Month: January 2023

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

One of the prominent developers behind the Bitcoin blockchain said he has asked the FBI to assist him in recovering $3.6 million worth of the digital coin that was stolen from his storage wallets on New Year’s Eve.

Luke Dashjr is a developer of the Bitcoin Core, an app that runs 97 percent of the nodes making up the Bitcoin blockchain. Bitcoin Core derives from the software developed by the anonymous Bitcoin inventor who uses the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. That software was called simply Bitcoin, but was later changed to Bitcoin Core to distinguish it from the coin. Dashjr has been contributing to the Bitcoin Core since 2011 and has long championed the concept of decentralization that the cryptocurrency was founded on.

“What the heck, FBI?”

On New Year's Day, Dashjr took to Twitter to report that his entire Bitcoin holdings—worth roughly $3.6 million—were “basically all gone.” He said the hack stemmed from the compromise of a PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) key that he used to ensure that his downloads of Bitcoin Core and a smaller app known as Bitcoin Knots weren’t laced with malware. He said all his computers were compromised and urged people to hold off downloading new versions for the time being.

Enlarge / VW used QR codes to camouflage the shape of its new ID.7 sedan for its CES debut. (credit: Volkswagen)

On Tuesday in Las Vegas, Volkswagen revealed its next fully electric model destined for North America. Well, a somewhat-camouflaged version, at any rate—the show car wears an electroluminescent QR code livery for its debut at this year's Consumer Electronics Show.

The new sedan, called the ID.7, will go on sale in the US in 2024 after the official production car is unveiled later this fall. As its name suggests, the ID.7 is part of VW's new family of electric vehicles that use the company's new modular platform called MEB (Modularer E-Antriebs-Baukasten or Modular Electrification Toolkit), which we've tested in the ID.4 crossover as well as the ID. Buzz van.

The ID.7 will be aimed above the ID.4 in the marketplace. (credit: Volkswagen)

Like the ID.4, the ID.7 will be built at Emden in Germany, and like that crossover, it will be a global EV for VW, on sale in Europe and China as well as the US. (Europe also gets an ID.3 hatchback and an ID.5 crossover, and the ID.6 is a larger crossover just for the Chinese market.)

Enlarge / Nvidia says that an unnamed RTX 4000-series GPU can perform like an RTX 3070 while consuming power like an RTX 3050. (credit: Nvidia)

In addition to un-unlaunching the RTX 4070 Ti GPU for desktops at CES today, Nvidia announced a new range of RTX 4000-series laptop GPUs. Nvidia claims the new GPUs will provide big performance and power efficiency boosts, particularly for the lower-end GPUs that ship in the gaming laptops that most people buy.

The RTX 4000-series laptop GPUs use the same Ada Lovelace architecture as the desktop parts and will come with the same architectural benefits: DLSS 3 support, hardware-accelerated AV1 video encoding, and a more efficient manufacturing process that Nvidia is leaning on to improve power efficiency. (Nvidia didn't specify in its presentation, but presumably it's the same customized 5nm TSMC process used for the desktop Lovelace cards).

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  Limited pricing and availability data for the mainstream RTX 4050, 4060, and 4070 GPUs. [credit: Nvidia ]

We don't have precise specs for any of the GPUs, and most of Nvidia's performance comparisons were pretty abstract. We know there will be 4050-, 4060-, 4070-, 4080-, and (for the first time in laptops) 4090-class GPUs. We also assume that manufacturers can set specific power targets for each GPU, providing better performance in designs that can handle it while tuning for power efficiency in thinner and lighter laptops. We know that each GPU will continue to use "ultra-low voltage" GDDR6 memory rather than GDDR6X, the same as the previous-generation RTX 3000-series laptop GPUs.

Enlarge / A CT scan of the infant mummy's head, showing deformation of the skull bones. (credit: A.G. Nerlich et al., 2022)

There's rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we're once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2022, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: Scientists conducted a "virtual autopsy" of a mummified toddler from the 17th century, concluding the remains are likely those of one Reichard Wilhelm (1625-1626).

A multidisciplinary team of Austrian and German scientists performed a "virtual autopsy" of the 17th century mummified remains of an infant, remarkably preserved in an aristocratic family crypt. They found that despite the infant's noble upbringing, the child suffered from extreme nutritional deficiency, causing rickets or scurvy, and likely died after contracting pneumonia, according to an October paper published in the journal Frontiers in Medicine.

“This is only one case,” said co-author Andreas Nerlich of the Academic Clinic Munich-Bogenhausen. “But as we know that the early infant death rates generally were very high at that time, our observations may have considerable impact in the overall life reconstruction of infants even in higher social classes."

Enlarge (credit: LG)

January means new technology product announcements from the CES trade show in Las Vegas. LG, a regular CES participant, announced this year's OLED TV lineup at the show. Similar to LG's 2022 OLED TVs, this year's focus is about boosting brightness. But in 2023, LG's OLED TVs will also face stiffer competition, including from Samsung Display's QD-OLED tech, which is also supposed to be getting brighter.

Today, LG announced updates to its 8K Z series (77 and 88 inches), high-end 4K G series (55–97 inches), and flagship 4K C-series (42–93 inches) OLED TVs. The company didn't detail new additions to its less advanced B series, but Forbes reported that LG would eventually release B3 OLED TVs with an A7 Gen 6 processor and 55-, 65-, and 77-inch sizes this year. LG will reportedly no longer sell the entry-level A series in North America.

In addition to using OLED.EX panels (which LG calls "OLED Evo" in its consumer TVs), LG Display announced in late 2021 that OLED.EX panels were up to 30 percent brighter than traditional OLED panels; LG also claims the 55-, 65-, and 75-inch G3 are up to 70 percent brighter when using a feature called Brightness Booster Max. The feature isn't available on the 83- or 97-inch G3 or any other LG OLED TV series.

Enlarge / Not exactly a great legacy for the first post-John-Madden Madden game.

EA says that a temporary "data storage issue" led to the corruption of many Madden NFL 23 players' Connected Franchise Mode (CFM) save files last week. What's worse, the company now estimates it can recover fewer than half of those corrupted files from a backup.

The issue started last Monday, December 26, when EA tweeted that it was "aware of players experiencing connection issues when trying to connect to CFM." That problem lasted until Wednesday, December 28, when EA announced that subsequent server maintenance meant that "users should now be able to play CFM without issue."

But users who attempted to log in to play online franchise games during a 22-hour period ranging from Wednesday afternoon to Thursday morning saw their franchise save data corrupted by the aforementioned "data storage issue," as EA confirmed over the weekend. And while EA says some of those corrupted save files can be recovered from a backup, it adds that the development team is "currently projecting around 40% of leagues to be recovered."

Enlarge (credit: Intel)

The 13th-generation "Raptor Lake" Intel Core CPUs we've tested so far have performed well by virtue of throwing lots and lots of cores at most workloads, and the less-expensive processors in the lineup are going to take the same approach. The number of large high-performance P-cores is staying the same, but CPUs from i5 to i9 are all picking up extra E-cores to help with rendering, encoding, and other high-end professional apps that can use every CPU core you give them.

Leaks and other early reports appear to have gotten everything from core counts to clock speeds to cache size mostly correct, so if you've been paying attention, none of today's announcements will come as a surprise. But for people who aren't familiar, the short version is that these are riffs on the 12th-gen Alder Lake CPUs' hybrid architecture, and their designs haven't changed much. They'll also continue to fit into the same LGA1700 motherboards as 12th-generation CPUs, so 600-series motherboards should recognize them just fine after a BIOS update.

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  The 65 W versions of Intel's new 13th-gen Core CPUs. The Core i9 and i7 variants include more cache per core than the i5 and i3 chips. [credit: Intel ]

Core i9 and Core i7 CPUs all have eight P-cores, but i9 chips come with 16 E-cores while i7 chips come with eight. Core i5 CPUs all come with six P-cores, but the amount of E-cores varies—the i5-13600 and i5-13500 come with eight, while the lowest-end i5-13400 comes with four. The Core i5-12500 and 12400 didn't come with any E-cores at all, so people in the market for a good mainstream CPU for a budget-conscious gaming PC or workstation will benefit even more from the jump between the 12th- and 13th-gen chips. The Core i3 remains the only CPU in the lineup with no E-cores, though their four P-cores should still do just fine for office work and low-end gaming desktops.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Over the holiday break, the footage from the recent "RISC-V Summit" was posted for the world to see, and would you believe that Google showed up to profess its love for the up-and-coming CPU architecture?

We've been trying to nail down how the Android team feels about RISC-V for a while. We last heard a comment from the team six months ago, where our Google I/O question about RISC-V was answered only with "we're watching, but it would be a big change for us." Some external RISC-V porting projects exist, and various RISC-V commits have been landing in the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), but since anyone can submit code to AOSP, it has been hard to make any bold proclamations about RISC-V's Android status.

Google's keynote at the RISC-V Summit was all about bold proclamations, though. Lars Bergstrom, Android's director of engineering, wants RISC-V to be seen as a "tier-1 platform" in Android, which would put it on par with Arm. That's a big change from just six months ago. Bergstrom says getting optimized Android builds on RISC-V will take "a lot of work" and outlined a roadmap that will take "a few years" to come to fruition, but AOSP started to land official RISC-V patches back in September.