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Late last summer, Earth picked up a new moon. No, you didn’t just miss seeing it in the night sky — this was a so-called “minimoon.” Earth’s gravity occasionally snags passing space rocks, holding them in irregular orbits before they fly off. With the object known as 2020 SO, it was more of a homecoming. Scientists confirmed 2020 SO was actually a discarded rocket booster from the 1960s, but it’s not here to stay. According to astronomers, Earth’s latest artificial satellite as it prepares to zip off into the inky blackness of space. Calling it a minimoon might seem a bit misleading, but the accepted definition doesn’t require the object to be naturally occurring.
We’re starting to see some numbers attached to the ongoing semiconductor shortage and accompanying predictions for how much of a drag the issue might be in 2021. Current predictions suggest automakers could lose some $61B in sales worldwide. Discussions between the auto industry and its chip manufacturing partners also sound as if they could be going better. At first glance, a sales reduction of that magnitude doesn’t sound like much. The top 10 auto manufacturers on Earth collectively earn about $1.63T in revenue per year. $61B isn’t much, by comparison, objectively speaking. The coronavirus hit the automotive industry pretty hard in 2020, however, and even though sales recovered more strongly than expected in the back half of the year, automakers across the world saw their sales fall by 10-20 percent year-on-year.
AMD reported its Q4 2020 earnings earlier this week, as well as full-year revenue results. One of the topics the company covered during the call was the ongoing hardware shortage in CPUs, GPUs, and gaming consoles. We want to say upfront that AMD had an excellent 2020, with full-year sales of $9.76B, up 45 percent from $6.73B the year before. AMD delivered record earnings in both client and server, with data center now comprising a “high teens percentage” of AMD’s total revenue. Assume 18 percent, and that’s $1.76B in data center revenue for the year. We’re going to talk about the shortage issue in this story, but it’s in the context of a very strong year for AMD.
Need to escape the real world for a bit? Gaming is a great way to have fun while staying safer at home, and whether you’re a big fan of the PS5, , and Nintendo Switch, there are plenty of awesome accessories you can snag in order to improve your gaming experience. Want more time playing your Nintendo Switch without being plugged in? The Nintendo Switch Battery Charger Case gives you double the playtime thanks to its battery pack, which allows for uninterrupted charging while you play thanks to 10,000mAh of power via an integrated USB-C PD port.
Smartphone charging technology has improved dramatically in the last few years with some phones sucking down 65W of power or more. Xiaomi has been one of the companies to push both wired and wireless charging speeds, and now it says you don’t need wires at all. The company’s Mi Air Charge technology can allegedly even while it’s in your pocket. Or so Xiaomi claims — we don’t know for sure because Mi Air Charge is just a tech demo right now. Many of the devices we use on a daily basis are limited because of battery capacity. So, the ability to remotely power things without wires could be a transformative technology.
The potential discovery of phosphine in Venus’s atmosphere last year made headlines around the world. On Earth, phosphine is produced by living things. Any detection of it inside another planet’s atmosphere would be a strong potential indicator of life. One reason folks got excited about the possibility is that Venus’s upper atmosphere is a much friendlier place for life to exist than its lower cloud layers or the lead-melting temperatures on the ground. The conditions approximately 50km above the planet’s surface are reportedly the most Earthlike in the solar system, with a pressure of approximately 1 atm and temperatures ranging from 0 to 50C.
Another weekend is here, and we are just one week away from the biggest football game of the year. Get ready for the big game this year by purchasing a new high-quality 65-inch TV and enjoy the game in both 4K HD and with exceptional color. Vizio’s M65Q8-H1 TV is a offers a strong feature set relative to its price. The TV comes with built-in support for localized dimming zones. There are 90 of these zones in total, which enables the TV to darken or brighten different portions of the screen to produce deeper blacks and brighter colors in separate parts of the screen at the same time.
Intel is finally back in the desktop graphics business, at least if you squint. The company has announced a partnership with certain PC OEMs to bring DG1 silicon to specific pre-built systems. This isn’t exactly a full-on desktop graphics launch — that’ll come later in 2021 with the launch of DB2 — but Intel is still indisputably shipping at least a handful of discrete GPUs in the low end of the desktop market, for the first time in more than 20 years. The company announced it had partnered with “two ecosystem partners, including Asus” in its initial PR, but LegitReviews the GPU featured in the image above is manufactured by Colorful.
