improvements to character animations, heat haze effect, and clouds. Users are also spotting various bug fixes and tweaks to make the ports' gameplay mechanics mimic the original releases, like being able to ruin and shoot at the same time in GTA III and Vice City.

Unlike the PC and console versions developed by Grove Street Games, the Android and iOS and iPadOS port was made by Video Games Deluxe, which added improvements like better lighting effects and hordes of bug fixes, it's unclear if Video Games Deluxe is now developing the PC and console version of the Definitive Edition too.

Looking towards the future of the series, the latest installment in the action franchise, Grand Theft Auto VI, is on track to launch in fall 2025.

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A few days ago, AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D was officially launched. The independent reviewers that reviewed the CPU found that it’s not only faster than AMD’s official claims, but it’s in fact the fastest gaming CPU in the world. We ourselves called it gaming legend, unknown to us that AMD is using the same term to market the CPU – maybe that came later.

So good is the CPU that we reported how it got sold out within minutes in many places like Germany and other countries. While a lot of it is possibly to due to scalpers having mass purchase the CPUs to seller it later at a higher price, combined with low stock, new numbers suggest that 9800X3D has a high demand too.

9800X3D Becomes Best Selling CPU

Well known Twitter (now X) based poster @TechEpiphanyYT, best known for sharing sale details from Germany’s top retailer Mindfactory, has shared this week’s, that is the launch AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D’s launch week’s CPU sale numbers.

As per the sale figures shared by him, AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D is now the best-selling CPU at Germany’s Mindfactory in the first week itself. It beats its predecessor AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, which was previously the top-selling CPU and continued to be so until now.

In the first week itself, AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D has topped the charts with 980 unit sales. Followed by AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D with 410 units sales. Then comes AMD Ryzen 7 5700X3D (which has virtually replaced Ryzen 5800X3D everywhere) with 330 units sold in trays.

The other CPUs in the top 10 include the likes of AMD Ryzen 7500F, 7600X3D and many other non-X3D CPUs in the Ryzen 5000, Ryzen 7000 and Ryzen 9000 series.

Compared to that, the highest selling CPU from Intel is Core i9-14900K has sold just 30 units. Followed by Intel Core i5-14600KF and Core i5-14600K, who have seen 30 and 20 unit sales respectively. Intel Core Ultra 200 series is almost not even among the sales, with the likes of Core Ultra 5 245K and Core Ultra 7 265K having sold just 5 units each.

However, so big is the demand for AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, that as per Computerbase.de (via VideoCardz), Mindfactory isn’t going to get the next stock till the later parts of December. Which is almost 45 days.

Conclusion

While this sale data is only from the largest retailer in Germany, it gives us some idea how things are going for Intel and AMD in the CPU market.

It’s true that Germany has massively shifted towards being an AMD dominant market in recent years, we are seeing that AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D is selling a lot or getting sold out in other regions in the world too. This comes on the backdrop of poor reviews for the AMD Ryzen 9000 non-X3D CPU series. Especially in the gaming performance.

AMD has struck gold with the X3D series with 3D-V Cache based CPUs and it keeps giving them the profits and market share. Just a few days ago, Tom’s Hardware reported how AMD’s CPU market share has skyrocketed in recent years. From having just 11% market share in 2018 to having 24% market share currently. We feel that’s largely due to the popularity of the X3D series of CPU and not just Ryzen series itself.

Whatever maybe the reason, we hope that AMD manages to improve the supply of the Ryzen 7 9800X3D. So that anyone who wants it can get it.

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The M4 Mac mini was supposed to turn heads with its sleek new design, but instead, everyone has been buzzing about one major issue: the power button placement. Laptop Mag reports that some have even gone as far as 3D printing extenders just to make it easier to press. Since the redesign dropped, the power button has basically stolen the spotlight.

Reactions are all over the place. A lot of people are not happy about having to tip or lift the mini just to turn it on or off, especially when it is all hooked up to cables. Not exactly convenient. Some people are really vocal about it, calling it a “dumb design choice” and comparing it to other Apple products with similarly awkward design choices (looking at you, Magic Mouse charging port).

Apple finally addressed the issue in an interview, where execs John Ternus and Greg "Joz" Joswiak basically said, "You don't really use the power button that much anyway." They also explained that the ultra-compact design of the M4 Mac mini is what forced them to put the button on the bottom. While this is likely an attempt to bring the conversation back to the Mac mini’s impressive size, is it a fair excuse to brush off the complaints?

It really depends on how you use your Mac mini. If you mainly use it as a desktop, the power button is not something you hit often, so maybe Ternus and Joswiak have a point. But the new Mac mini is so small you might take it on the go like a laptop. In that case, you will be using the power button a lot more, and the awkward placement could be a pain.

At the end of the day, the power button placement is not a huge deal, kind of like the odd charging port on the Magic Mouse.

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In a statement, Microsoft confirmed that MSN is taking over Microsoft Start, its news aggregation service. Here is what a company's spokesperson said:

We regularly review our offerings to ensure we’re delivering the highest value for customers. As part of this review process, we are unifying our content services under the MSN brand to better simplify our experiences. There will be no impact on functionality as part of this change.

In other words, the only changes so far are the brand and the new logo, which looks somewhat similar to the Windows 7 logo (here is some useless information for you today).

It makes sense for Microsoft to keep the MSN brand around, as it remains one of the oldest and most recognizable Microsoft brands. Also, ditching "Microsoft Start" might feel like the right choice for many as it was confusing from the get-go when it was introduced in 2021. While Microsoft is no stranger to confusing things (Windows App replacing Remote Desktop is another example), it is good to see the company making things a bit clearer for one.

For now, there is no information on what will happen to the Microsoft Start app on mobile devices. However, now you know why the MSN logo appears on the new tab page alongside Copilot, Bing search bar, and a Microsoft logo. Whether anybody cares remains an open question, though.

Source: Windows Central

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As spotted by Tushar Mehta on social media platform X, YouTube on Android has modified the way the swipe-down gesture behaves. Currently, swiping down on a fullscreen video exits the fullscreen mode and shows you the entire YouTube UI. However, thanks to the undergoing testing, performing the swipe-down gesture plays the next video instead.

Notably, this behavior is similar to how you watch short-form videos on the YouTube Shorts tab in the YouTube app. The feature is currently under testing and seems to be available only to a limited set of YouTube Android users. Besides, the swipe-down gesture change has not been spotted in the iOS and iPadOS app.

While there is a dedicated button for exiting and entering fullscreen mode on the YouTube player UI, the swipe gesture is much more convenient. In fact, it is much more helpful when using a large-screen device, such as an Android tablet. Though this change may bring consistency between short-format and long-format video navigation, it compromises ease of use.

Because there is also a dedicated "Next" button available in the YouTube player UI, many users agree that it would be better if YouTube keeps the swipe-down gesture exclusive to exit and enter fullscreen mode.

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Table of contents:

1. Windows 10 and 11 news
2. Windows Insider Program
3. Updates are available
4. Gaming news
5. Great deals to check

Windows 11 and 10

Here we talk about everything happening around Microsoft's latest operating system in the Stable channel and preview builds: new features, removed features, controversies, bugs, interesting findings, and more. And of course, you may find a word or two about older but still supported versions.

If you plan on buying a Copilot+ PC with Windows 11 version 24H2, beware of a known issue with some printers. In a support document, Microsoft confirmed that some ARM-based PCs have a hard time installing a printer with the included installer or the one from the official website.

Some users with traditional hardware may finally be able to upgrade to Windows 11 version 24H2 as Microsoft lifted one of the update blocks. It involved the Voicemeeter app causing blue screens of death due to driver compatibility issues. After updating the app, you will be able to update to Windows 11 24H2, assuming no other update block affects your system.

The company updated its documentation with some changes for Windows 10 users who were planning to create install media. Also, there is an update to KB5044380, the latest non-security update for Windows 11 24H2. Microsoft acknowledged that the update is breaking OpenSSH for many users. Fortunately, there is a workaround.

Following the release of Windows Server 2025, Microsoft also released Windows Server IoT 2025. However, the company ended up in hot waters after automatically upgrading Server 2022 to 2025 with KB5044284. By the way, if you want to learn more about Windows Server 2025, check out Microsoft's official security advice book and a list of new features.

This week, someone leaked the installer of a new People app for Windows 11. For now, there is little to no information about this application, plus users suspect it is a simple web app wrapper. After signing in with a work or school account, you can view contact cards, search, call, message, etc.

Here is some useful stuff for Windows 11 users. There is a new PowerShell script that can bypass Windows 11 hardware requirements. Also, with Paint3D now gone from the Microsoft Store, users found a way to bring the app back to life. Check out this guide if you want to try Paint3D on your computer.

To finish this week's Windows section, here is an interesting discovery in Windows 98. As it turned out, Microsoft intentionally made Control Panel slower in the past with a hardcoded eight-second delay when adding new hardware. The exact origin of this slowdown is not yet known.

Windows Insider Program

Here is what Microsoft Released this week for testing in the Windows Insider Program:

Users discovered that the latest Windows 11 Beta build contains new ways to share files. With a few tweaks, Windows 11 lets you share a local file from the "Recommended" section in the Start menu or jump lists on the taskbar.

Besides releasing new builds, Microsoft also shipped some feature updates for two inbox Windows apps: Notepad and Paint. The former finally succumbed to Microsoft's ever-growing AI efforts, giving users the ability to rewrite text within Notepad. Paint, on the other hand, received the new Generative Fill and Erase features, improvements to Cocreator, and more. Also, Paint now has its own entry in Windows 11's context menus, which further ruins what is already a broken experience for many.

Another interesting find is related to Windows widgets. Enthusiasts discovered new code bits in the latest Language Experience Pack pointing to the ability to customize lock screen widgets in Windows 11. Details are scarce, though.

Updates are available

This section covers software, firmware, and other notable updates (released and coming soon) delivering new features, security fixes, improvements, patches, and more from Microsoft and third parties.

Earlier this week, Microsoft released a new PowerToys version, 0.86. The update introduced module grouping for a tidier and better-organized user interface and a lot of improvements for existing modules. For example, Advanced Paste can now convert images to text, paste to files, and more. There are also improvements for Mouse Jump, New+, Run, Quick Accent, Registry Preview, and more.

There is a new version of ExplorerPatcher, a popular app for tweaking Windows 11's user interface and fixing some of its annoying quirks. The latest release fixed the broken Win + X menu and Start menu crashes and brought other important changes. Just keep in mind that antivirus apps do not like this app, and you will likely get a false positive when attempting to download it. Proceed at your own risk.

After confirming a bunch of Outlook issues last week, Microsoft published a workaround for yet another issue in Classic Outlook. This time, it is a fix for a crash that occurs when the user opens too many emails at once.

Speaking of Outlook, you might consider switching to Classic Outlook or an entirely different email client, as Microsoft is about to kill the old Windows Mail app on December 31, 2024. The company has updated its official documentation to clarify what will happen once the app is out of support by the end of this year.

Word users noticed that Microsoft started testing a new user interface for new documents. Microsoft's idea appears to place common Copilot-related tasks right above your new document, providing faster access to actions like writing a document based on another file, drafting an email, summarizing documents, or describing what a new document should contain.

This week's browser updates include a small patch for Firefox. Version 132.0.1 has been released to address video playback issues on certain websites and bugs with the browser themes. Also, Microsoft Edge Dev has been updated to version 132.0.2931.1 with some minor changes and bug fixes.

Other notable updates include the following:

• Microsoft expanded the Town Hall limit in Teams to a massive 50,000 attendees.
• Microsoft has updated the list of supported processors for Windows 10 LTSC.
• Proton VPN is now available natively on Windows on ARM.
• Telegram Desktop is now available natively on Windows on ARM.
• Microsoft is forcing Microsoft 365 subscribers to pay more Copilot in the service.
• Outlook is getting name pronunciation in profile cards and Copilot-powered themes.
• OpenAI updated the ChatGPT app for Windows with webcam support and more.
• Logitech updated Options+ with Smart Action improvements, new device support, and more.
• Microsoft announced Azure OpenAI Data Zones and 99% latency SLA for token generation.

Reviews are in

Here are the hardware and/or software we reviewed this week.

Christopher White reviewed the UnifyDrive UT2, a battery-powered portable NAS with multiple connection options, great performance, a solid built quality, and more. It is not cheap, though, plus you will have to deal with battery power and small software issues.

On the gaming side

Learn about upcoming game releases, Xbox rumors, new hardware, software updates, freebies, deals, discounts and more.

Turn 10 Studios announced a new Forza Motorsport update. Update 14 brings NASCAR to the game, offering gamers the opportunity to sit behind the wheel of three stock cars from the 2024 NASCAR season. The update also tweaks sound for some of the existing vehicles, introduces advanced ghosting for multiplayer events, adds rolling starts, and more.

Microsoft announced the next wave of games coming to Game Pass this month. The latest additions include Botany Manor, StarCraft: Remastered, StarCraft II, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, Hrold Halibut, and more.

SEGA has some bad news for its fans. On December 6, the publisher will delist over 60 games, including Crazy Taxi, Alien Storm, Jet Set Radio, Phantasy Star II, SEGA Bass Fishing, Shining Force, and many more from Steam. If you want to keep some of those in your library, you better act fast and get them while you can.

There is bad news for GeForce NOW users as well. Nvidia announced monthly caps for GeForce NOW playtime, limiting all tiers to 100 hours per month with the ability to pay $2.99 (Performance) or $5.99 (Ultimate) for 15 extra hours. The new limit will be applied at the start of 2025.

To make up for the bad news about playtime caps, Nvidia announced a batch of new games, such as Planet Coaster 2, TCG Card Shop Simulator, StarCraft II, StarCraft Remastered, and more.

Microsoft started testing a new AI chatbot among Xbox Insiders. The idea is to provide gamers with quick support using natural language. If the issue is out of the scope of AI, the user will have the option to ask the assistant to connect them to a real person from the Microsoft Support team.

Valve has announced a new feature for Steam that will help gamers record their gameplay. Steam Game Recording is pitched as a low-impact feature developed to "take advantage of NVIDIA and AMD" graphics cards to reduce the performance hit when recording and processing clips to the minimum. Steam Game Recording is now available to everyone.

Alongside announcing Steam Game Recording, Valve put another nail in Windows 7/8/8.1's coffin. The latest Steam version no longer works on pre-Windows 10 versions, and existing customers will not be able to install the update. Steam might still work for some time, but the clock is ticking, and you better upgrade if you are still on Windows 7.

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Paul's Hardware (1.49M subscribers)

November 10, 2024

Video length: 10m 39s

0:00 Welcome to Paul’s Tech News - Nov 10, 2024

1:33 AMD Ryzen 9800X3D Post Launch Diagnosis - sold out in minutes

3:18 AMD May Add 3D V-cache to Mobile APUs, Threadripper

4:15 Nvidia ousts Intel from Dow Jones Index after 25-year run

5:43 For the first time ever, AMD outsells Intel in the datacenter space

6:27 Intel is being sued over the instability issues in its Raptor Lake CPUs

7:12 Intel 'still committed to Arc,' but with fewer discrete GPUs, more integrated graphics

TECH BRIEFS

8:27 7600X3D launched this week too, but is Micro Center Exclusive

9:01 Mozilla Foundation lays off 30% staff, drops advocacy division

9:30 Touchscreens Are Out, and Tactile Controls Are Back

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Sony has been quiet about the requirement for the most part, but Sony president, COO, and CFO Hiroki Totoki made some comments (via GamesRadar) about the PSN changes during a Q&A session of the company's financial report. An interpreter was being used during he session, which explains the rather awkward language in some areas. However, the quotes the exact statements made by the president during the Q&A.

"The PlayStation accounts that we have offered – well actually, by offering them, for instance, sometimes that tends to invite pushback," says Totoki. "But for the live service games, in order to maintain order of the gaming so that anybody can enjoy the games safely, we need to create an environment conducive to that and, of course, enjoying the game freely."

"Having some restrictions, may not call it rule, but to ask the users and gamers to follow the manner, those manners are very important and we have to continue to seek the best way to achieve this," he adds

Despite Totoki specifically talking about live service games having a PSN account requirement, like Helldivers 2 for instance, Sony has been adding the mandatory login setting to its latest single-player ports too.

The latest God of War Ragnarök port is one of these games, while the upcoming Spider-Man 2 port will also need a PSN account. Sony even pulled the original Horizon Zero Dawn from stores when its remaster landed, which requires an account.

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The expansion's animated cutscenes, the first for the game, are more than just an aesthetically pleasing addition, according to the developer. They will let players get accurate summaries of historical events that also won't need to last as long as purely narrated options.

The style of the cutscenes will change depending on the section of the campaign the player is currently playing. "In the Achaemenid section of the campaign, these cutscenes are styled like Persian rock reliefs, while in the Athenian and Spartan sections of the campaign, they’re styled like Greek vase paintings," explains the developer.

The developer is also teasing a mysterious voice actor for the expansion's narrator, who will provide "even more of the historical and cultural flavor of the time period."

Moreover, the 21-scenario campaign will offer vastly different narratives, characters, as well as objectives to go after, which, according to Capture Age, will let players experience "carefully-crafted cinematic moments, from epic charges to city festivals to grand military parades."

"Each scenario has gameplay fitting the narrative and characters featured in them," the developer continues. "When playing as the politician Pericles, for instance, players will have to maintain popularity with the people of Athens, while numerous scenarios featuring the vicious general Lysander have mechanics which reward violence and destruction."

With the final dev blog out of the way, Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition — Chronicles: Battle for Greece expansion launches next week on November 14. It's available for pre-order on Steam as well as Microsoft Store for PC and Xbox console players.

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