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Enlarge / Picture of a Comcast router/modem gateway from the company's website. (credit: Comcast)

Comcast today offered the latest hint of a future in which its cable customers won't be limited to 35Mbps upload speeds. Announcing a recent lab test, Comcast said its research team "deliver[ed] upstream and downstream throughputs of greater than 4Gbps" and that "future optimization" will allow "even greater capacity."

This was "the first-ever live lab test" of a Broadcom "system-on-chip (SOC) device that will pave the way for Comcast to deliver multigigabit upload and download speeds over its hybrid-fiber coaxial (HFC) network," Comcast said. It won't require installation of more cables because the "technology works using the same types of connections already installed in hundreds of millions of homes worldwide," Comcast said.

Cable customers have been waiting a long time for upload speeds that aren't a tiny fraction of download speeds. Comcast's cable uploads, ranging from 3Mbps to 35Mbps, are so low that Comcast hides them deep within its online ordering system. While cable download speeds of up to 1.2Gbps are prominently displayed, Comcast doesn't tell customers what upload speeds they'll get until they enter a valid credit card number.

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  Hard to see Cyberpunk 2077 as anything but a massive driver of a record quarter in this chart... [credit: CD Projekt ]

Back in December, developer CD Projekt Red made waves by offering full refunds to Cyberpunk 2077 players who were dissatisfied with the game's poor performance, especially on older consoles. Days later, Sony delisted the game from the Playstation Store and made its own refund offer, which was followed by a similar refund offer from Microsoft.

Today, with the release of the CDPR's Consolidated Financial Statement for the 2020 fiscal year (which ended December 31), we know how much that refund program cost the company last year and how much CDPR expects those refunds and lost sales to cost in 2021. All told, it seems the impact will be very low to an otherwise record-setting financial year.

Buried in the "Other Provisions" section of the 90-page financial report, CDPR acknowledges about $51.2 million (194.5 million PLN) that the company says it "has recognized [as] provisions for returns and expected adjustments of licensing reports related to sales of Cyberpunk 2077 in its release window, in Q4 2020." Translated into plain English, that number seems to include all digital and retail refunds for the game in 2020, as well as expectations for continued refunds and lost sales projected through 2021 (thanks to F-Squared's Mike Futter for helping me parse the tortured language in the report).

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

The switch to electric vehicles is going more slowly in the US than in some other parts of the world. EVs reached a higher market share in 2020 than in any year past, but they still only accounted for 1.8 percent of all new cars and trucks. So for now, there's not really much impact on the grid from people charging their cars at home at the same time. At least not yet. But power consumption due to EV charging will be a growing concern as the country decarbonizes in the coming years, particularly given how fragile the US's electrical infrastructure is in places.

Just when EV charging will become a problem is something we've looked at before. A study by Matteo Muratori at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado found that a residential distribution transformer could handle six EVs all charging at once, as long as those EVs were only charging at 120 V. But adding just one 240 V (level 2) charger to the mix was enough to exceed the transformer's nominal capacity.

Muratori's proposed solution? Smart charging.

Enlarge / A Google Argos VCU. It transcodes video very quickly. (credit: Google)

Google has decided that YouTube is such a huge transcoding workload that it needs to build its own server chips. The company detailed its new "Argos" chips in a YouTube blog post, a CNET interview, and in a paper for ASPLOS, the Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems Conference. Just as there are GPUs for graphics workloads and Google's TPU (Tensor processing unit) for AI workloads, the YouTube infrastructure team says it has created the "VCU" or "Video (trans)Coding Unit," which helps YouTube transcode a single video into over a dozen versions that it needs to provide a smooth, bandwidth-efficient, profitable video site.

Google's Jeff Calow said the Argos chip has brought "up to 20-33x improvements in compute efficiency compared to our previous optimized system, which was running software on traditional servers." The VCU package is a full-length PCI-E card and looks a lot like a graphics card. A board has two Argos ASIC chips buried under a gigantic, passively cooled aluminum heat sink. There's even what looks like an 8-pin power connector on the end, because PCI-E just isn't enough power. Google also provided a lovely chip diagram, listing 10 "encoder cores" on each chip, with Google's white paper adding that "all other elements are off-the-shelf IP blocks." Google says that "each encoder core can encode 2160p in realtime, up to 60 FPS (frames per second) using three reference frames."

The cards are specifically designed to slot into Google's warehouse-scale computing system. Each compute cluster in YouTube's system will have a section of dedicated "VCU machines" loaded with the new cards, saving Google from having to crack open every server and load it with a new card. Google says the cards resemble GPUs because that's what fits in its existing accelerator trays. CNET reports that "thousands of the chips are running in Google data centers right now" and, thanks to the cards, individual video workloads like 4K video "can be available to watch in hours instead of the days it previously took."

Enlarge / The iPhone 12. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Yet another report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has emerged with details of Apple's future product plans. Citing "people with knowledge of the matter," the article broadly describes some of the key upcoming features in iOS 15 for iPhones and iPadOS 15 for iPads.

Apple is likely to reveal iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 at its annual developer conference, WWDC, which kicks off on June 7 in an online-only format this year. Typically, Apple then releases these updates in September or thereabouts—timed closely with the annual release of new flagship iPhones. Something close to that same timeline is likely again this year.

Bloomberg's sources say the upcoming OS updates will allow users to set different notification rules based on their status—"status," in this case, means some predefined buckets like working, sleeping, or driving, as well as custom statuses that users can define themselves.

Enlarge (credit: Sjo / Getty)

Last Saturday, two men died when a Tesla Model S crashed into a tree in a residential neighborhood. Authorities said they found no one in the driver's seat—one man was in the front passenger seat, while the other was in the back. That led to speculation that the car might have been under the control of Tesla's Autopilot driver-assistance system at the time of the crash.

Elon Musk has tweeted that "data logs recovered so far show Autopilot was not enabled." Tesla defenders also insisted that Autopilot couldn't have been active because the technology doesn't operate unless someone is in the driver's seat. Consumer Reports decided to test this latter claim by seeing if it could get Autopilot to activate without anyone in the driver's seat.

It turned out not to be very difficult.