AMD may have taken a breather on core counts in the past few years, but the company is poised to ramp things skyward again. AMD CEO Lisa Su shared the company’s updated server roadmap at its Accelerated Data Center event. In addition to new Milan CPUs with 768MB of L3 cache courtesy of AMD’s upcoming V-Cache, 2022 and 2023 will see new increases in core counts. First up, Genoa, which arrives on 5nm with up to 96 cores, PCIe 5.0, and DDR5 support. While Genoa will use the standard Zen 4 core, a follow-up chip that scales up to 128 cores, Bergamo, will use a tweaked Zen 4C design and debut in 2023.
The Milan-X CPUs and V-Cache equipped Zen 3 CPUs that AMD has been talking up since earlier this year are headed to market in both servers and the wider consumer space. AMD confirmed today that it would ship its Milan-X CPUs with up to 64MB of additional L3 cache per chiplet in Q1 2022. There are up to eight chiplets in a single Milan-X Epyc CPU, which means these new CPUs offer up to 512MB of additional L3 cache. Milan-X would be impressive for its stonkin’ huge L3 alone, but the fact that the cache is mounted vertically makes the project more interesting.
(Photo: Greg Bulla/Unsplash) By now we’ve all heard that Facebook is , with the hopes of building what it calls a Metaverse, where our avatars can interact with each other and hold meetings on top of mountains. To get there though, people are going to need VR and AR hardware, and there’s the rub; most people don’t own any VR gear. Facebook is hoping to change that, however, by launching a string of retail outlets to give people the chance to try it themselves. According to the , which looked at some of the planning documents and spoke with people with knowledge about the plans, the company envisions a global chain of stores showcasing the company’s latest hardware, including its Quest VR headsets, Portal teleconferencing system, and possibly even sunglasses from Ray-Ban that can capture video and photos.
Intel will reportedly pay VIA $125 million for some unspecified assets related to Centaur Technology. It’s been implied that the payment may be for the right to recruit Centaur Technology engineers to join Intel. Details are murky at best right now. Intel and AMD dominate the headlines today and have for many years, but there was a third x86 player, once upon a time. While VIA and its subsidiary, Centaur, never held more than a single-digit share of the overall CPU market, there was a time when the company’s small, power-efficient cores commanded market share in the ultra-efficient, ultra-silent PC market.
Stop me if this sounds familiar; NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is experiencing difficulties that caused it to fall back to safe mode last week. This is, of course, far from the first time Hubble has encountered a glitch. NASA just , and now it is again the aging observatory from the ground. Hubble reported an error on October 23rd due to a loss of data synchronization messages. Two days later, another batch of messages were lost, causing the instrument to enter safe mode. This is a safety feature intended to preserve data and prevent damage to the telescope while the team on Earth assesses the problem.
(Photo: Activision Blizzard)Activision Blizzard is pushing out production of Overwatch 2 and Diablo IV to afford its creative teams more time to develop both games. In what looks like a presentation slide by Axios reporter Stephen Totilo on Twitter, Blizzard states it’s “now planning for a later launch for Overwatch 2 and Diablo IV than originally envisaged.” Though the company has reportedly made great strides in wrapping up the games, the extra time will allow its teams to “continue growing their creative resources to support the titles after launch.” Blizzard admits this will impact the financial boost it expected to see in 2022.
Gamers hoping to score an RTX 30-Series GPU have so far had to battle with bots, miners, and scalpers in their quest to buy a new GPU, and now we can add one more enemy to the list: highway robbers. In a post on the EVGA forums, Product Manager Jacob Freeman that one of the company’s shipments of EVGA RTX 30-series graphics cards was recently stolen from a truck en route from San Francisco to its Southern California Distribution Center. We have no way of knowing if the entire truck’s contents were taken, or how many GPUs constitute a “shipment,” but it’s just another sign of the times that GPUs are so valuable people would pull off a seemingly brazen plan to snag a batch of them.
Verizon and AT&T were hoping to light up their new mid-band 5G networks in the coming weeks, but they might have to wait a bit longer. The C-band rollout was previously set for December 5th, but it will be January 5th, at the earliest. At issue is the potential interference with the safety systems of some aircraft. 5G connectivity in the US is in a rough place right now, and is seen as a major milestone in making 5G live up to the hype. Verizon and AT&T spent billions of dollars on the licenses for this spectrum recently because they’ve been trying to piece together a functional 5G network with scraps.
The moon is a big deal again. NASA is currently working toward a return to the lunar surface with the Artemis program and the (heavily delayed) Space Launch System rocket. Recently, the Australian Space Agency announced it would cooperate with NASA to send a rover to the moon in 2026, but a private Aussie rover . This robot, designed in cooperation with the University of Technology Sydney, will search for signs of water on the lunar surface, which could help support future exploration efforts. This will be a pint-sized rover with limited capabilities, but the designers have come up with some interesting gimmicks.
