Month: August 2022

Enlarge / AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su holding a sample of the flagship Ryzen 9 7950X. (credit: AMD)

Nearly two years after releasing its first Ryzen 5000 desktop processors, AMD is finally ready to follow them up. Today, the company announced pricing and availability for the first wave of Ryzen 7000 CPUs based on the Zen 4 architecture, along with more details about the accompanying AM5 platform and the performance increases that early adopters can expect.

The first four Ryzen 7000 CPUs will be available on September 27, and AMD is using the same strategy it used to launch the 5000 series (if you're wondering about the skipped number, 6000-series CPUs are only available for laptops). It's starting with four higher-end, higher-priced parts, while lower-end CPUs for mainstream and budget builds will follow next year.

AMD is sticking to the same core counts it used for Zen 3. The entry-level model is the 6-core Ryzen 5 7600X, launching for the same $299 that the 5600X cost in 2020; the 12-core Ryzen 9 7900X is also launching for $549, the same price as the Ryzen 9 5900X. The other two chips are a little cheaper than their Ryzen 5000 counterparts; the 16-core Ryzen 9 7950X launches for $699, $100 less than the 5950X, while the 8-core Ryzen 7 7700X starts at $399, $50 less than the launch price for the Ryzen 7 5800X (technically, this is a price increase over the $299 Ryzen 7 5700X, but that chip wasn't released until nearly a year and a half after the 5800X).

Enlarge / A polio vaccine box is displayed at a health clinic in Brooklyn, New York on August 17, 2022. (credit: Getty | Ed Jones)

A third county in New York with a low vaccination rate has detected poliovirus in its wastewater, suggesting that spread of the dangerous virus is expanding, which continues to pose a significant threat to anyone unvaccinated.

Wastewater sampling in Sullivan County detected poliovirus twice in July and twice in August, the New York State Health Department announced. Genetic sequencing determined that the positive samples are linked to the case of paralytic polio reported from Rockland County in July, which was genetically linked to viruses circulating in London and Israel.

Sullivan Country joins nearby Rockland County, Orange County, and New York City in having poliovirus detected in sewage. At least 13 sewage samples from Rockland and eight from Orange have tested positive since April. The three counties are all in a northwest-pointing line from New York City, along the state's southern border. Earlier this month, New York City also announced finding poliovirus in wastewater surveillance

Enlarge / A polio vaccine box is displayed at a health clinic in Brooklyn, New York on August 17, 2022. (credit: Getty | Ed Jones)

A third county in New York with a low vaccination rate has detected poliovirus in its wastewater, suggesting that spread of the dangerous virus is expanding, which continues to pose a significant threat to anyone unvaccinated.

Wastewater sampling in Sullivan County detected poliovirus twice in July and twice in August, the New York State Health Department announced. Genetic sequencing determined that the positive samples are linked to the case of paralytic polio reported from Rockland County in July, which was genetically linked to viruses circulating in London and Israel.

Sullivan Country joins nearby Rockland County, Orange County, and New York City in having poliovirus detected in sewage. At least 13 sewage samples from Rockland and eight from Orange have tested positive since April. The three counties are all in a northwest-pointing line from New York City, along the state's southern border. Earlier this month, New York City also announced finding poliovirus in wastewater surveillance

Enlarge / Former Twitter security chief Peiter Zatko, also known as Mudge. (credit: Getty Images | Washington Post)

Elon Musk's lawyers have subpoenaed Twitter whistleblower Peiter Zatko in hopes of bolstering Musk's defense against the lawsuit Twitter filed over their broken merger deal.

The subpoena orders Zatko to produce a list of documents and to appear for an oral deposition on September 9, about five weeks before the Musk/Twitter trial is scheduled to begin at the Delaware Court of Chancery. The subpoena was filed Thursday and made public today.

Zatko, a network security expert also known as "Mudge," worked at Twitter from November 2020 until being fired in January 2022. His whistleblower complaint, which was made public last week, alleges that Zatko "uncovered extreme, egregious deficiencies by Twitter in every area of his mandate including... user privacy, digital and physical security, and platform integrity/content moderation." It also claims that Twitter is guilty of "lying about bots to Elon Musk."

Enlarge / A building at Apple Park, the company's Cupertino, California, HQ. (credit: Apple)

Trademarks have been filed for "Reality One," "Reality Pro," and "Reality Processor" ahead of Apple's plans to launch a mixed reality headset, according to a report in Bloomberg.

The trademarks were filed by legal firms (not Apple itself) in the US, UK, EU, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Uruguay, and Costa Rica. Apple has turned to the same firms to secure other trademarks in the past.

The filings have not been traced directly to Apple, but they fit well with prior leaks that Apple was considering naming its AR/VR operating system realityOS, rOS, or something along those lines—in fact, a trademark filing for realityOS previously appeared earlier this year. The company already offers a developer framework called RealityKit for iOS apps, which will likely be the basis for some future headset applications. Apple employees have used the word "reality" to refer to the upcoming headset internally before, according to the report.

Enlarge / Let's open you up and see if we can get rid of some of those weighty internal components, OK?

At its launch in 2020, the PlayStation 5 wasn't just one of the biggest game consoles ever made. It was also one of the heaviest, with the full-fledged Disc Drive Edition weighing in at 9.9 pounds (4.5 kg) and the Digital Edition hitting 8.6 lbs (3.9 kg). Today, though, the eagle-eyed reporters at Press Start have noted the release of a new set of PS5 models that weigh about 13 percent less than their launch counterparts.

The new PS5 models (CFI-1202A and B for the Disc and Digital versions, respectively) first showed up on some Japanese retail sites over the weekend with a planned September 15 launch date. But Press Start reports that the new models are on shelves in many Australian retailers right now, including manuals listing their official weights at 8.6 lbs (3.9 kg) for the Disc Drive Edition and 7.5 lbs (3.4 kg) for the Digital Edition. No other changes are apparent in either the size of the system's casing or the listed system specs, according to the report.

Lighter and more expensive than ever

Those who follow the minutiae of game console hardware manufacturing might remember that this isn't the first internal revision to the PS5 hardware. The CFI-11XX models—which also hit Australia first in August 2021— came in at 9.25 lbs (4.2 kg) and 7.9 lbs (3.6 kg) for their Disc and Digital Editions, respectively. That effectively splits the weight difference between the launch model and the newest model hitting Australia today.