Technology

The Alphabet Workers Union launched a campaign Tuesday to push Google to allow employees to use their chosen names on ID badges. The move comes after Phares Lee, a transgender man who works at a Google data center in South Carolina and is employed by security subcontracting firm G4S, asked to have his deadname removed from his badge and was denied. Lee came out as transgender during his initial interview with G4S. “I was assured [Google] was inclusive, yet when I asked about a badge in my preferred name I was told that my badge had to reflect my legal name,” he says in an interview with The Verge. “After arriving on site and being issued the badge with my dead name, I noticed there were many people on site, both cis and transgender, whose badges did not reflect their legal names.” Lee’s ex...

AMD is partnering with Samsung to provide RDNA 2 graphics technology for an Exynos mobile system-on-chip, potentially giving a boost to GPU performance in flagship Samsung phones. The announcement was made today at Computex Taipei. There aren’t many details on the chip or which products it’ll be used in, but AMD describes the chip as a “next-generation Exynos SoC,” and says Samsung will provide further information later in 2021. The GPU will use AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture, enabling features like ray tracing and variable rate shading. AMD says it’ll make its way to “flagship mobile devices.” “The next place you’ll find RDNA 2 will be the high-performance mobile phone market,” AMD CEO Lisa Su said on stage. “AMD has partnered with industry leader Samsung for several years to accelerate graphi...

The World Health Organization (WHO) has announced a new naming system for notable variants of virus that causes COVID-19 based on letters of the Greek alphabet. The new names aren’t intended to replace official scientific designations, but it’s hoped they’ll provide labels that are easier to remember and say than alphanumeric names, and less stigmatizing than the informal use of countries’ names to identify new variants. The WHO has a list of existing “variants of concern” and “variants of interest” that have been given new labels under the Greek alphabet naming scheme. “Alpha” refers to B.1.1.7, the variant first documented in the UK, while “Delta” is B.1.617.2, which was first documented in India. In total, the WHO has already used 10 letters of the 24 letter strong Greek alphabet. The l...

A new collective is trying to solve the live audio monetization problem. A group of primarily tech-focused hosts are launching a shared podcast feed that’ll round up the many social audio chats they’ve started, with plans to run ads across the collected feed. The group, which is being spearheaded by Techmeme Ride Home host Brian McCullough, will initially involve nine total contributors, including Alex Kantrowitz of the Big Technology newsletter and product designer Chris Messina. They’ll share a podcast feed where they can publish audio they’ve recorded live across various social audio platforms, like Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces, and that feed, which is already live but hasn’t been publicly announced, is called SpaceCasts. Anyone who participates can publish their live audio on the feed ...

This week I’m talking to Horacio Gutierrez, head of global affairs and chief legal officer of Spotify, to help me understand why Spotify and so many other app developers are so frustrated with Apple. Horacio recently testified in front of Congress about Apple’s business practices, and he just wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal calling Apple a “ruthless bully.” That’s a lot. But it’s all part of a trend. You probably know that there’s a lot of government interest around the world in managing the size and power of big tech companies. A few weeks ago, we had Senator Amy Klobuchar on the show to talk about her proposed antitrust law reforms. There are ongoing antitrust lawsuits from the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, and various states against Google, Facebook, and...

Nvidia is unveiling its latest flagship gaming GPU today, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti. Based on Nvidia’s latest Ampere architecture, the RTX 3080 Ti will succeed the RTX 3080 and promises to deliver 1.5x more performance over the previous generation RTX 2080 Ti. Nvidia is making the RTX 3080 Ti available worldwide on June 3rd, priced from $1,199. The RTX 3080 Ti looks very much like the RTX 3080, with an identical design and ports. The main difference is a jump in power and VRAM. The RTX 3080 Ti ships with more VRAM than the RTX 3080, with 12GB of GDDR6X in total. This new GPU is essentially as close as you can get to an RTX 3090 on paper, with half the VRAM. The $1,199 price matches the same pricing Nvidia used for the RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition cards, and it’s $300 less than the giant RTX ...

AMD has announced that FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), its super sampling technique that should boost performance and image quality in supported games, will launch on June 22nd. The company gave a presentation at Computex Taipei today with more information on the feature, though it’s still not clear just how effective it’ll be. Supersampling is a major point of differentiation between AMD’s GPUs and those from its competitor Nvidia. DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling), Nvidia’s version of the technique, uses neural networks to reconstruct images at higher quality from lower resolutions in real time, enabling games to run at smoother frame rates without compromising the image quality. Nvidia launched DLSS back in 2018 with the RTX 20- series, and it’s has been increasing performance and ...

Remember when Elon Musk claimed you’d be able to play The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 on a 10 teraflop gaming rig he’s stuffing into the new Tesla Model S and X? AMD is officially providing the guts — during its Computex 2021 keynote, the chipmaker just revealed that the new Tesla infotainment system consists of an AMD Ryzen processor paired with an AMD RDNA 2 GPU. “So we actually have an AMD Ryzen APU powering the infotainment system in both cars as well as a discrete RDNA2-based GPU that kicks in when running AAA games, providing up to 10 teraflops of compute power…. we look forward to giving gamers a great platform for AAA gaming,” says AMD CEO Lisa Su. And if you combine that information with another piece of news AMD revealed today, plus a earlier leak in January, we may now ha...

AMD has announced its long-awaited Radeon RX 6000M series of mobile GPUs, featuring its RDNA 2 architecture. Today’s release consists of three chips: the RX 6800M (configurable at 145W and above), the RX 6700M (up to 135W), and the RX 6600M (up to 100W). AMD says the flagship 6800M delivers the fastest AMD graphics for laptops yet; it claims the 6800M will run modern AAA games at frame rates that are comparable to or better than those of Nvidia’s mobile RTX 3080. It’s also purported to outperform Nvidia’s chip while gaming on battery. AMD says the RX 6700M will deliver up to 100fps “in popular games” at 1440p resolution. The 6600M is better for “epic 1080p gaming.” Keep an eye out for independent reviews of these chips in the coming weeks for better idea of the performance you can expect f...

Alienware is keen on giving Razer a run for its money when it comes to making a super-thin gaming laptop. Two of the configurations of Alienware’s new X15 flagship model are actually 15.9mm thick, almost the same as Razer’s just-refreshed 15.8mm-thick Blade 15 Advanced. That’s impressively thin, especially considering that Alienware doesn’t usually try to compete in this realm. What’s also noteworthy is that, despite its thin build, the X15 looks like it will be a capable machine. Alienware is also announcing a bigger and thicker 17-inch X17 laptop that’s even more powerful. We’ll go into detail on both below. Let’s start with the X15, which will cost $1,999 for the base model, available starting today. Packed into that entry model is Intel’s 11th Gen Core i7-11800H processor (eight cores ...