(Credit: HP)After two years of record profits in the PC market, we’re seeing in real-time the old adage of “what goes up, must come down.” All of 2022 has been brutal for PC manufacturers, but they held a glimmer of hope that the holiday shopping season might turn things around. After all, we have never had as much new hardware to choose from as we did this year. However, it was not meant to be. The holiday numbers were not only bad but worse than expected. Taken as a whole, over time, the continued decline of shipments indicates the PC boom that was fueled by COVID-19 lockdowns is officially over.
(Image: Mishaal Zahed/Unsplash)You’d think with how good we already are at cooling buildings and keeping our canned beverages nice and frosty, we wouldn’t be working to improve our refrigeration techniques. According to a group of mechanical and chemical engineers, though, that isn’t the case. There’s quite a bit of progress to be made toward more sustainable cooling—and we might have just taken a significant step in the right direction. A team of researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley have developed a new refrigeration method. Their technique relies on what they call the “ionocaloric cycle,” a riff on the caloric cycle that induces a phase change (like ice melting) in order to cool or heat the surrounding area.
Since homo sapiens began to walk upright, PC power supplies have used pretty much the same layout. The power cable from the wall goes in one side, and the connectors are on the other side, facing toward the front of the chassis. This has worked out well, as that layout is compatible with the ATX standard. However, it can create a rat’s nest of cables at the bottom of the chassis, which is why many case manufacturers have begun putting a shroud over the PSU. Now Corsair looks to be trying a different approach to tidying up case wiring: shifting the connectors to the side of the PSU.
The James Webb Space Telescope was not designed exclusively to hunt for exoplanets like NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), but it can still make vital contributions to our understanding of these distant worlds. NASA has announced that Webb just confirmed its first exoplanet, a world known as LHS 475 b that was previously identified as a potential exoplanet by TESS. Unlike many of the worlds outside our solar system, this one is about the same size as Earth. TESS, which has been operating since 2018, scans large swaths of the sky in search of nearby stars that show evidence of exoplanets.
Well, this is awkward: AMD seems to be stuck in limbo regarding the upcoming launch of its highly-anticipated X3D line of CPUs. If you recall at the paper launch it said they’d arrive in February, and it conspicuously left out pricing information. This week the company revealed the actual launch date — Valentine’s Day, Feb. 14. A V-Cache CPU would make a perfect gift for the AM5-toting gamer in your life, after all. However, now it’s saying that was a mistake, and it has no launch date to announce. In one fell swoop, it’s ruined a sacred holiday for gamers worldwide.
Intel has released a new marketing video showing off what is surely the Core i9-13900KS. The company hasn’t officially announced the CPU yet, but it’s been hinting at it for months now. The new video is a no-frills affair with two Intel employees chatting at a testing bench, and one acting surprised at hearing some of the information. The word “awesome” is used quite frequently. It seems to show the CPU is exactly what Intel claims: capable of hitting 6GHz “out of the box,” with “no tricks” like a liquid chiller or fumbling around in the BIOS. The host of the video is Alejandro Hoyos, a tech evangelist for Intel.
Perseverance landed on Mars on Feb. 8, 2021. That’s nearly two Earth years ago. But on Mars, the wheel of the year turns slowly. Just a few days ago, Perseverance marked its one-Mars-year anniversary. A sol, or Martian day, is less than an hour longer than an Earth day. By comparison, a Mars year is almost twice as long as an Earth year — 687 Earth days, or just shy of 669 sols. This is partly because Mars, being farther away, sweeps out a larger orbit around the sun. However, Mars’ orbital eccentricity is also considerably larger, which causes its seasons to vary significantly in length.
(Photo: Angela Moscaritolo/PCMag)Apple has always relied on some of its biggest competitors for components of its mobile devices. The most notable is Samsung, which it’s relied on for the OLED displays in iPhone. At the same time, Samsung is its biggest adversary in the same market. This must have been sticking in Apple’s craw because according to a new from Bloomberg, Apple is going to alter this arrangement by making its own displays. This won’t be happening any time soon, but it’ll be a major blow to Samsung, LG, and others. Apple’s also looking at building its own wireless chips as well, which would be bad news for Broadcom and Qualcomm.
Microsoft didn’t quite get the response it hoped with the dual-screen Surface Duo 2, so it’s making some changes to its smartphone plans. A new report claims that Microsoft has ditched its next dual-screen device and will instead produce a larger OLED phone like the . This will mean no 360-degree hinge action, but that’s probably a fair tradeoff. The Surface Duo 2 was released in late 2021, and it’s easy to see why Microsoft might want a change. The phone was priced at a startlingly high $1,500, but it suffered from numerous software glitches and has been slow to get updates.
