Latest Tech News II Dec 2020 II

 

AMD's Smart Access Memory has been ported over to Intel, sort of. See, the feature allows a Ryzen 5000-series processor to have full access to the GPU memory of a Radeon RX 6000-series GPU, which can have a decent impact on performance. That does sound smart, but SAM is actually based on a technology called resizable base address register, or resize BAR which has been a part of the PCIe spec for years. Nvidia has said they ‘reworking on adding the feature to their GPU as well. Some of the board makers have already released BIOS updates that enabled BAR on Intel’s Z490 motherboards including Asus and ASRock, who named their implementation Clever Access Memory.

Some early testing has been done showing that a system with an Intel 10900K and an RX 6800 XT could gain performance by as much as 16%. This is great news for Intel, but if some Rocket Lake leaks are accurate, they're gonna need every extra boost they can get. That was a rocket pun. Maybe they can ask Elon Musk for help. - Comes in a rocket can. Google is in hot water, whatever that means when you're one of the richest companies on Earth, over its treatment of current and former employees. The US National Labour Relations Board has filed a complaint against the tech giant for illegally surveillant employees and firing those who attempt to unionize. The complaint alleges that Google blocked employees from sharing work grievances and information with each other using email, calendars, and even physical meeting rooms. At first, I was like, well, this is their fault for using Gmail, and others, G Suite. They have meeting rooms. Google, send Karen a message about how Google sucks.

There's also controversy surrounding Timnit Gebru, a research scientist on Google’s ethical AI team. Gebru was fired after questioning a manager's request that she retract a research paper that she had written discussing how AI systems can sometimes demonstrate racial bias. Now, hundreds of Google employees have signed an open letter calling Gebru's firing unprecedented research censorship. The best part is Google doesn’t even have to take any of this seriously since they removed don’t be evil from their motto, and obviously mottoes- - They're legally binding.- They're binding. So, they're free. They couldn't be legal before, but now they can.

And stock shortages continue to affect sales of graphics cards with retailers selling out of basically everything as soon as they refresh their stock. Wow, you can help them sell out even faster by joining the thousands of people currently watching a stock checker bot stream its stock-checking on Twitch. Sure, the screen is entirely composed of slowly updating lists of GPU models with big red text reading out "Out of stock," but what else would you do with your time in these unprecedented times where you have so much time? What would you do? Figure out which graphics settings to turn down so your current graphics card can play cyberpunk, which isn't even gonna get made anyway? What, watch the new episode of Mandalorian? No thanks. If you do enjoy this type of entertainment, you're in luck. Nvidia says that thanks to wafer shortages and other impacts on the supply line thanks to COVID, stock shortages are probably going to be the norm for the next couple of months, so grab the popcorn. "The Mandalorian" is okay at best, anyway. You don't even watch it. It's pretty good now. I've seen enough.

Photos of a phone called the Pixel XE have been leaked online, or at least that's what the device thinks it is, according to the About Phone section. It doesn't look like any Pixel phone release so far, so this could indeed be Google’s next flagship. Pretty rude of them to just steal Intel's graphics brand like that. But again, evil isn’t out of the question here. Am I right? They're making the Pixel. They're making the Pixel! - I hope they call it the Z instead of XZ. That's stupid. Hackers have been targeting the global supply chain responsible for distributing COVID vaccines. According to analysts from IBM’s comic book-sounding X-Force IRIS division. It's suspected the hackers aren't attempting to disrupt vaccine distribution. That would be disgusting. But are trying to harvest credentials to get close to the myriad corporations and countries involved in the effort, but it might screw things up anyway.

So, can you just take a break for a second, hackers? Can you just take your boot off of the throat of 2019 as it gasps for air? Verizon is trying to fix a glitch in their live chat support service that shows customers logs of previous chat sessions from other customers when they open a chat window. Yikes. This info can include names, addresses, phone numbers, and account numbers, and Verizon was notified of the issue by Ars Technical on Monday.

Warner Brothers Pictures has announced the studio's entire 2021 line-up of movies will release simultaneously in theatres and on HBO Max, including big boys like “Dune" and "The Matrix 4." 'Kay, this does not mean that all those movies are coming out in the same day. Awesome is what I would say if this wasn't limited to the US only. Do you want piracy? Cause this is how you get piracy. And ants. What about Canada?

And Chinese physicists claim to have built a quantum computer that completed a task in just over three minutes that would have taken the world's fastest conventional classic computer 600 million years to finish. The quantum machine used a process called Gaussian Boson Sampling which works exactly the way you would expect. The researchers say that this means they’ve achieved quantum supremacy even though Google already declared the same thing. These guys are even more supreme. They're Supreme, but I think technically all you have to do is declare it and you have it. It's like bankruptcy.

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