A few years back, Tesla built a giant battery in southern Australia. Now, the company may be doing the same thing in Texas. The Australian battery has been hailed as a success since coming online, and someone in Texas has evidently had a similar idea. Bloomberg that the new battery installation will be larger than 100MW and will store enough power to provide 20,000 homes with an hour of electricity on a hot summer day. The facility is being built by Gambit Energy Storage LLC, but Gambit’s headquarters are listed at the same address as a Tesla building near its Fremont auto plant.
The best thing about ExtremeTech has always been you, our loyal readers–the ones that show up in the comments and keep the discussion going. We take pride in having one of the best comment sections on the Web. We always learn a lot from all of you. On Thursday, March 11, 2021, we’ll be upgrading our comments section to a new system called OpenWeb, the same one other Ziff Davis sites have been adopting across the board. OpenWeb has better AI-driven spam filtering and moderation tools. This new system also supports images, GIFs, and stylized text. As before, you’ll be able to like or dislike existing comments, reply in threads, and sort the comments by quality.
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The Nintendo Switch has proven extremely popular with gamers in large part because it’s portable. It’s a bit underpowered compared with the other game consoles, though. A Chinese startup aims to offer a Switch-style device with a lot more power and access to the multitude of games on Windows. The Aya Neo went on sale in China last year, and now the company has . This Ryzen-powered mini-computer won’t come cheap, though. At the heart of the Neo is an AMD Ryzen 5 4500U 7nm APU. This six-core processor runs at 2.3 GHz with boost clocks as high as 4.0 GHz.
Microsoft’s purchase of Bethesda has finally born the fruit most of us were expecting. In a blog post supposedly welcoming its new set of studios to the Microsoft family, Phil Spencer, head of Xbox, laid out the real news: With the addition of the Bethesda creative teams, gamers should know that Xbox consoles, PC, and Game Pass will be the best place to experience new Bethesda games, including some new titles in the future that will be exclusive to Xbox and PC players. Back in November, Microsoft tried to argue there was more nuance to . Tim Stuart, CFO of the Xbox division, was trotted out to make mouth noises implying that while console exclusives could happen, Microsoft was much more focused on making games better on Xbox than cutting off Nintendo or Sony players.
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Microsoft and Intel will be working with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop and implement fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) in hardware. A breakthrough in this field would have a profound impact on cybersecurity. The encryption schemes in use today all have a common weakness: decryption. You can encrypt data any way you like, but if you want to perform useful work with it, you have to decrypt it first. Homomorphic encryption removes this problem. Not only can you compute using encrypted data, but the output of your computation also remains encrypted. A fully homomorphic encryption scheme would be capable of performing all mathematical operations on any encrypted data without the need to decrypt it.
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Nvidia has won a lawsuit brought against it by multiple investors who claimed the company had deliberately and recklessly misrepresented the provenance of over a billion dollars in crypto-mining sales during the last boom in 2017-2018. To briefly recap: A few years ago, when cryptocurrency-related demand for GPUs was through the roof, Nvidia told investors that the bulk of the demand it was seeing was actually for gaming GPUs. The previous cryptocurrency boom of 2013-2014 had targeted AMD cards almost exclusively, so the idea that miners were still preferring GCN over Pascal had a certain credibility to it. Nvidia’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang dismissed the idea that cryptocurrency was having a significant impact on Nvidia sales at multiple points.
