Waymo and Cruise were approved to operate their robotaxi services 24/7 in San Francisco after a contentious six-hour public hearing in which residents voiced their support and opposition to the vehicles. It’s a big win for autonomous vehicle operators, who have spent tens of billions on the technology with very little return.
The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) voted 3-to-1 in favor of allowing the two companies to operate their vehicles at any hour of the day throughout the city of San Francisco.
“Today is the first of many steps in bringing AV transportation services to Californians,” CPUC Commissioner John Reynolds said at the end of the hearing. (Reynolds, a former general counsel at GM-backed Cruise, had recused…
Leaks and rumors had indicated that a new Call of Duty title coming in 2023 would be a direct sequel to last year’s entry, but Activision has only recently begun making official confirmations.Read Entire Article
The Acer Swift X 16 (2023) is an unassuming laptop. You won’t likely look twice in a coffee shop — but up close, this OLED display makes all the difference.
What do you get when you combine AMD’s fastest mobile processor, Dragon Ridge, with its killer performance-enhancing desktop technology, 3D V-Cache? The AMD Ryzen 7945HX3D, which AMD claims to be the world’s fastest laptop gaming processor.
It’s a claim that AMD can back up. The Ryzen 9 7945HX3D performs substantially faster than the existing 7945HX, the flagship “Dragon Ridge” processor AMD announced at CES 2023 in January. In general, the 7945HX3D’s performance ranges from about equal to the 7945HX to a stunning 44 percent to 53 percent faster for games like Cyberpunk 2077 as well as Riftbreaker.
Essentially, AMD’s 3D V-Cache takes a giant chunk of cache RAM and mounts it to the top of the CPU die, using a modular architecture called chiplets. The additional cache stores frequently accessed instructions close to the main CPU die. If a game needs to access those instructions, the larger at-hand cache means that it can do so quickly. Otherwise, it would have to search for them from the PC’s main memory. Put extremely simply, it’s the difference between keeping a serving bowl of food on the table at dinner, versus walking into the kitchen for additional helpings.
AMD’s Ryzen 9 7945HX3D appears to run at the same frequencies as the 7945HX: 2.5GHz base, or up to 5.4GHz while boosted. Like the 7945HX, it’s a Zen 4 chip. The 7945HX3D contains 16 cores and 32 threads, while operating at “55W+” thermal design power, according to AMD. (AMD specifies the 7945HX at between 55 and 75W of power.) The key difference, of course, is the cache: a total of 144MB of cache, 64MB more cache than the 7945HX.
Gamers or laptop makers don’t have to run the 7945HX3D at full power. AMD shared a slide showing that the chip can improve performance by 22 percent at just 40W, and by 11 percent at 70W, compared to disabling the V-Cache entirely. (At the lower power, the V-Cache allows the 7945HX3D’s CPU output to catch up to the discrete GPU, putting them more in sync and increasing overall performance compared to the 7945HX, an AMD spokesman said. At 70W, the additional power helps the 7945HX catch up, lowering the performance improvement that the V-Cache provides.)
It’s the games, though, where the additional performance will matter. Here’s how AMD sees the Ryzen 9 7945HX3D stacking up to the 7945HX. (You may need to open the image in a separate tab and zoom in to see the fine detail.)
In most cases, the additional V-Cache translates into increased performance.
AMD
The Ryzen 9 7945HX3D joins the Ryzen 5 5600X3D, Ryzen 7 5800X3D, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D and the Ryzen 9 7900X3D and 7950X3D as AMD’s sixth 3D V-Cache processor.
The new chip will feature inside the ROG Strix Scar 17 X3D, a new gaming laptop that will launch on August 22, AMD said. According to leaked product listings, discovered by Hot Hardware and others, the laptop will boast an RTX 4090 GPU, plus 32GB of memory and a mammoth 2TB SSD. The ROG Strix Scar 15 we reviewed in 2022 included a 240Hz 1440p display, so we can expect at least that in the new model.
Bertie Gregory is back, and this time, the adventures are even more epic! Bertie takes us to the most spectacular corners of our planet — from Antarctica to …
Author: National Geographic. [Source Link (*), movie trailer – YouTube]
The original Remnant: From the Ashes was a surprise success thanks to its Souls-inspired action combined with third-person shooting and randomized environments. The sequel is a refinement with new environments and expanded lore. I enjoyed my time with the game and its final boss and the shooting mechanics feel great, but Remnant II ultimately doesn’t do enough to separate itself from the genres and games that inspired it.
Comparing other video games to From Software’s iconic Souls series is an overused cliché, but it’s be hard to talk about Remnant II without doing so. Timed dodge-rolling is your primary means of avoiding damage, fog gates separate you from bosses, and checkpoints refill your health items and reset the enemies in the environment. The good news is that all these mechanics feel great and work well. Firing off a few critical shots at the head of a boss and dodging out of the way just as a gigantic sword comes slamming to the ground is consistently exciting. And nothing beats the relief of coming across a checkpoint after an intense sprint through what felt like an endless barrage of enemies. The influences are apparent and it mostly translates well to a third-person shooter.
Some elements don’t translate as well, however, or just aren’t particularly satisfying. Being a shooter, you must face the enemy you’re fighting, which means running away from a rampaging beast requires removing it from your view, which can feel unfair. The progression loop also did little to pull me in. The primary source of growth is making your weapons more powerful, but those upgrades are incremental and somewhat infrequent. You can apply traits to many elements of your character, but the statistical upgrades are minor. The items you find in the environment also have far too many variables that typically only affect very specific scenarios making the choice to not equip them easy. I played most of the game with the same weapon and armor, as switching to something else never felt like a valuable pursuit.
While the upgrade progression didn’t excite me, I was always eager to continue, thanks to seeing what environment I would encounter next. The lore conceit allows players to explore different dimensions, not just levels, which means one location can look like the back alleys of Victorian London, while the next can be a futuristic city loaded with robots. And every area nails the difficult-to-quantify unsettling tone without being horrific.
The world-building of each dimension invites exploration, but the moment-to-moment plot and characters did little to engage me. Its bosses, however, are exciting, scary, and challenging, but thankfully not to the point of feeling insurmountable. There are plenty of big scary monsters with swords and fire breath who will kill you repeatedly, but there are also giant cubes stomping through mazes and A.I. machines excited to test your mortality on moving trains. Every dimension feels radically different, and their guardians all present thrilling encounters.
Remnant II is most successful as a tour through a series of disparate dimensions, each contending with their own battles against the villainous Root plaguing their world. The gunplay is solid, the co-op with up to two other players works great, and the lore is fascinating (if you want to dig deep). Remnant II’s plot, characters, and progression are where it falls short, but I like its third-person shooter take on mechanics and ideas borrowed from the Souls games.
T-Mobile has started the rollout of its new 5G tech that can deliver speeds of up to 3.3Gbps using carrier aggregation, which combines four different 5G channels into one for devices that can handle it (only Samsung’s newer Galaxy S23 phones at the moment), similar to a trick used by Wi-Fi routers to create a faster connection.
That’s even faster than what you’d get out of mmWave 5G, which is more heavily touted by Verizon and AT&T as also being capable of extremely high speeds — Ookla recently reported download speeds of up to 1.6Gbps in the US. However, it has limited range and device support and is easily hampered by common impediments like trees and buildings.
The four channels T-Mobile is using include repurposed 1,900MHz spectrum…
Author: Sean Hollister. [Source Link (*), The Verge – All Posts]
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