It’s remarkable how tech just gets cheaper and cheaper while also becoming faster and better. Today you can get Acer’s newly updated Predator Helios 300 gaming laptop with one of Intel’s new Core i7-10750H processors for just $1,199.99. The system isn’t on sale, but it offers excellent performance for its price and it undercuts many competing systems including some of Acer’s more expensive gaming laptops. Acer’s Predator Helios 300 offers excellent gaming performance at a price that won’t break the bank. The system features several gaming enthusiast features including an RGB LED keyboard and a fast 144Hz 1080p display.
Back in 2005, Microsoft, Sony, and other game developers collectively decided the new standard price for a video game would rise, from $49.99 to $59.99. For the past 15 years, retailers have avoided punching through that number, even as inflation reduced its value in absolute terms. Now, 2K has raised the price of its upcoming NBA 2K21 to $69.99 for the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X. If you want to buy the game for both platforms, it’ll cost $99.99 for the “Mamba Edition” to do so. This could be an arguable . Adjusted for inflation, the price of a $59.99 game in 2005 should have risen to $77.84 already.
Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, creators of HBO’s hit Westworld, have announced they are collaborating with Amazon Prime to create a TV series around the Fallout video game franchise. According to Nolan and Joy, they intend to craft a show that showcases “[T]he harshness of the wasteland set against the previous generation’s utopian idea of a better world through nuclear energy.” On the plus side, Westworld has a lot of awards and acclaim. On the downside, there’s the depressing question of whether Bethesda understands what Fallout’s biggest fans loved about the series in the first place, and that quote doesn’t exactly fill me with hope.
A worldwide medical pandemic and social unrest is taking a serious bite out of most companies’ bottom lines. And while most Microsoft profits were largely unaffected by COVID-19 last quarter, one area that was changed was cloud operations arm Azure. They were up. In a big, big way. In fact, Azure saw , largely on the backs of organizations supercharging their efforts to push everything to the cloud. Now that the stampede to the cloud has intensified, it’s a prime opportunity for IT experts or fresh hungry newcomers to the business to be completely up to speed on Azure.
Over the past year, companies like Cerebras have for their use of wafer-scale processing. TSMC wants to grow this area of its business and plans to build out its InFO_SoW (Integrated Fan-Out Silicon on Wafer) technology in order to build supercomputer-class AI processors in the future. TSMC has already with Cerebras to build its wafer-scale processors, but the company has an eye on the broader market as well and believes wafer-scale processing will prove appealing to other customers beyond Cerebras. The company has stated it will build these chips on 16nm technology. Acronym Soup Understanding what TSMC is building here requires parsing more than few acronyms.
Step up your game with a high-end Dell Alienware desktop. Today you can save $200 on one of these edgy-looking systems; it comes equipped with a top-tier Ryzen 7 3700X processor and an Nvidia RTX 2060 Super graphics card. This Alienware desktop features an edgy, rounded design and powerful gaming hardware capable of running most current AAA titles with high graphics settings. In addition to looking cool, this system was also designed to provide improved airflow over the older Aurora desktops, which means the hardware inside will also run cooler as well. For a limited time with promo code 50OFF699, you can get this system from Dell marked down from $1,379.99 to $1,179.99.
Whether you’re playing video games on a PC, a mobile device or a console, the important point is that you’re playing. That’s music to the ears of an industry that’s one of the few reaping huge benefits from the state of the world in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Whether it’s video game powerhouse platform Steam in March or the explosion of , the appetite for gaming is only growing more ravenous. And that’s after last year. If you’ve got an awesome game idea, this is the time to strike — and you don’t even have to be a coder anymore either.
Celebrate this Independence Day with discounts on new high-end devices. Today you can get your hands on a Ring Video Doorbell cam for a mere $79.99. There’s also a 4K 43-inch Dell monitor that is available with hundreds cut off its retail price, and it comes with a bonus $100 gift card to make the deal all that much better. Dell engineered this model to be a large display with tons of desktop real estate. This makes it easier to multitask on multiple windows at the same time. The display also has a high 4K resolution and a USB-C port that doubles as both a video connection and a charging port for compatible notebooks.
Stars can do a lot of things. They can get warmer, expand, explode, and even collapse into a black hole. They can not, as a rule, simply disappear. However, that’s what appears to have happened to an ultra-bright star in the constellation Aquarius. Astronomers went looking for this well-known star in late 2019 only to find that it was missing. The team has , but this is a real head-scratcher. Astronomers studied this object in great detail between 2001 and 2011 because it’s no ordinary star. It is (or was?) a very rare type of ancient star called a massive luminous blue variable (LBV).
