(Photo: Pawel Czerwinski/Unsplash)New details from a pending lawsuit against Google reveals that the company deceived those involved in its advertising business for years, resulting in increased cash flow that Google then pocketed. This information follows a lawsuit filed by ten states back in December 2020, in which a handful of Republican attorneys general the tech giant for forming a monopoly around its web search and digital advertising services. The complaint pointed out that Facebook had emerged in 2017 as a viable Google competitor, and that Google had swiftly taken care of the potential rivalry by initiating a tradeoff: Facebook would scale back its competitive actions in return for preferential treatment in Google-run ad auctions.
Intel’s Extreme Memory Profiles, known simply as Intel XMP, has been a marketing advantage for Intel for many years, as it associates the company’s high-end processors with gamer-oriented high-performance RAM. While AMD supports XMP on Ryzen CPUs, the company is planning to push its own branded standard forward when DDR5 support arrives with its next-generation socket, AM5. This is not the first time AMD has done this (more on that later), but AMD’s Ryzen brand is in a much more competitive position now than it was in years past, so its chances at success this time around are arguably higher than they’ve ever been.
(Image: United States Patent and Trademark Office)Facebook (recently rebranded as Meta) has been granted a patent for a lifelike mechanical eye—a turn of events that can simultaneously be considered both unsettling and entirely unsurprising. The patent, granted in December and first by Insider, describes in great detail a robotic eye dubbed the “Two-Axis Mechanical Rotatable Eyeball.” The mechanical eye is set on two rotational axes that intersect at a center point and is powered by an external motor, which may or may not exist inside a creepy animatronic head. The mechanical eye is eerily similar to a human eye both in volume and aesthetic design, which seems to be on purpose given Facebook’s intention to make the eye “appear authentic to an observer.
Microsoft didn’t start out as a gaming company, but it’s been 20 years since it launched the first Xbox and it’s only becoming a bigger part of the industry. With its recent acquisition of ZeniMax complete, Microsoft is scooping up another gaming heavyweight: Activision Blizzard. Microsoft says the $68.7 billion deal after Sony and Tencent. Bringing Activision Blizzard into the Microsoft family will give Redmond control of some of the most storied franchises in modern gaming, including Diablo, Call of Duty, Starcraft, and Warcraft. The deal also includes mobile developer King, which became part of Activision Blizzard in 2016.
Intel’s CEO Pat Gelsinger has released a holiday video celebrating his first year at the company. The video mostly thanks employees for a good year but there’s one particular remark that’s drawn a lot of attention. “Alder Lake. All of a sudden, boom! We are back in the game,” Gelsinger said. “AMD in the rearview mirror in clients and never again will they be in the windshield; we are just leading the market.” This is unlikely to be true and I suspect Gelsinger knows it. I don’t say that because I have any special or particular knowledge of how Zen 4 will compare against future Intel microarchitectures.
At CES this year Nvidia dropped a “one more thing” teaser at the end of its keynote address, revealing a “monster” GPU, the RTX 3090 Ti. The unveiling didn’t offer much in the way of specs aside from its 40 Teraflops of shader performance, and the fact that it had 24GB of GDDR6X memory running at 21Gb/s, which was already predicted. The presentation ended with the host saying, “tune in later this month for more details,” and now we have some: it’s probably delayed, like everything else that has chips, delivers fun, or is related to gaming in some way.
Humble Bundle appeared more than a decade ago with an interesting pitch: pay what you want for a bundle of DRM-free games, but the more you paid, the more games you got. Over time, the site has tweaked its offerings and rolled out a subscription option to deliver new games every month. However, Humble Bundle has announced a change to the subscription that some gamers won’t like. It’s simplifying its subscription offerings and rolling out a new launcher, but that launcher is Windows-only. Linux and macOS customers only have a few weeks to download their purchased games before they’re no longer accessible.
Sony might be building a few more PlayStation 4 consoles to help with the ongoing shortage, but Microsoft has opted for a different tactic. The company has ceased manufacturing the Xbox One (technically the Xbox One S) and is focusing all of its efforts on the Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X. A Farewell to Xbone This doesn’t appear to have been a recent decision. “To focus on production of Xbox Series X / S, we stopped production for all Xbox One consoles by the end of 2020,” Cindy Walker, the senior director of Xbox marketing, told .
PC sales had been on a decade-long decline, and then the COVID-19 pandemic happened. PC sales spiked in 2020 as the world adjusted to a new reality, and the numbers from 2021 show . Recent reports from , , and show double-digit growth last year, and analysts now believe the pumped-up PC market will last for at least a few more years regardless of what happens with COVID-19. The primary driver of the PC’s resurgence is undoubtedly the pandemic. More people than ever are working and attending classes from home, and demand for PCs has kept up even as businesses and schools attempt to reopen.
