Technology

AMD just announced its new Zen 3-powered Ryzen 5000 series CPUs, but CEO Lisa Su didn’t stop there, ending her presentation with a preview of AMD’s other big PC announcement: the company’s upcoming RX 6000 “Big Navi” GPUs, which it’s set to announce on October 28th. While full details on the upcoming lineup of graphics cards won’t come until later in October, Su is setting expectations high, promising that the RX 6000 lineup offers “by far the most powerful gaming GPU we have ever built.” Su also offered a brief preview of what to expect from the company’s top-of-the-line Ryzen 5000 CPUs working together with the new RX 6000 series GPUs, showing a short clip of Borderlands 3 running at 4K resolution at over 60fps at “Badass Quality,” along with benchmarks for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (...

Western Digital has announced its first PCIe 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSDs, the WD Black SN850s, and they’ll offer fast read / write speeds of up to 7,000MB/s and 5,300MB/s that should help reduce load times on your PC and in games. Those speeds are a notable increase from the SN750’s 3,100MB/s and 1,600MB/s read / write speeds, and on par (with a slightly faster write speed) with Samsung’s recently announced PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs. [embedded content] Because they’re standard M.2 NVMe SSDs, the SN850s should work in most gaming PCs, as long as you have a compatible motherboard. Theoretically, they could also work as storage expansions for the PlayStation 5 — but Sony hasn’t actually said what drives will be certified as compatible with its next-generation console just yet. (The Xbox Series X / S, on the o...

On Tuesday, Congress revealed whether it thinks Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google are sitting on monopolies. In some cases, the answer was yes. But also, one app developer revealed to Congress that it — just like WordPress — had been forced to monetize a largely free app. That developer testified that Apple had demanded in-app purchases (IAP), even though Apple had approved its app without them two years earlier — and that when the dev dared send an email to customers notifying them of the change, Apple threatened to remove the app and blocked all updates. That developer was ProtonMail, makers of an encrypted email app, and CEO Andy Yen had some fiery words for Apple in an interview with The Verge this week. We’ve known for months that WordPress and Hey weren’t alone in being strong-arme...

The next time you open Lime’s smartphone app, you may see a new type of vehicle that isn’t an electric scooter. The San Francisco-based company announced today that it is integrating Wheels, a shared electric bike startup, into its app so customers can rent an e-bike from Wheels as easily as they would a scooter from Lime. Lime plans to add more shared mobility services to its app in the coming months as it seeks to become both a provider and platform for all two-wheeled electric transport. The “ultimate goal,” a spokesperson said, is to own “all light electric vehicle trips under 5 miles.” It’s an ambitious one, especially considering that shared electric bike and scooter companies are still struggling to turn a profit as COVID-19 upends supply chains and the transportation section global...

I Am Dead is a game about objects. It’s obsessed with them, really. The way they look, the way they feel, how they can change depending on your perspective — and, most importantly, what they mean to people. It’s a game where you play as a ghost, but it uses that conceit as an excuse to let you freely explore a quaint island full of charming residents, searching through memories that are anchored by specific objects. It’s heartfelt and charming — and not at all as dark as the name I Am Dead implies. The premise is, admittedly, quite strange. You play as Morris, the recently deceased curator of a museum on a small island who has two particular ghostly powers: he can venture into the memories of the living and peer inside of objects with a strange sort of X-ray vision. The island, meanwhile, ...

Virgin Hyperloop One announced its plan to build a $500 million certification center to advance its vision of the future of high-speed transportation in West Virginia. The state will serve as a locus for testing, developing, and validating the technology that underpins the still-theoretical hyperloop system. There is no fully functional hyperloop in the world, and it has never been tested with human passengers. But the federal government has recently laid out the framework for regulating the hyperloop, giving hope to companies like Virgin Hyperloop One that it may eventually break ground on a full-sized operational hyperloop system. To do so, it will still need to raise millions of dollars in funding, acquire the enormous tracks of land, and certify that the hyperloop can be operated safel...

Ricky Desktop is one of the biggest hitmakers of 2020 — though there’s a good chance you’ve never heard his name. Ricky has made more than 20 beats destined for TikTok this year, and more than a half dozen of them have gone on to be huge viral hits. If you’ve spent any time using the app, you’ll probably recognize some of his sounds: “The Chicken Wing Beat,” “The Dice Beat,” “The Boat Beat,” and most recently “The Banjo Beat.” The latest beats were made from the garage of his parents’ house, where Ricky — not his real name — moved after graduating college last year. Ricky, now 22, is a multi-instrumentalist who’s been playing music since he was 14. Before he shifted to TikTok, he was creating short raps about modern tech, like Venmo, Wikipedia, and LinkedIn. “I had zero traction,” he told ...

It’s going to be your best look at Middle Earth yet — The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies are finally getting a 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray release, with preorders now available and shipping starting from December 1st in the US. That’s just in time for the holidays. The news was shared by none other than Samwise Gamgee himself via fansite TheOneRing, with actor Sean Astin announcing the remaster in the video below. “Now, because it’s in 4K UHD you know it’s going to be the most incredible home-viewing experience possible,” said Astin. “Peter Jackson oversaw the remastering himself, and I can say that working with Peter was the adventure of a lifetime, and the friendships that I made will last forever. Enjoy.” The Lord of the Rings is going to be particularly delightful to see in 4K UHD,...

Global TV shipments hit a “historical high” in the third quarter of this year, according to a new report from TrendForce. 62.05 million units were shipped over the course of the quarter, a 12.9 percent increase over the same period last year, and 38.8 percent increase from the previous quarter. Both Samsung and LG, the two largest TV manufacturers, said today that they’re expecting profits to increase this quarter compared to last year. TrendForce gave a couple of different factors for the historic high. It said that in North America, TV demand increased by 20 percent as people spent more time at home due to the pandemic. The quarterly spike also accounts for TV shipment that were delayed from the first half of the year, according to the supply-chain analytics company. TrendForce’s report ...

Einride, the Swedish autonomous trucking startup, unveiled a new vehicle type that the company hopes to have on the road delivering freight starting in 2021. The vehicles, dubbed Autonomous Electric Transport (AET), came in four different variations. And much like Einride’s previous prototypes, they come without steering wheels, pedals, windshields, and, in general, no cab at all. Einride has been in the business of releasing interesting, eye-catching prototype vehicles since it was founded in 2016. There was the cab-less T-Pod, released in 2017, four of which are operating on public roads hauling freight for Oatly, the Swedish food producer. A year later, the company unveiled the T-Log, built to be more powerful than its predecessor for the job of (you guessed it) hauling tons of giant tr...

Netflix has been indicted in Texas on charges that the film Cuties contains lewd depictions of children. The indictment follows controversial backlash from conservative groups over certain scenes in the film where young girls dance provocatively. A grand jury in Tyler County, Texas, is charging Netflix with “Promotion Of Lewd Visual Material Depicting A Child,” a criminal act in Texas that was introduced into state law in 2018, Reuters reported. The charge alleges that Cuties, a movie about a group of young girls who form a dance troupe, “depicts the lewd exhibition of the genitals or pubic area of a clothed or partially clothed child who was younger than 18 years of age at the time the visual material was created,” according to the indictment filing. The filing also states that said conte...

Fortnite creator Epic Games is partnering with carmakers, starting with General Motors, to use its Unreal Engine game development platform to build in-car software in what Epic is calling its “human-machine interface” (HMI) initiative. The first car to use Unreal Engine, which is the primary software toolset with which developers make Fortnite and countless other big-budget video games, will be GMC’s upcoming Hummer EV, set to be unveiled on October 20th. The logic is simple: modern cars are primarily designed using software, and assembled cars carry scores of onboard computers and rely on touchscreens and digital interfaces to power infotainment centers and other sources of information displayed to drivers. And Unreal Engine is a great platform for building software, which Epic thinks mak...