Month: December 2023

Enlarge / AMD's Ryzen 8040 series is a lot like the 7040 series but with a higher model number. (credit: AMD)

Both Intel and AMD usually have processor updates to announce at CES in January, but AMD isn't waiting to introduce its next-generation flagship laptop chips: the Ryzen 8040 series is coming to laptops starting in early 2024, though at first blush these chips look awfully similar to the Ryzen 7040 processors that AMD announced just seven months ago.

Though the generational branding is jumping from 7000 to 8000, the CPU and GPU of the Ryzen 8040 series are nearly identical to the ones in the 7040 series. The chips AMD is announcing today use up to eight Zen 4 CPU cores and RDNA 3-based integrated GPUs (either a Radeon 780M with 12 compute units, or Radeon 760M or 740M GPUs with 8 or 4 CUs). The chips are manufactured using the same 4 nm TSMC process as the 7040 series.

There's also an AI-accelerating neural processing unit (NPU) that AMD claims is about 1.4 times faster than the one in the Ryzen 7040 series in large language models like Llama 2 and ONNX vision models. Both NPUs are based on the same XDNA architecture and have the same amount of processing hardware—AMD says that the AI performance improvements come mostly from higher clock speeds.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | imagedepotpro)

The US broadband industry is protesting a Federal Communications Commission plan to measure the affordability of Internet service.

The FCC has been evaluating US-wide broadband deployment progress on a near-annual basis for almost three decades but hasn't factored affordability into these regular reviews. The broadband industry is afraid that a thorough examination of prices will lead to more regulation of ISPs.

An FCC Notice of Inquiry issued on November 1 proposes to analyze the affordability of Internet service in the agency's next congressionally required review of broadband deployment. That could include examining not just monthly prices but also data overage charges and various other fees.

Enlarge / The Google Gemini logo. (credit: Google)

On Wednesday, Google announced Gemini, a multimodal AI model family it hopes will rival OpenAI's GPT-4, which powers the paid version of ChatGPT. Google claims that the largest version of Gemini exceeds "current state-of-the-art results on 30 of the 32 widely used academic benchmarks used in large language model (LLM) research and development." It's a follow-up to PaLM 2, an earlier AI model that Google hoped would match GPT-4 in capability.

A specially tuned English version of its mid-level Gemini model is available now in over 170 countries as part of the Google Bard chatbot—although not in the EU or the UK due to potential regulation issues.

Like GPT-4, Gemini can handle multiple types (or "modes") of input, making it multimodal. That means it can process text, code, images, and even audio. The goal is to make a type of artificial intelligence that can accurately solve problems, give advice, and answer questions in a variety of fields—from the mundane to the scientific. Google says this will power a new era in computing, and it hopes to tightly integrate the technology into its products.

Enlarge (credit: Dilok Klaisataporn | iStock / Getty Images Plus)

Governments have been secretly tracking the app activity of an unknown number of people using Apple and Google smartphones, US Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) revealed today.

In a letter demanding that the Department of Justice update or repeal policies prohibiting companies from informing the public about these covert government requests, Wyden warned that "Apple and Google are in a unique position to facilitate government surveillance of how users are using particular apps."

Push notifications are used to provide a wide variety of alerts to app users. A friendly ding or text alert on the home screen notifies users about new text messages, emails, social media comments, news updates, packages delivered, gameplay nudges—basically any app activity where notifications have been enabled could be tracked by governments, Wyden said.

Enlarge / It takes proficiency in quite a few disciplines, a pick-and-place machine, a 3D printer, and lots of little solder points to get a candle looking this cool. (credit: mitxela)

The latest device crafted by the prolific maker going by mitxela comprises an LED matrix board, "a bunch of electronics" underneath it, an infrared sensor, a coin battery, and the motor from a CD drive. It's a deceptively simple bill of goods for a rather elegant DIY project the size of a tea light candle.

Typical volumetric displays are tricky things, given the need to send data and power to rapidly spinning things. Mitxela's solution: make everything spin, including the battery. Creeping up on the infrared sensor with his finger, mitxela coaxed the tiny spinning board to create collapsing stars, pouring liquid, and the candle flames for which it was originally designed.

"I won't deny, this is a very satisfying result for what was a hastily thrown-together prototype," mitxela says in the video. "I wasn't expecting it to work at all." The next version will have more LEDs, and they'll be better-centered; right now, the LED matrix backplate is on the center line, not the LEDs themselves. Since the LEDs illuminate twice during each revolution, having them exactly centered improves the clarity of the resulting image.

Enlarge (credit: Getty)

Reddit URLs are being manipulated to include a slur in the subdomain, and those URLs are coming up in Google Search results.

The Verge experienced the problem on Tuesday, reporting that while doing a Google search, Reddit results that came up had a URL that looked like this: "https://2goback-[slur].reddit.com/r/[the rest of the URL]".

One Reddit user posted about the problem on Monday, and other Redditors also noticed the issue (examples here and here).