News: Technology News

Intel to get up to $3 billion in grants for making chips for the Department of Defence

Tue, 17 Sep 2024 17:22:15 +0000

Intel is set to receive funding of up to $3 billion from the U.S. government under the 'Secure Enclave' program. The program, which is an initiative by the Biden-Harris administration, is aimed at making sure there's a steady supply of advanced semiconductors for the U.S. government's defense and intelligence use.

This funding is different from the CHIPS and Science Act, which is more focused on supporting the construction and modernization of semiconductor fabs. The chips made for the Secure Enclave program, however, are likely to be made in separate facilities that are isolated from the production of other components.

Although the Department of Commerce is still responsible for granting the funds under the CHIPS and Science Act, the Secure Enclave will be handled by the Department of Defense (DoD) to ensure a domestic supply chain of advanced semiconductors fully purposed for national security.

Chris George, Intel Federal's president and general manager, said:

“Intel is proud of our ongoing collaboration with the U.S. Department of Defense to help strengthen America’s defense and national security systems. Today’s announcement highlights our joint commitment with the U.S. government to fortify the domestic semiconductor supply chain and to ensure the United States maintains its leadership in advanced manufacturing, microelectronics systems, and process technology.”

Intel is currently the only company to benefit from the Secure Enclave program, as government officials in the U.S. are keen to get advanced semiconductors from an American supplier since they're meant for national security interests.

Although Intel is still struggling with its finances, as evident from its mass layoffs of 15,000 employees, it's making huge efforts to ensure that it gets back on its feet. Recently, the company announced that its foundry business will become an independent subsidiary. The change is said to give external foundry customers a "clearer separation from the rest of Intel."

via Bloomberg (paywall)

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Crucial claims its new Gen4 NVMe SSD makes Windows boot faster than Samsung, WD

Tue, 17 Sep 2024 17:21:13 +0000

Micron today has released its latest NVMe SSD. The new M.2 drive, Crucial P310, is a new variant of the one existing with the same name, but this one, comes in the 2280 form factor instead of 2230. Micron distinguishes the two variants as "P310 2280" and "P310 2230".

Both of them are built on PCIe Gen4 technology and although it is not the latest and greatest, it is still plenty fast for most people. In terms of performance, Micron makes some pretty big claims regarding Windows performance, especially in terms of booting and startup. It says that the Crucial P310 can deliver 20% faster performance compared to Samsung's 990 Evo and Western Digital (WD)'s SN580 SSDs. It also adds that app performance is also better, as well as game load times.

These claims are based on UL Benchmarks' PCMark 10 and 3DMark synthetic tests which help give a rough estimate of how a Windows (10) system should perform, though something like the Storage Benchmark would have been a nice addition too.

It writes:

20% faster performance in real-world tasks than other Gen4 SSDs booting Windows, starting applications such as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, and loading seamless gameplay on PCs.

Based on PCMark 10® Benchmark test results comparing the Crucial P310 to Samsung 990 EVO and WD SN580 SSDs. Performance may vary.

Based on 3DMark Benchmark test results comparing the Crucial P310 to Samsung 990 EVO and WD SN580 SSDs. Your performance may vary.

The performance advantage the P310 enjoys is not hard to understand though. The new drive from Crucial comes with higher sequential reads and write speeds of 7100 MB/s and 6000 MB/s respectively.

In contrast, the 990 Evo is rated at 5000 MB/s and 4200 MB/s respectively and the SN580 has 4150 MB/s for both reads and writes. Micron has not provided the random throughputs (IOPS).

However, these get interesting when we take price into consideration. Micron is launching the P310 2280 SSDs in three variants, 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB, and their MSPRs are $88.99, $114.99, and $189.99 respectively.

At this launch price, it is cheaper than what the Samsung 990 Evo debuted at ($124.99 for the 1TB model and $209.99 for the 2TB model), although current prices are much lower. Meanwhile, the WD Blue SN580 came out cheaper at $79.99 for the 1TB and $134.99 for the 2TB, and like the 990 Evo, the WD too is much cheaper now.

Hence, the Crucial P310 can certainly be a good recommendation if the price settles at a similar level as that of the 990 Evo and the WD SN580. Until then though the claim is not really all that meaningful.

One major caveat of the Crucial drive is that it is built on QLC NAND compared to TLC on the other two products. This means the endurance on the P310 2280 is far lower at just 440 TBW for the 2TB variant and 220 for the 1TB.

The Samsung blows it out of the water with a rating of 1200 TBW for 2TB and WD does not do too badly at 900 TBW for the 2TB.

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Amazon kills remote working, tells workers to be in office 5 days a week

Tue, 17 Sep 2024 17:20:03 +0000

Hot-desking is out, assigned floor plans are in.

Amazon has told staff they must return to the office five days a week from the start of next year, one of the strictest corporate crackdowns on remote working that has become commonplace since the pandemic.

“We’ve decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID,” chief executive Andy Jassy wrote in a memo to employees globally on Monday. “We’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective.

“Before the pandemic, it was not a given that folks could work remotely two days a week, and that will also be true moving forward,” Jassy said. He added exceptions would be made for employees with a sick child, family emergencies, or coding projects that needed a more isolated environment.

Amazon said it would also end hot-desking and bring back assigned floor plans in its US buildings—although the practice will continue in Europe. At the end of 2023, the company had about 1.5 million full-time and part-time employees, according to regulatory filings.

While the vast majority of those are hourly warehouse workers or delivery drivers, it still has hundreds of thousands of office-based staff.

Amazon has been in the vanguard of the return to the office drive, making it an outlier among tech companies that continue to offer more flexible terms. Google requires staff to regularly attend one of its buildings three times a week, and many start-ups remain completely remote.

In May last year, Amazon introduced a company-wide three-day rule for office attendance and aggressively policed the policy, monitoring when employees badged in and out of buildings and warning those who persistently failed to comply.

“The advantages of being together in the office are significant,” Jassy wrote. “The last 15 months... has strengthened our conviction about the benefits.”

In other sectors such as financial services there have been five-day mandates, but typically only for certain staff, such as traders and senior managers. Last year, JPMorgan Chase told its managing directors they needed to be in full time to set an example for the rest of the company and help train juniors.

Jassy—who has been at Amazon since 1997 and replaced founder Jeff Bezos as chief in mid-2021—also outlined a number of other initiatives aimed at galvanizing the ecommerce and cloud giant.

He has set up a “bureaucracy mailbox” for staff to report “unnecessary and excessive process or rules [that] should be called out and extinguished.” The chief executive also announced a cull of middle management aimed at boosting the ratio of “individual contributors” to managers by 15 percent by the end of the first quarter next year.

“As we have grown our teams as quickly and substantially as we have the last many years, we have understandably added a lot of managers,” he wrote. “It’s created artifacts that we’d like to change, eg pre-meetings for the pre-meetings for the decision meetings, a longer line of managers feeling like they need to review a topic before it moves forward.”

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Microsoft increases quarterly dividend and announces a $60 billion share repurchase program

Tue, 17 Sep 2024 08:12:28 +0000

Microsoft yesterday announced a quarterly dividend of $0.83 per share, an 8-cent or 10% increase over the previous quarter’s dividend of $0.75 per share. Microsoft's board of directors declared that the increased quarterly dividend is payable on December 12, 2024, to shareholders of record on November 21, 2024. The ex-dividend date will be November 21, 2024.

In addition to the increased quarterly dividend, Microsoft's board of directors also approved a massive share repurchase program of up to $60 billion. Unlike previous share repurchase programs from Microsoft, this new program has no expiration date and may be terminated at any time.

In 2019, Microsoft's Board of Directors approved a share repurchase program authorizing up to $40 billion in share repurchases. After completing this program in 2021, the Board approved a new share repurchase program in September 2021, authorizing up to $60 billion in share repurchases. With the announcement of this new $60 billion share repurchase program yesterday, Microsoft's total share repurchase program has reached $160 billion over the past 5 years.

Furthermore, Microsoft announced that its 2024 Annual Shareholders Meeting will be held on December 10, 2024. Microsoft stockholders of record at the close of business on September 30, 2024, will be eligible to vote during the meeting.

As expected, the 2024 Annual Shareholders Meeting will be held virtually and hosted by Satya Nadella (chairman and CEO of Microsoft), Amy Hood (executive vice president and chief financial officer), Brad Smith (vice chair and president), and Sandra E.Peterson (Microsoft's lead independent director).

Microsoft's above announcements signal a strong commitment to returning value to shareholders. The combination of an increased quarterly dividend and a substantial, open-ended share repurchase program demonstrates the company's confidence in its financial position and future growth prospects. These actions, alongside the details of the upcoming Annual Shareholders Meeting, highlight Microsoft's focus on transparency and engagement with its investors.

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Apple software leaks new Mac mini with five USB-C ports ahead of rumored event

Tue, 17 Sep 2024 03:27:57 +0000

Apple often launches Macs and iPads in October, after the iPhone dust settles.

Apple's newest iPhones and Apple Watches don't come out until later this week, but the rumor mill is already indicating that Apple is planning a product announcement for October to refresh some of the products that didn't get a mention at the iPhone event. Apple scheduled its release calendar similarly last year, when it announced and released new iPhones in September and then launched the first wave of M3 Macs around Halloween.

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman believes that the event will mainly focus on the first wave of Macs with M4 processors, following the standard M4's introduction in the iPad Pro earlier this year. As he has reported previously, he expects new MacBook Pro models with the M4 and "pro-level M4 chip options," presumably the M4 Pro and M4 Max. He also expects an M4 version of the 24-inch iMac.

But the most interesting of the new Macs will still be the redesigned Mac mini, which hasn't gotten an M3 update at all and has been using the same basic external design since 2010. This Mac mini is said to be closer in size to the Apple TV than the current mini, but still uses an internal power supply so that owners won't have to wrangle a power brick. At least some of the current device's ports will be replaced by USB-C and/or Thunderbolt ports, something that MacRumors apparently confirmed earlier today when they found a reference to an "Apple silicon Mac mini (5 ports)" in an Apple software update (some of those ports are reportedly on the front of the device, a nice Mac Studio design upgrade that I'd like to see on a new Mac mini).

The "five port" descriptor does imply that there will be another model with either more or fewer ports—Apple used similar terminology to distinguish the two- and four-port versions of some MacBook Pro models in the Intel days. The current M2 Mac mini models have fewer ports than the models with the M2 Pro chip, because the more powerful processor also has more I/O capabilities—assuming we get one Mac mini with an M4 and an upgraded model with an M4 Pro, we'd expect the Pro version to have more ports.

Gurman says that other Mac models, including the Mac Studio, Mac Pro, and MacBook Air, will see M4-series updates throughout 2025. Of those, the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro have gone the longest without an update—they're all still using M2-series chips.

Apple is also said to be planning some new lower-end iPads for the October event—not the first time that Macs and iPads have shared billing for one of these late-fall product announcements. The $349 iPad 10 and the iPad mini have both gone over a year without any kind of hardware update; it seems likely that they'll both get newer chips, if not significantly updated designs.

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Intel confirms it plans to switch its foundry business into an independent subsidiary

Tue, 17 Sep 2024 03:27:05 +0000

Earlier this year, Intel announced its current financial situation was not looking good. Among other things, the company announced mass layoffs of 15,000 team members in early August. Today, as previously rumored, Intel announced more details of its plan to make major change to get things back on track.

In a blog post, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger announced it would be making changes to its foundry business. That division will now become an independent subsidiary of the company. Gelsinger stated:

A subsidiary structure will unlock important benefits. It provides our external foundry customers and suppliers with clearer separation and independence from the rest of Intel. Importantly, it also gives us future flexibility to evaluate independent sources of funding and optimize the capital structure of each business to maximize growth and shareholder value creation.

Intel will also put the construction of two foundry plants, one in Poland and one in Germany, on hold for at least two years. It still plans to complete the construction of its packaging plant in Malaysia but added that it will "align the startup with market conditions and increased utilization of our existing capacity."

Intel also announced a new collaboration with Amazon Web Services. That will include Intel making an "AI fabric chip" for AWS. The company said it will put its focus on its own x86 chip portfolio. It added:

Our top priority is to maximize the value of our x86 franchise across client, edge and data center markets, including with a broader range of custom chiplets and other customized offerings that meet emerging customer needs, as demonstrated by today’s AWS announcement.

Intel said that it is currently over halfway through the process of cutting its previously announced 15,000 workers, either through layoffs or early retirement. The rest of the job cuts will happen before the end of October.

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The next Battlefield game is confirmed for a present day setting; first concept art revealed

Tue, 17 Sep 2024 03:26:25 +0000

Fans of Electronic Arts' Battlefield military shooter game series got some news today about the next entry in the franchise. IGN is reporting that the untitled game will be set in the present day, and it also posted the first public concept artwork from that game.

The published concept art, which is partially obscured by the game's logo, does show elements like naval engagements. There also appears to be a wildfire in progress. IGN speculates that could mean natural disasters could be a part of the new Battlefield game.

IGN also interviewed Vince Zampella, the head of EA's Respawn Entertainment who also serves as the Group General Manager for EA Studios. He indicated that after releasing games set in World War I, World War II, and in the near future for the last game in the series (Battlefield 2042) the decision was made to go back to the modern-day setting. He added:

I think for me, it's that peak of Battlefield-ness is in that Battlefield 3 and 4 days. So I think it's nostalgic for players, for me, for the teams even.

Zampella added that the next game in the series will support up to 64 players in online matches and that it will not have the Specialist characters like in Battlefield 2024.

In February, EA Entertainment President Laura Miele stated that the company now has "the largest Battlefield team in the franchise's history." Four internal EA teams (DICE, Motive, Ripple Effect, and Criterion) are confirmed to be working on the next game in the series.

There's no word on a release date for the game yet. However, Zampella did confirm there will be some kind of community program for the upcoming game that will begin sometime in 2025. He stated the team wants to "get the community back on our side, get that trust back."

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Cities: Skylines II DLC further delayed as work on improving base game continues

Tue, 17 Sep 2024 03:26:06 +0000

It was in April of 2024 that Paradox Interactive pushed back the launch of Cities: Skylines II's promised post-launch premium content. The decision was announced following overwhelmingly negative feedback the company had received about the base game's stability. Now, months later, even more delays have been announced to upcoming DLC packs and expansions.

"We wanted to take a moment to update you on the status of our upcoming releases," says the post on Paradox forums by developer Colossal Order. We know many of you are excited for new content, and we want to be transparent about where things currently stand."

The upcoming Modern Architecture and Urban Promenades DLC packs that were slated to deliver cosmetic content has been delayed to Q4 of 2024, even though they are functionally ready for release. The Bridges and Ports expansion that was previously delayed to Q1 2025 from 2024 is now poised to land sometime in Q2 of 2025.

The developer is instead focusing its attention to delivering the long-promised Asset Editor to the modding tools suite.

"We will continue dedicating our efforts to the base game before shifting focus to paid content, says the studio, reiterating its mission from months ago. "Our goal is to ensure the community is satisfied with the state of the game, and once we’ve achieved that, we’ll be excited to release these amazing packs to you!"

As for the Asset Editor though, the studio says that while it's making good progress on its release, its development had gone through "more challenges" than it expected. Work is reportedly being done on finishing "Serialization and Virtual Texturing support for custom assets," before a beta release hits the public. No actual launch timeline was shared today though.

Bugs related to hotels not appearing in cities, tourism, and other gameplay affecting problems are being explored by the studio for future patches too. Following fan feedback, "road-related decorations and a line tool for placing props and trees" are also being looked at by the studio for being implemented with future patches.

Unfortunately for console fans, Colossal Order had nothing new share the Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 versions of Cities: Skylines II. They were originally supposed to launch alongside the PC version before being hit by multiple delays. In July of this year, the studio indefinitely delayed the console versions.

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Diablo 4 has made $1 billion and counting for Blizzard, and a huge chunk of that comes from devilish microtransactions

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 17:49:10 +0000

Over a year after its launch, we have an idea of how much revenue Diablo 4 has made.

What you need to know

Blizzard Entertainment's popular action RPG Diablo 4 was one of the biggest games in 2023, and has continued to be a big success in 2024.
Now, new details from a developer's LinkedIn profile have revealed that the game has made over $1 billion in total revenue since its launch last year, with $150 million of that coming from in-game microtransaction purchases.
Diablo 4's microtransactions have a reputation for being egregiously overpriced, and many players have scathingly criticized them for many months.
However, Diablo 4 has also gotten significant improvements and additions over time, with the upcoming Vessel of Hatred expansion looking to be a huge boost to the game.

Blizzard Entertainment's huge action RPG Diablo 4 was undoubtedly one of 2023's biggest games, and it's remained an incredibly popular title over the course of this year as well. It's always been clear that it's been a financial success, but now, thanks to some newly discovered details on the LinkedIn page of Blizzard senior product manager Harrison Froeschke (thanks, Gamepressure), we have an idea of exactly how much cash it's pulled in for the developer.

According to what Froeschke wrote (his profile has since been taken down), Diablo 4 has made over $1 billion in all-time revenue since its launch in early June last year. Of that, a sizable $150 million has some from microtransaction purchases on in-game shop items like weapon skins, armor sets, and other premium cosmetics.

"Leading the monetization strategy of the store cosmetics, pricing, bundle offers, personalized discounts, and roadmap planning which have driven over $150M MTX lifetime revenue," read part of the description of Froeschke's work at the studio. He also helped carry out "every step of game sales since game pre-order to the first expansion by configuring and collaborating with other teams resulting in over $1B total lifetime revenue."

The Spiritborn, the new class coming in the Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred expansion.

(Image credit: Blizzard Entertainment)

Given that Diablo 4 stands as the fastest-selling Blizzard game ever, its impressive performance isn't exactly shocking. Still, what I was surprised to see is that the game's microtransactions account for a full 15% of its total revenue, given that it's a fully priced title on all of its platforms. And sure, some of its players come from Xbox Game Pass, but the hack-and-slash ARPG only made it to Microsoft's buffet-style gaming service in March following the firm's acquisition of Activision Blizzard for Xbox.

Another reason I was surprised by the statistic is that Diablo 4's in-game purchases are notorious for being egregiously overpriced, especially for items being sold in a game that already has a $40-50 barrier-to-entry. We've written about how Diablo 4 has done little to earn these shop prices in the past, but as my colleague Jez Corden wrote in that piece, many players are likely detached from community discourse and don't care much. Perhaps that's what this number is telling us.

To Blizzard's credit, Diablo 4 has been updated frequently over time with numerous high-level patches, with its next big update poised to make the Season of Loot Reborn look like a hotfix with how massive it is. That comes after Season 5's patch notes were so long that my finger got tired scrolling through them; overall, if there's one thing to be said with certainty, it's that the game's developers are not resting on their laurels.

On that note, it's worth keeping in mind that Diablo 4's Vessel of Hatred expansion is just a few weeks away from its scheduled October 8 release, with the DLC bringing the returning Diablo 2 zones Teganze Plains and Torajan Jungle, a fresh story centered around the Prime Evil Mephisto, and a dexterity-based class called the Spiritborn to the action RPG. Following its launch, Blizzard then intends to allow feedback on the expansion to guide their approach towards future seasons and the second upcoming DLC.

Ultimately, even with the negative reputation Diablo 4's in-game purchases have, it's clear that they — along with the game itself — are continuing to rake in a healthy profit, and I don't see that changing any time soon.

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Starfield: Shattered Space gameplay trailer shows off the handcrafted city of the expansion

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 17:47:06 +0000

Since launch, Bethesda has been steadily updating its latest RPG experience Starfield with new content and highly-requested features. Now, with the game's first expansion, Shattered Space, right around the corner the studio is starting to give more looks at what exactly players are jumping into.

Previously, the studio has confirmed that the expansion will be focused on the House Va'ruun faction that players already run into in the base game. Heading to the faction's home planet Va'ruun'kai, the new questline will take place in the city of Dazra, a hand-crafted location to explore like the studio's expansions for its previous games. It will feature over 50 new locations, fresh enemies, and even new types of grenades made of "gross" organic material.

The latest Starfield: Shattered Space deep dive Bethesda published today can be seen above, giving plenty of looks at the new planet players will be visiting and gameplay.

"There's so much mystery to House Va'ruun, and because they've so thoroughly isolated themselves, it made them the perfect faction to explore in a completely self-contained experience," says the studio. "From the minute you arrive on Va'ruun'kai, the story never sends you off-planet. You're free to leave at any time, but the story is fully centered around life on the Va'ruun homeworld."

Shattered Space Lead Quest Designer Brian Chapin says that the expansion will explore what can happen when humanity's search for knowledge goes too far. A secret Grav-Drive experiment had made the fabric of spacetime to rip apart, taking with it a large section of the Dazra capital. Players will be arriving at the city just weeks after this incident. With the city leadership still missing, everything is in chaos, making for plenty of role-playing opportunities.

Starfield Shattered Space expansion releases on September 30 across PC and Xbox Series X|S consoles. It costs $29.99 to purchase, but everyone who owns the Premium and Constellation Editions Starfield will receive it for no extra cost.

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Intel reportedly misses out on $30 billion PlayStation 6 chip deal

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 17:45:34 +0000

Intel Corporation has reportedly failed in its bid to supply chips for Sony's next-generation console, PlayStation 6. According to sources familiar with the matter, Intel was in talks with Sony for months in 2022 to design and manufacture the semiconductor components for the PlayStation 6.

Winning the contract would have been hugely significant for Intel. The order would have kept Intel's manufacturing capacity filled for at least five years, and revenue from the contract was estimated at $30 billion throughout the contract. That lost business comes as Intel tries to grow the contract manufacturing part of its business and add more big customers who can help use its chip fabrication plants.

Instead, AMD was selected to design the chips for the PlayStation 6, continuing its deal with Sony that began with the PlayStation 4. While AMD will handle the design, TSMC will carry out the actual production, following the industry model of chip design, which is separate from fabrication.

According to reports, Intel was unable to settle the main issues with Sony regarding how the two companies would share their profit. There was also an issue over backward compatibility for PlayStation games, which would have demanded that Intel invest heavily in a processor capable of meeting Sony's needs. These were some of the factors that contributed to the breakdown in talks without a deal.

The missed Sony opportunity and other setbacks have exacerbated the challenges facing Intel's leadership. The technology giant recently saw the abrupt departure of board member Lip-Bu Tan over disagreements about company strategy. Intel executives are debating potential divestments and reorganizations in the wake of multi-billion dollar losses in its manufacturing division.

Securing the PlayStation 6 chip order could have provided Intel with a much-needed boost. However, the talks with Sony reportedly fell apart due to clashes over financial terms and technical requirements.

Source: Reuters

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Indian antitrust body finds Amazon, Flipkart guilty of violating laws with Samsung, others

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 17:44:50 +0000

The Competition Commission of India (CCI) has reportedly accused Samsung and Xiaomi, along with other smartphone companies, of colluding with e-commerce giants Amazon and Flipkart to feature exclusive product launches that violate India's antitrust laws. According to the antitrust watchdog, these companies only favoured limited sellers and engaged in business practices that harmed other ordinary sellers on their platform, affecting competition and consumer interests.

The investigation was started as part of a lawsuit that was filed by the Delhi Vyapar Mahasangh (DVM) against Flipkart Internet Private Limited and Amazon Seller Services Private Limited, the companies' registered entities in India. The DVM is part of India's largest trade association, the Confederation of All India Traders, and represents several Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSME) traders of New Delhi. It said that both these e-commerce platforms engaged in anti-competitive practices that harmed small local traders selling smartphones and related accessories online, and also the brick-and-mortar retailers who had delayed access to those smartphones.

In its filing, the DVM said that Flipkart and Amazon had agreements with a select group of preferred sellers who were either directly or indirectly affiliated with them. These sellers had significant advances such as better pricing, preferential listings, and deep discounts during major sales events such as Flipkart's Big Billion Days and Amazon's Prime Day Sale.

According to Reuters, the same was evident from the CCI's reports which said that five companies, Samsung, Xiaomi, Motorola, Realme, and OnePlus colluded with Amazon and its affiliates and were involved in the practice of exclusive phone launches, which opposes the competition laws of India. Flipkart had similar exclusive launches with Samsung, Xiaomi, Motorola, Vivo, Lenovo, and Realme. The report also said that both Flipkart and Amazon downplayed the allegation of exclusive launches though the practice was "rampant" in reality.

For now, the CCI has mandated regulatory actions on the e-commerce companies and asked them to submit their financial records for the past three fiscal years. In the coming weeks, the watchdog will review any objections to its findings, and could potentially impose fines while mandating companies to change their business practices.

via Reuters

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Steam reaches a new concurrent online player high record thanks to several hit games

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 07:37:16 +0000

We are still very early in the fall/holiday gaming season, but the release of several new hit PC games has caused the number of concurrent players on Valve's Steam service to continue to go up. Last week, Steam reached a new online player high number of 37,633,514. Earlier today, Valve's own charts reported that the number hit 37,789,483 concurrent players on Steam. That's another significant increase of 155,969 more Steam users in just seven days.

The big reason for the increases today and last week is due to the launches of several recent PC games that have become popular online on Steam. That includes titles like Black Myth: Wukong, Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine 2, and the 1.0 release of Satisfactory. Other games that launched earlier this year that continue to be popular on Steam include Once Human and even Banana. The free-to-play game, where you just click on the image of a banana, is currently the third most played Steam with over 375,000 players online.

Even older games are seeing a reassurance on Steam. The battle royale game PUBG: Battlegrounds, has seen its online game numbers go up in the last year, according to SteamDB. Its latest 24 hour peak player number today was 687,660, making it the second most-played online game on Steam today. Valve's own Counter-Strike 2 free-to-play shooter continues to generate consistent online player numbers. Today it hit a 24-hour peak of 1,433,661 to be the most-played game on Steam.

Those numbers could keep going higher and higher as more highly anticipated games are due to launch in the next few months. They include Frostbite 2, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, Marvel Rivals, and more. Valve's own upcoming game Deadlock, which is not officially released yet, already has over 150,000 players online with its invite-only model, and that number could explode when Valve officially releases the game.

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Paul's Tech News - The REAL Reason AMD Gave Up High-End Gaming GPUs… [Video]

Sun, 15 Sep 2024 08:56:05 +0000

Paul's Hardware (1.48M subscribers)

September 15, 2024

Video length: 11m 57s

0:00 Welcome to Paul’s Tech News - Sept 15, 2024

1:47 The Real Reason AMD is Ditching High-End Gaming GPUs

4:02 AMD announces unified UDNA GPU architecture to take on Nvidia's CUDA

5:04 Intel is still waiting for $8.5 billion Chips Act disbursement

6:29 Intel Core Ultra 200K launch pushed back by a week, now scheduled for October 24

TECH BRIEFS

8:04 Sony announces PS5 Pro, a $700 graphical upgrade available Nov. 7

9:10 AMD X870 Motherboards Could Be Expensive - Expected Late Sept

10:23 Man Makes Fake Bands With AI, Earns $10 Million Listening to them with Bots ► LINKS The Real Reason AMD is Ditching High-End Gaming GPUs

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Microsoft Weekly: More layoffs, another no-build week, Windows updates, and more

Sun, 15 Sep 2024 08:54:34 +0000

In this episode of Microsoft Weekly, we look at another no-build week, new executives at Microsoft, another round of layoffs in the company's gaming division, Patch Tuesday updates, more tools for PowerToys, some game reviews, and more.

Table of contents:

Windows 10 and 11 news
Windows Insider Program
Updates are available
Gaming news
Great deals to check

This week's Microsoft Weekly kicks off with a new COO (Chief Operations Officer) at Microsoft. That position, vacant (or absent) since 2016 and Kevin Turner's departure, is now occupied by Carolina Dybeck Happe, a former Chief Financial Officer of GE. When commenting on Carolina's assignment, Satya Nadella said that she's "recognized for her ability to drive transformational change at scale while delivering improved customer experiences and faster time to value."

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.

This month's Patch Tuesday updates are now available. Windows 11 users can download KB5043076 for versions 23H2 and 22H2, while those on Windows 11 version 21H2 can download KB5043067. As for Copilot+ PCs with Windows 11 24H2, KB5043080 and KB5043939 await them in Windows Update (or probably already installed). Windows 10 received KB5043064.

In addition to releasing new Patch Tuesday updates, Microsoft issued a reminder that computers with Windows 11 version 21H2 and 22H2 will be force-updated to version 23H2 in less than one month. That is because Windows 11 versions 21H2 and 22H2 are about to reach their end of support.

The company confirmed that it fixed problems with degrading performance and high CPU usage on Windows Server 2019. It also acknowledged the "Operation is not supported" bug with Windows 11 24H2 MSU updates (there is a workaround).

Moving away from cumulative updates, we come to a new deprecated feature in Windows client versions. Microsoft announced that legacy DRM support in Windows 7 and 8 is now deprecated. That includes Windows Media Player and Silverlight clients.

Finally, Microsoft held its Windows Endpoint Security Ecosystem Summit, where it revealed some ideas for improving Windows security updates and preventing future incidents like the one caused by Crowdstike this Summer.

Windows Insider Program

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

	Windows 11	Windows 10
Canary Channel		Not Applicable
Dev Channel		Not Applicable
Beta Channel		Not Applicable
Release Preview Channel

Despite another no-build week, Windows Insiders still received some small bits to try. The Clock app has been updated with two new widgets: you can now pin timers and countdowns to the widget board. By the way, you can get this update in the Stable Channel as well, so be sure to check out that article for more details.

If you are running the latest build from the Dev Channel, beware of some Windows Update bugs, which can cause lags, stutters, and other annoyances.

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.

PowerToys received a small update that fixed several issues with the recently introduced Workspaces feature. However, even more tools are coming soon. Microsoft confirmed that a future PowerToys update will bring a part of the Sysinternals suite.

Clipchamp, a Microsoft-owned web-based video editor, has been updated with some gaming-themed content. Users can now access templates, stickers, and other bits from Minecraft and Sea of Thieves franchises.

Microsoft Edge Insiders got a new preview update. Version 130.0.2821.1 arrived this week with an improved Appearance settings section and fixes for various browser crashes. As for the Stable Channel, Microsoft delivered version 128.0.2739.0 with fixes for duplicated taskbar shortcuts and crashes when launching custom protocols on managed devices.

Moving to third parties, Mozilla revealed that Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 users will have at least seven more years of Firefox 115 support. According to Mozilla engineers, Firefox still has quite a few users on unsupported systems, so the company decided to stick around with Firefox 115 ESR for over a half-year extra.

Other notable updates include the following:

And here are the newest drivers released this week:

Nvidia 561.09 WHQL with Final Fantasy XVI, God of War Ragnarök support and more.
AMD released a new preview driver with AFMF 2 and VGM support for Ryzen AI 300 CPUs.
Surface Pro X received fixes for camera crashes and broken keyboard input in WinRE.
Surface Pro 8 received fixes for flickering taskbar, display freezes, and more.
Surface Laptop 6 for Business received fixes for always-spinning fans.

As usual, the update section finishes with the latest Microsoft 365 Roadmap Weekly and new features coming soon to Teams, Outlook, and more.

On the gaming side

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

This week was a pretty tough one for employees of Microsoft's gaming division. The company announced yet another round of layoffs affecting 650 people from corporate and support functions (reportedly from teams behind Call of Duty Warzone Mobile and more). The latest wave of layoffs is part of Microsoft's optimization of its gaming division following the purchase of Activision-Blizzard for $69 billion.

Pulasthi Ariyasinghe reviewed Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, a brutal game with enemy hordes, fantastic visuals, engaging combat, good cooperative capabilities, and more. While the game has some audio and performance issues, it still delivers a great experience. Many tend to agree with our score, considering that developers already sold over 2 million copies at launch.

Besides Warhammer, Pulasthi reviewed Towerborne, a new game published by Xbox currently in early access. This game offers fun combat with wild combos, a solid focus on cooperative play, a fantastic art style and gorgeous animations, and steadily increasing difficulty. There are several rough surfaces here and there, so check out the complete review here.

Turn 10 Studios released a new Forza Motorsport update. Update 12 is now available on Xbox and PC and brings a new Spectate Mode, Challenge Hub, new cars, and more. The update also introduces improvements to Forza Racing Regulations, fixes small issues, and further polishes the racing experience.

Mojang, another Microsoft-owned studio, announced plans for future Minecraft updates. Gamers can expect more frequent content drops, better multiplayer features, and some unknown "long-term initiatives." Besides, Minecraft Live will be held twice a year, and the mob vote is finally gone.

After spending five years in Early Access, Satisfactory 1.0 is finally out on Steam and the Epic Games Store. Besides leaving Early Access, version 1.0 brings multiple changes and improvements, Phase 5 of Project Assembly, and more.

CD Projekt Red released Patch 2.13 for Cyberpunk 2077 on PC. It is a pretty important update as it finally delivers the long-awaited AMD Fidelity FX Super Resolution 3 with Frame Generation, Intel XeSS 1.3, and the ability to Nvidia DLAA with DLSS Ray Reconstruction. If you want to try AMD's latest performance-improving technologies in Cyberpunk 2077, check out this article, as it contains some important prerequisites.

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor also has some neat updates for its audience. The latest update removed Denuvo, which resulted in notable FPS improvements across "various hardware configurations", better ray tracing, and other positive changes.

Microsoft announced a new Insider update for Xbox owners. It is a pretty big release that brings back friend requests and adds new privacy and notification settings for friend requests and followers.

Valve also released a significant update for its platform. With the latest Steam release, Steam Families has reworked family controls. Gamers can invite up to five other people from the same household, and everyone can play simultaneously. While the existing Steam Family Sharing option will remain for some time, Valve plans to discontinue it in the near future.

Following the announcement of offline mode for its The Crew racing games, Ubisoft put The Crew 2 on sale, allowing everyone to score the game for just $1. As a result, the game climbed Steam's chart and became the fifth best-selling game.

Finally, Nvidia announced nine new games for GeForce NOW members. They include Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown, Dawn of Defiance, Fort Solis, XIII, and more.

Deals and freebies

This week's Weekend PC Game Deals issue covers various bundles, big discounts on Sony hits, cheap racing titles of different sizes and from different developers, two freebies from the Epic Games Store, and a lot more.

Here are other noteworthy gaming stories from this week:

Microsoft Weekly banner image by alba1970 on Pixabay

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What Is Wi-Fi 7? Here’s Everything You Need to Know

Sat, 14 Sep 2024 20:41:02 +0000

The Wi-Fi 6E successor is here, and it promises to significantly boost the speed and stability of your wireless connections.

While many people only recently upgraded to Wi-Fi 6 or Wi-Fi 6E, the successor to those standards has already arrived. Wi-Fi 7 is the next significant advance, and just like its predecessors, it promises faster connections, lower latency, and the ability to gracefully manage more connections.

If you are looking to improve your Wi-Fi today, Wi-Fi 7 could be the answer. The first wave of Wi-Fi 7 routers was very expensive, but we are starting to see more affordable options, and Wi-Fi 7 is supported by the latest devices, such as Apple's iPhone 16 range. If you need to upgrade pronto, first consider delving into how to buy a router before you check out our picks of the best Wi-Fi routers and the best mesh Wi-Fi systems.

Updated September 2024: We refreshed this guide to reflect the wider rollout of Wi-Fi 7 and the latest Wi-Fi 7 devices, mesh systems, and routers.

What Is Wi-Fi 7?

The seventh generation of Wi-Fi brings major improvements over Wi-Fi 6 and 6E and can offer speeds up to four times faster. It also includes clever advances to reduce latency, increase capacity, and boost stability and efficiency.

Wi-Fi 7 is IEEE 802.11be in the old naming convention, where Wi-Fi 6 was IEEE 802.11ax, and Wi-Fi 5 was IEEE 802.11ac. Like previous standards, Wi-Fi 7 is backward compatible. But to take advantage of the new features and improved performance it promises, you will need to upgrade your devices. That means buying new routers and access points, not to mention new smartphones, laptops, TVs, and so on.

What Benefits Does Wi-Fi 7 Bring?

Wi-Fi 7 is faster, supports more connections, and is more adaptive to maintain reliable low-latency performance.

These benefits help deliver high-quality video and better cloud gaming, and they serve AR and VR applications that require high throughput and low latency. Wi-Fi 7 also tackles congestion and interference, bringing tangible benefits to areas with densely packed devices or neighboring networks that overlap. The latter is most significant for enterprise and larger venues.

How Does Wi-Fi 7 Compare to Wi-Fi 6E?

Photograph: RerF/Getty Images

You may, understandably, wonder what distinguishes Wi-Fi 7 from Wi-Fi 6E, which broadly promises the same advantages over previous standards by opening up the 6-GHz band. Especially since Wi-Fi 7 will use the same three 2.4-GHz, 5-GHz, and 6-GHz bands. Here are some notable upgrades:

Wider Channels

Each band is broken into channels. The 2.4-GHz band comprises 11 channels of 20 megahertz (MHz) each. The 5-GHz band has 45 channels, but instead of being limited to a width of 20 MHz, they can combine to create 40-MHz or 80-MHz channels. The 6-GHz band supports 60 channels, and with Wi-Fi 6E they can be as wide as 160 MHz. Wi-Fi 7 supports channels that are up to 320 MHz wide. The wider the channel, the more data it can transmit.

A simple analogy is to imagine how much traffic a single-lane road can handle compared to a three-lane highway or a six-lane superhighway.

Photograph: Simon Hill

Multi-Link Operation

Perhaps the most exciting advance in Wi-Fi 7 is Multi-Link Operation (MLO). Every previous Wi-Fi standard establishes a connection between two devices on a single band. Even a tri-band Wi-Fi 6E router connects two devices on a single band on a fixed channel (the router decides whether to connect on the 2.4-GHz, 5-GHz, or 6-GHz band).

MLO can combine several frequencies across bands into a single connection. A Wi-Fi 7 router can connect to a Wi-Fi 7 device across two or more channels in different bands simultaneously. MLO potentially enables wider channels capable of transmitting more data—going back to our highway analogy, you can send traffic on the highway and the superhighway at once.

Speed isn’t always the priority, but MLO also allows for more efficient performance. A Wi-Fi 7 router can take congestion and other interference into account and transmit on the best channel to bypass it, switching to maintain a stable connection and low latency. MLO can also help mitigate the relatively short range of the 6-GHz band, ensuring you get seamless connectivity from your mesh system as you move around the home.

Higher QAM

Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) is a method to transmit and receive data in radio-frequency waves. The higher it is, the more information you can pack in. Wi-Fi 7 supports 4K-QAM, while Wi-Fi 6 supported 1,024-QAM, and Wi-Fi 5 was limited to 256-QAM.

The potential benefits are complicated by signal strength, background noise, and interference. Consequently, as QAM goes up, the range drops, and you need a stronger signal. So, the jump to 1,024-QAM in Wi-Fi 6 offered around a 25 percent data rate increase over Wi-Fi 5. The leap to 4K-QAM in Wi-Fi 7 translates to a 20 percent increase in peak performance.

Wi-Fi 7 also enhances existing technologies like OFDMA, MU-MIMO, and TWT, which we discuss in our Wi-Fi 6E explainer.

When Should I Upgrade to Wi-Fi 7?

This is a tricky question. Wi-Fi 7 devices and routers began rolling out in early 2023. While you won’t feel the benefit of a Wi-Fi 7 router until you have Wi-Fi 7 devices, the new Wi-Fi 7 routers are backward compatible. Buying a Wi-Fi 7 system may make sense for people considering an upgrade now, especially folks considering an expensive Wi-Fi 6E system, as they will handle 6E connections but also afford some future-proofing.

Photograph: TP-Link

We have tested a number of Wi-Fi 7 routers and mesh systems, including the TP-Link BE800 (8/10, WIRED Review), the Amazon Eero Max 7 (7/10, WIRED Review), the Netgear Orbi 970 Series (7/10, WIRED Review), and the TP-Link Deco BE85 (7/10, WIRED Review). All of these systems are very expensive. Thankfully, some manufacturers have started dropping prices on their flagship Wi-Fi 7 routers and introducing midrange and entry-level options (you can find some in our best router and best mesh guides).

On the device side, we are seeing more and more smartphones and laptops with Wi-Fi 7 on board. The latest flagship phone ranges from Apple, Google, and Samsung all support Wi-Fi 7. All of the major chipmakers, including Qualcomm, Intel, Broadcom, and MediaTek now offer chipsets that have been Wi-Fi 7 certified, and the Wi-Fi Alliance is using them as the test bed for certification. It suggests that more than 233 million Wi-Fi 7 devices will enter the market this year.

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Forget FSR 2 And FSR 3, AMD Is Already Making FSR 4

Sat, 14 Sep 2024 08:47:54 +0000

AMD has revealed that it’s team is already working on FSR 4 from 9 to 12 months and the newest version of FSR is going to be completely AI-based.

Upscaling and frame generation has become among the most important performance improving feature in games that have released in recent times. While Nvidia introduced a hardware locked solution with DLSS, AMD replied with an open, hardware-agnostic solution with FSR.

Throughout the years, both DLSS and FSR have seen some important improvements. Both DLSS 2 and FSR 2 saw complete change in how they worked and provided massive improvements in upscaling quality. Whereas both DLSS 3 and FSR 3 introduced us to the world of frame generation – something that doubled the FPS by inserting frames in between two frames.

The problem with frame-generation, however, is that it introduces some latency or lag. To answer this issue, Nvidia came up with Nvidia Reflex. AMD made its own solution called AMD Anti-Lag 2, which it incorporates in FSR 3.1.

Now, we would be wondering what next. Looks like we have got some answers.

AMD Already Developing FSR 4

Tom’s Hardware managed to speak to AMD’s Jack Huynh about the successor to FSR 3, the FSR 4. The biggest surprise was that not only AMD is working on FSR 4 from 9 to 12 months, but that FSR 4 is going to be completely AI-based.

Not only that, it seems FSR 4 will focus more on battery efficiency improvements targeting the handhelds than performance. Quoting AMD:

On the handheld side, my number one priority is battery life. If you look at the ASUS ROG Ally or the Lenovo Legion Go, it’s just that the battery life is not there. I need multiple hours. I need to play a Wukong for three hours, not 60 minutes. This is where frame generation and interpolation [come in], so this is the FSR4 that we’re adding.

Because FSR2 and FSR3 were analytical based generation. It was filter based. Now, we did that because we wanted something with a very fast time to market. What I told the team was, “Guys, that’s not where the future is going.” So we completely pivoted the team about 9-12 months ago to go AI based.

So now we’re going AI-based frame generation, frame interpolation, and the idea is increased efficiency to maximize battery life. And then we could lock the frames per second, maybe it’s 30 frames per second, or 35. My number one goal right now is to maximize battery life. I think that’s the biggest complaint. I read the returns too from the retailer, where people want to be able to play these games.

Conclusion

The report speculates whether FSR 4 will be just for handled gaming consoles, or will it come to desktops too. Or whether it will require NPUs that aren’t commonly found in desktop CPUs yet. But Tom’s Hardware did reach out to AMD for clarification and AMD is yet to reply. Knowing AMD, they are likely to design it in a such a way that it works on as many hardware solutions as possible.

Now, when will AMD actually release FSR 4. That’s to be seen. But as it’s in development since 9 to 12 months, expect it to be released soon. Not to forget, Nvidia could be working on it’s DLSS 4 too.

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Embracer Group will keep Zen Studios and Metro's dev 4A Games instead of selling them off

Fri, 13 Sep 2024 17:51:11 +0000

In March, Embracer Group announced it would sell off a number of its game development studios to Beacon Interactive, a recently formed company that controls Saber Interactive, for $247 million. At the time, Embracer stated that Beacon Interactive had the right to purchase two more teams from the company: 4A Games and Zen Studios.

Today, Embracer announced in a press release that it has received $168.4 million from Beacon Interactive and will receive an additional $28.1 million sometime in late 2024 and early 2025. It also announced that Embracer will keep 4A Games and Zen Studios after all and will not sell them off.

Lars Wingefors, CEO of Embracer, is quoted as saying:

We are satisfied with the conclusion of this transaction and very glad to see the great teams and assets of 4A Games and Zen Studios remain within Embracer. They will be important building blocks in our continued journey.

Ukraine-based 4A Games is best known as the development team behind the acclaimed Metro post-apocalypse first-person shooter series. Wingefors stated in the press release, "4A Games currently has two AAA titles under development that we eagerly await to announce."

Hungary-based Zen Studios is best known for its Pinball FX games. The digital pinball games include tables based on major entertainment franchises, including Star Wars, Aliens, Predator, and many more. Earlier this week, Zen Studios announced that the latest Pinball FX game, launched in 2023, had hit 2 million players.

Saber Interactive currently has one of the best-selling games, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2. It will release the movie-based game A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead on October 17. We are still waiting for a status update on another Saber Interactive-developed title, John Carpenter's Toxic Commando, a zombie-themed game that was first announced in June 2023 and was supposed to be released in 2024.

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Carolina Dybeck Happe named as Microsoft's new Chief Operations Officer

Fri, 13 Sep 2024 17:49:59 +0000

Microsoft has announced a new addition to its senior leadership team this week. In a post on its official blog, CEO Satya Nadella revealed that the company has hired Carolina Dybeck Happe as its latest executive vice president and Chief Operations Officer.

Nadella stated that the Chief Operations Officer role has been newly created and that Happe will report directly to him as part of its Senior Leadership Team. Nappe previously worked as the Chief Financial Officer of GE for four years. During her time there, the company split itself off into three publicly traded companies.

In his blog post, Nadella said he was an admirer of Happe's and named her "a global business leader." He added:

She is recognized for her ability to drive transformational change at scale while delivering improved customer experiences and faster time to value. Carolina will partner with the SLT to help us drive continuous business process improvement across all our organizations and accelerate our company-wide AI transformation, increasing value to customers and partners.

Nadella added that several Microsoft divisions, including the "Commerce + Ecosystems organization in Cloud + AI, the Microsoft Digital organization in Experiences + Devices, and the Microsoft Business Operations organization in Finance," will report directly to Heppe.

Microsoft has not had a person with the title of Chief Operations Officer for a number of years. The last person who held that title was Kevin Turner, who worked in that role at the company from 2005 to 2016. Before his departure, Turner was reportedly a major possibility to be Microsoft's CEO after Steve Balmer departed Microsoft, but in the end, Nadella was picked to lead the company.

It will be interesting to see what Heppe, an outsider who was brought into the company, will do at Microsoft under this new role.

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GitHub Copilot integrates OpenAI's o1 to streamline complex coding problems

Fri, 13 Sep 2024 04:41:15 +0000

OpenAI today unveiled its new o1 series of AI models, designed with stronger logical reasoning capabilities than previous models. One of the first applications being explored for these new models is improving GitHub Copilot's ability to analyze, refine, and optimize code.

OpenAI and GitHub have been running some internal tests of the integration of the new o1-preview model with Copilot. One such test was to use o1-preview on performance optimization for one of the most critical code components in Copilot. As noted in the blog, it deeply analyzed the code, understood the constraints and edge cases, and suggested a far better solution in one try.

Another example pitted o1-preview against the current model, GPT-4o, in debugging a browser performance issue within GitHub's codebase. The bug was causing a focus management function to slow down, stalling the browser.

o1-preview was able to identify the issue and suggest line-by-line fixes in minutes, while GPT-4o gave less targeted responses.

The results highlight how o1-preview’s reasoning capability allows a deeper understanding of the code’s constraints and edge cases, which helps produce a more efficient and higher quality result. Meanwhile, GPT-4o sticks to obvious optimizations and would need a developer’s help to steer Copilot towards more complex approaches.

According to the blog, the o1-preview model has enhanced reasoning which will improve Copilot's support for code review, refactoring and optimization use cases that rely on richer analyses. It calculates metrics and benchmarks directly from code output and presents results in a concise manner.

With 1,000 elements managed by this code, it was hard to isolate the problem. Eventually we implemented a change that improved the runtime of this function from over 1,000ms to about 16ms. If we had Copilot with o1-preview, we could have quickly identified the problem and fixed it faster.

OpenAI and GitHub plan to offer o1-preview and a smaller o1-mini model on the GitHub Marketplace. While o1-preview remains in preview, developers can apply for early access via Azure AI to experiment with building projects using the new models.

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OpenAI’s new “reasoning” AI models are here: o1-preview and o1-mini

Fri, 13 Sep 2024 04:37:10 +0000

New o1 language model can solve complex tasks iteratively, count R's in "strawberry."

OpenAI finally unveiled its rumored "Strawberry" AI language model on Thursday, claiming significant improvements in what it calls "reasoning" and problem-solving capabilities over previous large language models (LLMs). Formally named "OpenAI o1," the model family will initially launch in two forms, o1-preview and o1-mini, available today for ChatGPT Plus and certain API users.

OpenAI claims that o1-preview outperforms its predecessor, GPT-4o, on multiple benchmarks, including competitive programming, mathematics, and "scientific reasoning." However, people who have used the model say it does not yet outclass GPT-4o in every metric. Other users have criticized the delay in receiving a response from the model, owing to the multi-step processing occurring behind the scenes before answering a query.

In a rare display of public hype-busting, OpenAI product manager Joanne Jang tweeted, "There's a lot of o1 hype on my feed, so I'm worried that it might be setting the wrong expectations. what o1 is: the first reasoning model that shines in really hard tasks, and it'll only get better. (I'm personally psyched about the model's potential & trajectory!) what o1 isn't (yet!): a miracle model that does everything better than previous models. you might be disappointed if this is your expectation for today's launch—but we're working to get there!"

OpenAI reports that o1-preview ranked in the 89th percentile on competitive programming questions from Codeforces. In mathematics, it scored 83 percent on a qualifying exam for the International Mathematics Olympiad, compared to GPT-4o's 13 percent. OpenAI also states, in a claim that may later be challenged as people scrutinize the benchmarks and run their own evaluations over time, o1 performs comparably to PhD students on specific tasks in physics, chemistry, and biology. The smaller o1-mini model is designed specifically for coding tasks and is priced at 80 percent less than o1-preview.

A benchmark chart provided by OpenAI. They write, "o1 improves over GPT-4o on a wide range of benchmarks, including 54/57 MMLU subcategories. Seven are shown for illustration."

OpenAI

OpenAI attributes o1's advancements to a new reinforcement learning (RL) training approach that teaches the model to spend more time "thinking through" problems before responding, similar to how "let's think step-by-step" chain-of-thought prompting can improve outputs in other LLMs. The new process allows o1 to try different strategies and "recognize" its own mistakes.

AI benchmarks are notoriously unreliable and easy to game; however, independent verification and experimentation from users will show the full extent of o1's advancements over time. It's worth noting that MIT Research showed earlier this year that some of the benchmark claims OpenAI touted with GPT-4 last year were erroneous or exaggerated.

A mixed bag of capabilities

OpenAI demos "o1" correctly counting the number of Rs in the word "strawberry."

Amid many demo videos of o1 completing programming tasks and solving logic puzzles that OpenAI shared on its website and social media, one demo stood out as perhaps the least consequential and least impressive, but it may become the most talked about due to a recurring meme where people ask LLMs to count the number of R's in the word "strawberry."

Due to tokenization, where the LLM processes words in data chunks called tokens, most LLMs are typically blind to character-by-character differences in words. Apparently, o1 has the self-reflective capabilities to figure out how to count the letters and provide an accurate answer without user assistance.

Beyond OpenAI's demos, we've seen optimistic but cautious hands-on reports about o1-preview online. Wharton Professor Ethan Mollick wrote on X, "Been using GPT-4o1 for the last month. It is fascinating—it doesn’t do everything better but it solves some very hard problems for LLMs. It also points to a lot of future gains."

Mollick shared a hands-on post in his "One Useful Thing" blog that details his experiments with the new model. "To be clear, o1-preview doesn’t do everything better. It is not a better writer than GPT-4o, for example. But for tasks that require planning, the changes are quite large."

Mollick gives the example of asking o1-preview to build a teaching simulator "using multiple agents and generative AI, inspired by the paper below and considering the views of teachers and students," then asking it to build the full code, and it produced a result that Mollick found impressive.

Mollick also gave o1-preview eight crossword puzzle clues, translated into text, and the model took 108 seconds to solve it over many steps, getting all of the answers correct but confabulating a particular clue Mollick did not give it. We recommend reading Mollick's entire post for a good early hands-on impression. Given his experience with the new model, it appears that o1 works very similar to GPT-4o but iteratively in a loop, which is something that the so-called "agentic" AutoGPT and BabyAGI projects experimented with in early 2023.

Is this what could “threaten humanity?”

Getty Images

Speaking of agentic models that run in loops, Strawberry has been subject to hype since last November, when it was initially known as Q* (Q-star). At the time, The Information and Reuters claimed that, just before Sam Altman's brief ouster as CEO, OpenAI employees had internally warned OpenAI's board of directors about a new OpenAI model called Q* that could "threaten humanity."

In August, the hype continued when The Information reported that OpenAI showed Strawberry to US national security officials.

We've been skeptical about the hype around Q* and Strawberry since the rumors first emerged, as this author noted last November, and Timothy B. Lee covered thoroughly in an excellent post about Q* from last December.

So even though o1 is out, AI industry watchers should note how this model's impending launch was played up in the press as a dangerous advancement while not being publicly downplayed by OpenAI. For an AI model that takes 108 seconds to solve eight clues in a crossword puzzle and hallucinates one answer, we can say that its potential danger was likely hype (for now).

Controversy over “reasoning” terminology

It's no secret that some people in tech have issues with anthropomorphizing AI models and using terms like "thinking" or "reasoning" to describe the synthesizing and processing operations that these neural network systems perform.

Just after the OpenAI o1 announcement, Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue wrote, "Once again, an AI system is not 'thinking,' it's 'processing,' 'running predictions,'... just like Google or computers do. Giving the false impression that technology systems are human is just cheap snake oil and marketing to fool you into thinking it's more clever than it is."

"Reasoning" is also a somewhat nebulous term since, even in humans, it's difficult to define exactly what the term means. A few hours before the announcement, independent AI researcher Simon Willison tweeted in response to a Bloomberg story about Strawberry, "I still have trouble defining 'reasoning' in terms of LLM capabilities. I’d be interested in finding a prompt which fails on current models but succeeds on strawberry that helps demonstrate the meaning of that term."

Reasoning or not, o1-preview currently lacks some features present in earlier models, such as web browsing, image generation, and file uploading. OpenAI plans to add these capabilities in future updates, along with continued development of both the o1 and GPT model series.

While OpenAI says the o1-preview and o1-mini models are rolling out today, neither model is available in our ChatGPT Plus interface yet, so we have not been able to evaluate them. We'll report our impressions on how this model differs from other LLMs we have previously covered.

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Unity is dropping its unpopular per-install Runtime Fee

Fri, 13 Sep 2024 04:32:49 +0000

Cross-platform game engine saw the downside to "novel and controversial" plan.

Unity, maker of a popular cross-platform engine and toolkit, will not pursue a broadly unpopular Runtime Fee that would have charged developers based on game installs rather than per-seat licenses. The move comes exactly one year after the fee's initial announcement.

In a blog post attributed to President and CEO Matt Bromberg, the CEO writes that the company cannot continue "democratizing game development" without "a partnership built on trust." Bromberg states that customers understand the necessity of price increases, but not in "a novel and controversial new form." So game developers will not be charged per installation, but they will be sorted into Personal, Pro, and Enterprise tiers by level of revenue or funding.

"Canceling the Runtime Fee for games and instituting these pricing changes will allow us to continue investing to improve game development for everyone while also being better partners," Bromberg writes.

A year of discontent

Unity's announcement of a new "Runtime Fee that's based on game installs" in mid-September 2023 (Wayback archive), while joined by cloud storage and "AI at runtime," would have been costly for smaller developers who found success. The Runtime Fee would have cost 20 cents per install on the otherwise free Personal tier after a game had reached $200,000 in revenue and more than 200,000 installs. Fees decreased slightly for Pro and Enterprise customers after $1 million in revenue and 1 million installs.

The move led to almost immediate backlash from many developers. Unity, whose then-CEO John Riccitiello had described in 2015 as having "no royalties, no [f-ing] around," was "quite simply not a company to be trusted," wrote Necrosoft Games' Brandon Sheffield. Developers said they would hold off updates or switch engines rather than absorb the fee, which would have retroactively counted installs before January 2024 toward its calculations.

Unity's terms of service seemed to allow for such sudden shifts. Unity softened the impact of the fee on Personal users, removed the backdated install counting, and capped fees at 2.5 percent of revenue. Unity Create President and General Manager Marc Whitten told Ars at that time that while the fee would seemingly not affect the vast majority of Unity users, he understood that a stable agreement should be a feature of the engine.

However coincidentally or not, Riccitiello announced his retirement the next month, which led to some celebration among devs, but not total restoration of trust. A massive wave of layoffs throughout the winter of 2023 and 2024 showed that Unity's financial position was precarious, partly due to acquisitions during Riccitiello's term. The Runtime Fee would have minimal impact in 2024, the company said in filings, but would "ramp from there as customers adopt our new releases."

Instead of ramping from there, the Runtime Fee is now gone, and Unity has made other changes to its pricing structure:

Unity Personal remains free, and its revenue/funding ceiling increases from $100,000 to $200,000
Unity Pro, for customers over the Personal limit, sees an 8 percent price increase to $2,200 per seat
Unity Enterprise, with customized packages for those over $25 million in revenue or funding, sees a 25 percent increase.

"From this point forward, it’s our intention to revert to a more traditional cycle of considering any potential price increases only on an annual basis," Bromberg wrote in his post. Changes to Unity's Editor software should allow customers to keep using their existing version under previously agreed terms, he wrote.

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Unicode 16.0 release with new emoji brings character count to 154,998

Fri, 13 Sep 2024 04:29:26 +0000

New designs will roll out to phones, tablets, and PCs over the next few months.

Emojipedia sample images of the new Unicode 16.0 emoji.

Emojipedia

The Unicode Consortium has finalized and released version 16.0 of the Unicode standard, the elaborate character set that ensures that our phones, tablets, PCs, and other devices can all communicate and interoperate with each other. The update adds 5,185 new characters to the standard, bringing the total up to a whopping 154,998.

Of those 5,185 characters, the ones that will get the most attention are the eight new emoji characters, including a shovel, a fingerprint, a leafless tree, a radish (formally classified as "root vegetable"), a harp, a purple splat that evokes the '90s Nickelodeon logo, and a flag for the island of Sark. The standout, of course, is "face with bags under eyes," whose long-suffering thousand-yard stare perfectly encapsulates the era it has been born into. Per usual, Emojipedia has sample images that give you some idea of what these will look like when they're implemented by various operating systems, apps, and services.

Unicode 16.0 also adds support for seven new modern and historical scripts: the West African Garay alphabet; the Gurung Khema, Kirat Rai, Ol Onal, and Sunuwar scripts from Northeast India and Nepal; and historical Todhri and Tulu-Tigalari scripts from Albania and Southwest India, respectively.

We last got new emoji in 2023's Unicode 15.1 update, though all of these designs were technically modifications of existing emoji rather than new characters—many emoji, most notably for skin and hair color variants, use a base emoji plus a modifier emoji, combined together with a "zero-width joiner" (ZWJ) character that makes them display as one character instead. The lime emoji in Unicode 15.1 was actually a lemon emoji combined with the color green; the phoenix was a regular bird joined to the fire emoji. This was likely because 15.1 was only intended as a minor update to 2022's Unicode 15.0 standard.

Most of the Unicode 16.0 emoji, by contrast, are their own unique characters. The one exception is the Sark flag emoji; flag sequences are created by placing two "regional indicator letters" directly next to each other and don't require a ZWJ character between them.

Incorporation into the Unicode standard is only the first step that new emoji and other characters take on their journey from someone's mind to your phone or computer; software makers like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, and others need to design iterations that fit with their existing spin on the emoji characters, they need to release software updates that use the new characters, and people need to download and install them.

We've seen a few people share on social media that the Unicode 16.0 release includes a "greenwashing" emoji designed by Shepard Fairey, an artist best known for the 2008 Barack Obama "Hope" poster. This emoji, and an attempt to gin up controversy around it, is all an elaborate hoax: there's a fake Unicode website announcing it, a fake lawsuit threat that purports to be from a real natural gas industry group, and a fake Cory Doctorow article about the entire "controversy" published in a fake version of Wired. These were all published to websites with convincing-looking but fake domains, all registered within a couple of weeks of each other in August 2024. The face-with-bags-under-eyes emoji feels like an appropriate response.

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Cyberpunk 2077 2.13 update brings Frame Generation and AMD FSR 3 support

Thu, 12 Sep 2024 18:45:19 +0000

CD Projekt Red has released a new patch for Cyberpunk 2077. Version 2.13 is now available for download, and it includes a few important changes and additions, such as the long-promised support for Frame Generation, AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 3, Intel XeSS 1.3, and more. In addition, Nvidia users can enable both DLAA and DLSS Ray Reconstruction at the same time.

Here is the complete changelog:

Added support for AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 with Frame Generation.

Added support for Intel Xe Super Sampling 1.3.

It will now be possible to enable both DLAA and DLSS Ray Reconstruction at the same time.

Added a new "Utilities" tab in Settings and moved HDD Mode, Hybrid CPU Utilization and AMD Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) options there.

Other stability and visual fixes.

If you want to try AMD FSR 3 in Cyberpunk 2077 on your system, CD Projekt Red recommends customizing graphical settings so that the game can reach 60 FPS first without FidelityFX Super Resolution 3. This will ensure optimal results and performance increases. Also, developers do not recommend using FSR 3 with monitors operating at 120Hz or higher to avoid frame time issues.

Additional requirements include Hardware-Accelerated GPU Scheduling enabled and a recent driver from Nvidia (556.12), Intel (32.0.101.5972), or AMD (32.0.11037.4004). To check whether your system has Hardware-Accelerated GPU scheduling enabled, head to Settings > System > Display > Graphics > Default Graphics settings and check the corresponding option.

Developers also say they decided to keep FSR 2.1 available so that gamers can choose their preferred option.

Although the update is PC-only and it bumps the game's version higher, cross-progression will continue working after installing the latest version. More information about Cyberpunk 2077 2.13 is available here. Also, CD Projekt RED has a separate page for AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 3.

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Sony releases major PS5 system update with Welcome hub, Party Share, and more

Thu, 12 Sep 2024 18:44:09 +0000

Sony has rolled out a major new system software update for the PlayStation 5, introducing a host of long-awaited features and customization options. The company describes version 24.06-10.00.00 as designed to improve the overall user experience and arm PS5 players with even more personalized tools.

The headliner addition is the new Welcome hub—an all-new, personalized home screen that replaces the former Explore tab. This customizable dashboard lets players choose from a range of widgets to surface information such as storage usage, accessory battery levels, online friends, and more. Sony says users can resize and arrange these widgets to suit their preferences, as well as choose from different background designs.

The other important new feature at release is Party Share, which lets users make shareable links for their voice chat parties. That will easily allow friends on any messaging platform to pop into the party chat, even if they are not on the user's PlayStation Network friends list.

Alongside these newly-announced features, the update also delivers a raft of other tweaks first tested in PS5 system software betas, including Personalize 3D audio profiles for headphones and earbuds, Customization options on a per-user basis for Remote Play access, Adaptive charging support for DualSense controllers.

According to Sony, these custom 3D audio profiles leverage the individual's personal hearing characteristics to offer an immersive spatial audio experience. Each individual can create their own profile by running a quick setup process in the console.

The following features that were tested in our latest PS5 beta will be released globally, starting today:

Personalized 3D audio profiles for headphones and earbuds

Adjust Remote Play settings per user and choose who is allowed to connect to your PS5 console using Remote Play

Adaptive charging for your controllers (available for the slimmer PS5 model and PS5 Pro when it’s available)

The Welcome hub, Party Share functionality and other features will be gradually rolled out globally over the coming weeks.

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