The people making bank selling PlayStation 5’s, Xbox Series X, various types of footwear, and both Nvidia and AMD GPUs believe they’ve been misunderstood. If you think about it, scalpers are really just providing a service. They’re not parasites, they’re just economically savvy. Forbes recently to some of these charming go-getters to get their opinions on the recent console shortages. “There seems to be A LOT of bad press on this incredibly valuable industry and I do not feel that it is justified, all we are acting as is a middleman for limited-quantity items.” said one individual named Jordan, who co-founded a group known as the Lab.
Today you can get a Dell Alienware gaming desktop that’s marked down $over $300 and comes equipped with a powerful Intel Core i7 processor and an Nvidia RTX 3070 graphics card. Intel Core i7-10700F Gaming Desktop w/ Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070, 16GB DDR4 RAM and 512GB NVMe SDD for $1,799.99 from Dell (List price $2,209.99) 240Hz 1080p 27-Inch IPS Gaming Monitor + $50 Gift Card for $379.99 from Dell (List price $609.99) 4K HDR Media Player for $24.99 from Amazon (List price $39.99) If you’re looking for a gaming desktop, you can’t go wrong with one of Dell’s newly redesigned Alienware Aurora R11 PCs.
NASA’s Perseverance rover is set to touch down on Mars this week, and we had the opportunity to talk to one of the people who had a hand in bringing this mission to fruition. Adam Steltzner is the chief engineer of the Mars 2020 project at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and he designed the rover’s ambitious sample return system. He’s featured heavily in the upcoming Nat Geo documentary Built for Mars, which follows the twists and turns of getting this robot to the red planet. Our conversation below was lightly edited for clarity and length.
The ongoing power shortage across Texas has forced grid operators to take extraordinary steps to keep power flowing across the state. Multiple companies with fabs near Austin have been ordered to shut down completely, including Samsung, Infineon, and NXP. The largest immediate cause of the rolling blackouts and outages was Texas’ inability to provide sufficient natural gas for both electricity and heat. Frozen pipelines hindered electricity production across the state. There were also reports of some problems with frozen wind turbines and decreased power output from solar, but renewables provide a much smaller fraction of Texas’ total electricity than natural gas.
Google’s decision to kill Stadia’s game development and shut down its studio came as a surprise to everyone, especially its employees. A leaked email shows that that the VP of Stadia and general manager Phil Harrison sent an email on January 27 lauding everyone for the ‘great progress’ Stadia had made thus far. Five days later, Harrison announced Google would no longer be developing its own games, effective immediately. Kotaku that Harrison held a contentious conference call with Stadia developers several days later. When pressed to explain the difference in tone between his January 27 email and the Feb 1 announcement, Harrison admitted nothing had changed between those two dates.
Smartphones often focus on raw power and wacky gimmicks to stand out, and this is doubly true in the Asian smartphone market. Case in point: Chinese mobile giant Xiaomi is set to announce a new device called the Mi 11 Ultra, and the device has leaked early. It’s got a giant camera module that supports up to 120x zoom, and . Yes, a screen in the camera hump. Because why not, I guess? As Xiaomi’s new top-of-the-line, the M11 Ultra has the best hardware available to smartphone makers, including the Snapdragon 888 processor, a 1440p OLED measuring 6.8-inches, Gorilla Glass Victus, 67W charging (wired and wireless), and a 5,000 mAh battery.
When Nvidia declared its intention to buy ARM, it sent shockwaves through the entire ecosystem. In the PC world, if you buy an x86 processor, you buy it from Intel and AMD. In the ARM ecosystem, in contrast, there are a wide number of vendors who manufacture, design, and sell ARM processors. Google, Microsoft, and Qualcomm are particularly concerned about the acquisition, and one of them is said to openly oppose it. Bloomberg reports that all three companies have requested that antitrust officials intervene to prevent the purchase, but not which one wants to kill the deal. Other companies potentially affected by Nvidia’s decision to buy ARM are Apple, Samsung, MediaTek, Huawei, and pretty much anyone who ever shipped an ARM core in the past few years.
Early on Thursday, a group of US chip designers and manufacturers sent a letter to the White House, asking that the government include “substantial funding for incentives for semiconductor manufacturing” as part of the overall COVID-19 economic recovery plan. The Biden Administration has now pledged to take action to help remedy the situation by “identifying choke points in supply chains.” President Biden will sign an executive order directing a government-wide review of supply chains for critical goods. Both the request and the Biden Administration’s response are . There is no practical way that any action taken by the Biden Administration is going to have a near-term impact on silicon supplies.
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