Author name: Shannon Garcia

the-motorola-edge-2024-comes-to-the-us-for-$550

The Motorola Edge 2024 comes to the US for $550

Tech / /

Fix your update plan —

Motorola’s Pixel 8a fighter is headed to a carrier store near you.

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  • The Motorola Edge 2024.

    Motorola

  • Some companies are still making curved screens.

    Motorola

  • The bottom, which just features a sim tray, speaker, and USB-C port.

    Motorola

  • The top.

    Motorola

  • The side.

    Motorola

Motorola’s newest phone is the Motorola Edge 2024. This is a mid-range phone with the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 2. It costs $550 and will be in stores June 20. Every Motorola phone nowadays looks exactly the same, but Motorola assures us this is new.

The Snapdragon 7s Gen 2 is the bottom of Qualcomm’s “7 series” lineup and features four Cortex-A78 cores and four Cortex-A55 cores built on a 4 nm manufacturing process. The phone has a 144 Hz, 6.6-inch 2400×1080 OLED panel with curved sides. It has 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, a 5000 mAh battery, 68 W wired charging, and 15 W wireless charging. Cameras include a mid-range 50 MP Sony “LYTIA” 700C, 13 MP wide-angle, and a 32 MP front camera. The phone has NFC, Wi-Fi 6E, an in-screen fingerprint reader, and—a big addition compared to other Motorola devices—an IP68 rating for dust and water resistance.

Just like on the Moto G Stylus, this phone has a “vegan leather” back option that should be softer than the usual plastic, but it’s still plastic. Unlike that phone, there’s no headphone jack or MicroSD slot. A customizable hardware button on the left side of the phone lets you open the Google Assistant or whatever other app you choose.

Motorola doesn’t officially list the update plan on its site, but the 2023 Motorola Edge has a whopping one OS update and three years of security updates. We’ve asked Motorola if that changed and will update this article if we hear back. This is usually a major downside of Motorola devices. And speaking of updates, the $550 price tag makes this Motorola’s alternative to the $500 Google Pixel 8a, which is getting seven years of OS and security updates. The Pixel is a smaller device (6.1 inches) with a smaller battery (4482 mAh) and less storage (128GB), but the Pixel’s better software, faster SoC, and dramatically longer update plan make it easy to choose over the Motorola.

The phone will land at Amazon, Best Buy, and motorola.com on June 20, with “subsequent availability” at carrier stores like “T-Mobile, Metro by T-Mobile, Spectrum, Consumer Cellular, and on Straight Talk, Total By Verizon, and Visible.”

The Motorola Edge 2024 comes to the US for $550 Read More »

countdown-begins-for-third-try-launching-boeing’s-starliner-crew-capsule

Countdown begins for third try launching Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule

atlas v, Boeing, commercial crew, human spaceflight, international space station, launch, NASA, Science, Space, starliner, united launch alliance / /

Going today? —

Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have been in prelaunch quarantine for six weeks.

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Astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, wearing their Boeing spacesuits, leave NASA's crew quarters during a launch attempt May 6.

Enlarge / Astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, wearing their Boeing spacesuits, leave NASA’s crew quarters during a launch attempt May 6.

Fresh off repairs at the launch pad in Florida, United Launch Alliance engineers restarted the countdown overnight for the third attempt to send an Atlas V rocket and Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft on a test flight to the International Space Station.

NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were expected to awake early Wednesday, put on their blue pressure suits, and head to the launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station to board the Starliner capsule on top of the 172-foot-tall Atlas V rocket.

Once more through the door

Wilmore and Williams have done this twice before in hopes of launching into space on the first crew flight of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft. A faulty valve on the Atlas V rocket prevented liftoff May 6, then engineers discovered a helium leak on the Starliner capsule itself. After several weeks of troubleshooting, NASA and Boeing officials decided to proceed with another launch attempt Saturday.

Everything seemed to be coming together for Boeing’s long-delayed crew test flight until a computer problem triggered an automatic hold in the countdown less than four minutes before liftoff. Technicians from United Launch Alliance (ULA), the Atlas V rocket’s builder and operator, traced the problem to a failed power distribution source connected to a ground computer responsible for controlling the final phase of the countdown.

The instantaneous launch opportunity Wednesday is set for 10: 52 am EDT (14: 52 UTC), when the launch site at Cape Canaveral passes underneath the space station’s orbital plane. Forecasters predict a 90 percent chance of good weather for launch. You can watch NASA’s live coverage in the video embedded below.

The countdown began late Tuesday night with the power-up of the Atlas V rocket, which was set to be filled with cryogenic liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants around 5 am EDT (09: 00 UTC). Kerosene fuel was loaded into the Atlas V’s first-stage booster prior to the mission’s first launch attempt in early May.

The two Starliner astronauts departed crew quarters at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center for the 20-minute drive to the launch pad, where they arrived shortly before 8 am EDT (12: 00 UTC) to climb into their seats inside the Starliner capsule. After pressure checks of the astronauts’ suits and Starliner’s crew cabin, ground teams will evacuate the pad about an hour before launch.

Assuming all systems are “go” for launch, the Atlas V will ignite its Russian-made RD-180 main engine and two solid-fueled boosters to vault away from Cape Canaveral and head northeast over the Atlantic Ocean. Wilmore and Williams will be not only the first people to fly in space on Boeing’s Starliner, but also the first astronauts to ride on an Atlas V rocket, which has flown 99 times before with satellites for the US military, NASA, and commercial customers.

The rocket’s Centaur upper stage will deploy Starliner into space around 15 minutes after liftoff. A critical burn by Starliner’s engines will happen around 31 minutes into the flight to finish the task of placing it into low-Earth orbit, setting it up for an automated docking at the International Space Station at 12: 15 pm EDT (16: 15 UTC) Thursday.

The two-person crew will stay on the station for at least a week, although a mission extension is likely if the mission is going well. Officials may decide to extend the mission to complete more tests or to wait for optimal weather conditions at Starliner’s primary and backup landing sites in New Mexico and Arizona. When weather conditions look favorable, Starliner will undock from the space station and head for landing under parachutes.

The crew test flight is a prerequisite to Boeing’s crew capsule becoming operational for NASA, which awarded multibillion-dollar commercial crew contracts to Boeing and SpaceX in 2014. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon started flying astronauts in 2020, while Boeing’s project has been stricken by years of delays.

Wilmore and Williams, both former US Navy test pilots, will take over manual control of Starliner at several points during the test flight. They will evaluate the spacecraft’s flying characteristics and accommodations for future flights, which will carry four astronauts at a time rather than two.

“The expectation from the media should not be perfection,” Wilmore told Ars earlier this year. “This is a test flight. Flying and operating in space is hard. It’s really hard, and we’re going to find some stuff. That’s expected. It’s the first flight where we are integrating the full capabilities of this spacecraft.”

Countdown begins for third try launching Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule Read More »

new-trailer-for-alien:-romulus-just-wants-to-give-us-a-big,-warm-face-hug

New trailer for Alien: Romulus just wants to give us a big, warm face-hug

20th Century Studios, Alien: Romulus, culture, Entertainment, film trailers, xenopmorphs / /

No one can hear you scream —

Beware abandoned space stations “haunted” by xenomorphs.

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Director Fede Alvarez promises to bring the sci-fi franchise back to its horror roots with Alien: Romulus.

We got our first look at Alien: Romulus, the ninth installment in the sci-fi franchise, in March with a brief teaser. That footage showed promise that horror director Fede Alvarez (Don’t Breathe, Evil Dead) could fulfill his intention to bring this standalone film back to the franchise’s stripped-down space horror roots. Now we have the full trailer, and we’re pretty confident he’s kept that promise. It looks as gory, intense, and delightfully terrifying as the seminal first two films in the franchise.

(Spoilers for Alien and Aliens below.)

As previously reported, Alien: Romulus is set between the events of Alien and Aliens (and is not related to FX/Hulu’s Alien prequel series slated to premiere next year). That is, after Ellen Ripley, the sole survivor of the Nostromo, destroyed the killer xenomorph and launched herself into space in the ship’s lifeboat—along with the ginger cat, Jonesy—and before she woke up after 57 years in hypersleep and battled more xenomorphs while protecting the young orphan, Newt (Carrie Henn). Per the short-and-sweet official premise: “While scavenging the deep ends of a derelict space station, a group of young space colonizers come face to face with the most terrifying life form in the universe.”

Cailee Spaeny (Priscilla, Pacific Rim: Uprising) stars as Rain Carradine, Isabela Merced (The Last of Us) plays Kay, and David Jonsson (Murder Is Easy) plays Andy. Archie Renaux (Shadow and Bone) plays Tyler, Spike Fearn (Aftersun) plays Bjorn, and Aileen Wu plays Navarro. But we aren’t likely to see iconic badass Ellen Ripley (immortalized by Sigourney Weaver) in the film. At this point in the timeline, she’s in the middle of her 57-year stasis with Jonesy as her escape shuttle travels through space toward her fateful encounter with a xenomorph queen.

The teaser offered little more than panicked calls for help (“Get it away from me!”), piercing screams, and a shot of a gore-spattered wall, along with a few frenetic shots of panicked crew members fleeing the alien xenomorph that is no doubt delighted to have fresh hosts in which to hatch its deadly offspring. There was also some special footage screened at CinemaCon in April featuring the expected face-huggers and chest-bursters.

The new trailer opens with ominous heavy footsteps (which punctuate the footage throughout) as Tyler asks Rain if this is really where she wants to spend the rest of her life. It’s unclear which place “this” refers to, but Rain definitely wants to escape, and Tyler has found what he claims is their “only ticket out of here”: becoming space colonizers, one presumes.

Cue the spooky “haunted house in space” vibes as Rain, Tyler, and their fellow colonists explore the aforementioned derelict space station—and get far more than they bargained for, including being attacked by face huggers. We also get a shot of Navarro’s horror as a chest-burster hammers against her rib cage. Kudos to whoever edited this trailer to remove the sound for the final 30 seconds, right after lettering spells out the classic tagline (“In space, no one can hear you scream”). It makes Rain’s final quiet line (“Are you sure you wanna do this?”) and the sudden burst of screaming at the end that much more effective.

Alien: Romulus hits theaters on August 16, 2024.

20th Century Studios

Listing image by 20th Century Studios

New trailer for Alien: Romulus just wants to give us a big, warm face-hug Read More »

the-2024-subaru-solterra-is-nimble-but-sorely-lacks-range,-personality

The 2024 Subaru Solterra is nimble but sorely lacks range, personality

car review, Cars, Subaru, Subaru Solterra, Toyota bZ4x / /

how about an electric Baja —

Slow charging and inefficient driving, Solterra is no electric WRX or Forester.

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A Subaru Solterra drives on a dirt road

Enlarge / With just 222 miles of range, you can’t venture far off-grid in the Subaru Solterra.

Subaru

Over the years, Subaru has generated a cult following in the US, making its name with all-wheel drive powertrains and a go-anywhere attitude. Cars like the rally-bred WRXes and STIs did a lot of work here, but lately, Subaru has seemed to go in the opposite direction, phasing out fun drives like the STI lineup in favor of volume-movers like the Ascent and bloated versions of existing models such as the Subaru Wilderness editions.

Its first electric vehicle is perhaps even less in character. The $44,995 Solterra is the result of an ongoing partnership with Toyota and was developed together with the bZ4X. Unlike the Toyota, there’s no single-motor option for the Solterra. It’s all-wheel-drive only, with a pair of identical 107 hp (80 kW) permanent magnet electric motors, one for each axle. That means you can do some, but not all, of the off-road things you’d expect to do with a Subaru.

Looks are deceiving

At first glance, the Solterra looks like the edgy, tech-leaning offspring of a Crosstrek and an Impreza wagon. The 8.3 inches of ground clearance is slightly less than the Outback or Forester, while the Solterra comes in at 184.6 inches (4,689 mm) in length, placing it squarely in the middle of the brand’s stable. It’s a rather compact SUV, even more so when you try to get comfortable in the cockpit. My short frame was cramped, and anyone taller than me won’t feel welcome on long drives.

The large multifunction steering wheel can obscure the small instrument display in front of the driver.

Enlarge / The large multifunction steering wheel can obscure the small instrument display in front of the driver.

Subaru

In what seems to be the norm with Subaru these days, the interior is full of plastic and cloth. Even on this top-line Touring trim test car, which comes in at just under $55,000, there’s a very cheap-looking dash with a plethora of rigid lines. Controls are close by, but the overall layout is borderline infuriating, with slow response times through the central infotainment system and a driver alert system that beeped and shrieked every 20 seconds for one reason or another. There were so many driver warnings and advisories popping up that I eventually tuned them out, which is probably not the intended effect.

Range Non-Rover

There’s about five miles (8 km) of charging difference between the 228-mile (367 km) Premium trim level and the Limited and Touring trims, which have an EPA range of 222 miles (357 km) on a single charge of the 72.8 kWh lithium-ion battery. In my 10 days with the car, the only time I eclipsed 200 miles (321 km) was leaving my driveway with the range reading 201. After about 10 minutes, it slumped back under 200 miles. In fairly normal city and highway conditions, I realized around 180 miles of range (290 km). When the weather called for air conditioning, I lost another 5–7 miles (8–11 km).

  • The Solterra is 184.6 inches (4,689 mm) long, 73.2 inches (1,859 mm) wide, 65 inches (1,651 mm) tall, with a 112.2-inch (2,850 mm) wheelbase. It has a curb weight of between 4,365 and 4,505 lbs (1,980–2,043 kg) depending on trim level.

    Subaru

  • The Toyota-developed infotainment system can be laggy.

    Subaru

  • The back seat has 35.5 inches (902 mm) of rear legroom.

    Subaru

  • There’s 27.7 cubic feet (783 L) of cargo volume with the rear seats in use and the cover in place.

    Subaru

  • Wireless device charging, as well as wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, are available in the Limited and Touring trims.

    Subaru

Charging is slow, however. A stop to recharge from about 20 to 80 percent state of charge took the better part of 45 minutes. At launch, the Solterra was rated at an even longer 56 minutes to DC fast-charge to 80 percent, but for model year 2024, Subaru says that in ideal conditions, this should now be as quick as 35 minutes.

Charging at home was an overnight endeavor—nine hours on a level 2 charger. The Solterra currently features a CCS1 charge port, but in 2025, the company will adopt the J3400 standard, with adapters made available to existing customers so they can charge at Tesla Supercharger sites.

The 2024 Subaru Solterra is nimble but sorely lacks range, personality Read More »

spotify-raising-prices-by-up-to-$3-as-frustrated-subs-beg-it-to-“just-do-music”

Spotify raising prices by up to $3 as frustrated subs beg it to “just do music”

Spotify, streaming, Tech / /

As high as $20/month —

Spotify last raised prices in July 2023.

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Spotify raising prices by up to $3 as frustrated subs beg it to “just do music”

After keeping Spotify Premium subscription pricing flat since debuting it in 2011, Spotify increased monthly pricing in July 2023 and will do so again in July 2024, it announced today.

Individual monthly subscriptions will increase from $11 per month to $12/month. Family plans, which support up to six members, will go from $17/month to $20/month. Duo plans, for two accounts, are rising from $15/month to $17/month. Spotify didn’t announce pricing changes for its Student ($6/month) or free plans.

Spotify said it’s increasing prices so that it can “continue to invest in and innovate on our product features and bring users the best experience.”

It said it would email subscribers directly “over the next month” about the changes. The message that Spotify said it will send to subscribers will include a link to the account page, where subscribers can cancel their subscription if desired, as well as the support site for asking questions.

“Just do music”

Spotify went 12 years without changing subscription prices, but now it’s doing it for a second time in about a year.

In July 2023, monthly pricing for Spotify’s Premium plan for individual users went from $10 to $11. Duo pricing went from $13 to $15, and the Family and Student plans also each increased by $1 per month. However, these sweeping pricing changes occurred at a time when rivals, like Tidal, were making similar changes. And as Spotify’s first price hike ever, it seemed more digestible.

The second price hike comes as Spotify seeks its first year of profitability. These efforts have included attempts to diversify revenue by expanding from Spotify’s traditional music-streaming service to include things like podcasts, which Spotify has reportedly invested over $1 billion in, and audiobooks, a newer business for Spotify that it fueled with a $123 million Findaway acquisition. Meanwhile, Spotify has been working on adding high-fidelity audio to its service since 2021.

Some subscribers would rather see predictable pricing than new endeavors. For example, a reported user going by “ccolburn” on Spotify’s online forum reacted to this news with a post titled, “I only want music only! Stop increasing the prices to justify adding things I don’t want!“:

I DONT want podcast in my music app. … I dont want audio books when I want music. I also dont wanna pay more for the same service. JUST DO MUSIC!!!! [sic]

Apparent subscribers have shared similar sentiments elsewhere online, like on Reddit, where “crazytalk151” recently wrote:

Can you just do music and stop with all the other crap? No I dont want your shit podcasts or audio books. Just music and the same price. Whats the best alternative? [sic]

A tightrope

But like with many subscription price hikes among streaming services, Spotify’s growing prices are tied to profitability goals. Despite having profitable quarters, the 18-year-old company hasn’t reported a profitable year.

In its Q1 2024 earnings report shared on April 23, Spotify recorded its highest quarterly profit ever, at 1 billion euros (about $1.08 billion). The company noted price increases helping to boost the average revenue it sees per user. However, Spotify’s total monthly active users fell 3 million short of its 618 million user goal. The report also followed about 1,500 layoffs in December 2023.

During Spotify’s Q1 2024 earnings call, Spotify CEO and co-founder Daniel Ek called 2024 Spotify’s “year of monetization” and said the company would focus on “strong revenue growth and margin expansion” via “ambitious plans.” Ek didn’t announce price changes at the time but noted that Spotify often reviews its “value-to-price” ratio in relation to subscription prices, as Variety reported at the time.

Spotify stock opened 5.5 percent higher on news of subscription prices rising, The Wall Street Journal reported today. However, subscribers, who are generally getting increasingly fed up with ever-rising subscription prices, will likely be less impressed by the news.

The announcement of price changes follows Spotify’s recent decision this December to brick its Car Thing hardware after releasing it to the general public in February 2022. Spotify has given some users refunds if they can provide proof of purchase. However, some users online have reported problems with getting refunds due to things like the devices being linked to a third-party or unknown account, people owning multiple devices, or people reportedly being offered Spotify Premium credits initially instead. Spotify has previously declined to specify to Ars Technica the exact criteria required for receiving a full refund on Car Thing.

As Spotify tries to push toward profitability by raising prices and adding new endeavors and by distancing itself from old ones, it walks a tightrope in maintaining the type of customer satisfaction and trust that’ll keep people subscribing.

Spotify raising prices by up to $3 as frustrated subs beg it to “just do music” Read More »

ridiculous,-inventive-party-pack-sportsfriends-is-now-free-on-pc-and-playstation

Ridiculous, inventive party pack Sportsfriends is now free on PC and PlayStation

bennett foddy, gaming, sportsfriends / /

Good things for tough reasons —

Couch co-op collection lets you compete on the screen and in each other’s face.

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How well do you know your friends and family? Can you smack a 2010-era controller in their hands to win intangible points?

Enlarge / How well do you know your friends and family? Can you smack a 2010-era controller in their hands to win intangible points?

Die Gut Fabrik LLC

If there is any reason to head into your garage or attic and dig out that PlayStation Move controller, it’s Johann Sebastian Joust. Actually, there’s a second good reason: that game, and three others with the same spirit, are all free now on Steam for PlayStation, Windows, Mac, and Linux.

The reason and timing are unfortunate, as Die Gute Fabrik, the Danish developer collective behind Sportsfriends, can no longer support or update the 10-year-old game. But the group is doing the right thing, making the game free on all platforms, including Steam, transferring ownership of the game to Bennett Foddy (Getting Over It), and working to open-source a version of the JS Joust game for Linux so that perhaps it can be fit to work with other motion-sensitive controllers or through some other scheme.

Sportsfriends launch trailer.

Sportsfriends, previously described at Ars as a “stellar pack of multiplayer-only gems,” are four games meant for “couch co-op,” i.e. playing in the same room as other folks holding controllers (or glowing Move sticks, in the case of JS Joust). Each one is a little masterwork of clever design and hard to encapsulate briefly, but if you don’t have time for the deeper dive, here goes:

  • Super Pole Riders, by Bennett Foddy, has you use the left PlayStation stick for your feet, and the right stick to angle and pivot a vaulting pole, then attempt to knock a ball through a hoop to score points or knock an opponent off their pole. (There’s an early web version.)
  • Baribariball is a one-on-one or two-on-two Smash Brothers-like experience, but with more old-school arcade dynamics and in-air movement.
  • Hokra, a kind of soccer game with Atari-esque visuals and deceptively simple controls.
  • JS Joust, in which you try to not get your Move controller jostled while goading or physically nudging other players’ controllers, with your ability to move dictated by Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos.

Johann Sebastian Joust.

There are no solo versions of any of these games, and Joust does not work with Windows, because Windows does not support the Move controller. With any luck, this can be worked around. And while no controller may yet provide the kind of perfect combination of motion sensitivity and glowing colored orb that the Move controller does, opening Joust up to more hardware can only be beneficial. More people need to try to lightly assault their friends in the name of camaraderie.

Don't say they didn't warn you.

Don’t say they didn’t warn you.

Die Gut Fabrik LLC

Ridiculous, inventive party pack Sportsfriends is now free on PC and PlayStation Read More »

nvidia-jumps-ahead-of-itself-and-reveals-next-gen-“rubin”-ai-chips-in-keynote-tease

Nvidia jumps ahead of itself and reveals next-gen “Rubin” AI chips in keynote tease

AI, AI accelerators, Biz & IT, Blackwell, chatgpt, chatgtp, computex, GH200, GPU, GPUs, Grace Hopper Superchip, Jensen Huang, machine learning, NVIDIA, Nvidia Rubin, Taiwan, Vera CPU, Vera Rubin / /

Swing beat —

“I’m not sure yet whether I’m going to regret this,” says CEO Jensen Huang at Computex 2024.

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Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang delivers his keystone speech ahead of Computex 2024 in Taipei on June 2, 2024.

Enlarge / Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang delivers his keystone speech ahead of Computex 2024 in Taipei on June 2, 2024.

On Sunday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang reached beyond Blackwell and revealed the company’s next-generation AI-accelerating GPU platform during his keynote at Computex 2024 in Taiwan. Huang also detailed plans for an annual tick-tock-style upgrade cycle of its AI acceleration platforms, mentioning an upcoming Blackwell Ultra chip slated for 2025 and a subsequent platform called “Rubin” set for 2026.

Nvidia’s data center GPUs currently power a large majority of cloud-based AI models, such as ChatGPT, in both development (training) and deployment (inference) phases, and investors are keeping a close watch on the company, with expectations to keep that run going.

During the keynote, Huang seemed somewhat hesitant to make the Rubin announcement, perhaps wary of invoking the so-called Osborne effect, whereby a company’s premature announcement of the next iteration of a tech product eats into the current iteration’s sales. “This is the very first time that this next click as been made,” Huang said, holding up his presentation remote just before the Rubin announcement. “And I’m not sure yet whether I’m going to regret this or not.”

Nvidia Keynote at Computex 2023.

The Rubin AI platform, expected in 2026, will use HBM4 (a new form of high-bandwidth memory) and NVLink 6 Switch, operating at 3,600GBps. Following that launch, Nvidia will release a tick-tock iteration called “Rubin Ultra.” While Huang did not provide extensive specifications for the upcoming products, he promised cost and energy savings related to the new chipsets.

During the keynote, Huang also introduced a new ARM-based CPU called “Vera,” which will be featured on a new accelerator board called “Vera Rubin,” alongside one of the Rubin GPUs.

Much like Nvidia’s Grace Hopper architecture, which combines a “Grace” CPU and a “Hopper” GPU to pay tribute to the pioneering computer scientist of the same name, Vera Rubin refers to Vera Florence Cooper Rubin (1928–2016), an American astronomer who made discoveries in the field of deep space astronomy. She is best known for her pioneering work on galaxy rotation rates, which provided strong evidence for the existence of dark matter.

A calculated risk

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang reveals the

Enlarge / Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang reveals the “Rubin” AI platform for the first time during his keynote at Computex 2024 on June 2, 2024.

Nvidia’s reveal of Rubin is not a surprise in the sense that most big tech companies are continuously working on follow-up products well in advance of release, but it’s notable because it comes just three months after the company revealed Blackwell, which is barely out of the gate and not yet widely shipping.

At the moment, the company seems to be comfortable leapfrogging itself with new announcements and catching up later; Nvidia just announced that its GH200 Grace Hopper “Superchip,” unveiled one year ago at Computex 2023, is now in full production.

With Nvidia stock rising and the company possessing an estimated 70–95 percent of the data center GPU market share, the Rubin reveal is a calculated risk that seems to come from a place of confidence. That confidence could turn out to be misplaced if a so-called “AI bubble” pops or if Nvidia misjudges the capabilities of its competitors. The announcement may also stem from pressure to continue Nvidia’s astronomical growth in market cap with nonstop promises of improving technology.

Accordingly, Huang has been eager to showcase the company’s plans to continue pushing silicon fabrication tech to its limits and widely broadcast that Nvidia plans to keep releasing new AI chips at a steady cadence.

“Our company has a one-year rhythm. Our basic philosophy is very simple: build the entire data center scale, disaggregate and sell to you parts on a one-year rhythm, and we push everything to technology limits,” Huang said during Sunday’s Computex keynote.

Despite Nvidia’s recent market performance, the company’s run may not continue indefinitely. With ample money pouring into the data center AI space, Nvidia isn’t alone in developing accelerator chips. Competitors like AMD (with the Instinct series) and Intel (with Guadi 3) also want to win a slice of the data center GPU market away from Nvidia’s current command of the AI-accelerator space. And OpenAI’s Sam Altman is trying to encourage diversified production of GPU hardware that will power the company’s next generation of AI models in the years ahead.

Nvidia jumps ahead of itself and reveals next-gen “Rubin” AI chips in keynote tease Read More »

amd-intros-ryzen-ai-300-chips-with-zen-5,-better-gpu,-and-hugely-improved-npu

AMD intros Ryzen AI 300 chips with Zen 5, better GPU, and hugely improved NPU

AMD, ryzen ai, ryzen ai 300, Tech, zen 5, zen 5c / /

ai everywhere —

High-end Ryzen laptop chips combine big and little Zen cores for the first time.

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  • AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 series is its next-gen laptop platform, and the first to support Copilot+ PC features.

    AMD

  • Ryzen AI 300 uses a new CPU architecture, a revamped NPU, and a tweaked GPU architecture that AMD hasn’t said much about.

    AMD

  • Only two high-end processors will be available by July, though others will surely follow.

    AMD

  • How AMD’s new laptop CPU naming scheme applies to Ryzen AI 300.

    AMD

AMD’s next-generation laptop processors are coming later this year, joining new Ryzen 9000 desktop processors and ushering in yet another revamp to the way AMD does laptop CPU model numbers.

But the big thing the company wants to push is the new chips’ performance in generative AI and machine-learning workloads—it’s putting “Ryzen AI” right in the name and emphasizing the presence of an improved neural processing unit (NPU) that meets and exceeds Microsoft’s performance requirements for Copilot+ PCs. The new Ryzen AI 300-series, codenamed Strix Point, succeeds the Ryzen 8040 chips from earlier this year, which were themselves a relatively mild refresh for the Ryzen 7040 processors less than a year before.

AMD promises performance of up to 50 trillion operations per second (TOPS) with its new third-generation NPU, a significant boost from the 10 to 16 TOPS offered by Ryzen 7000 and 8000 processors with NPUs. This would make it faster than the 45 TOPS offered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus in the first wave of Copilot+ compatible PCs, and also Intel’s projected performance for its next-generation Core Ultra chips, codenamed Lunar Lake. All exceed Microsoft’s Copilot+ requirement of 40 TOPS, which enables some Windows 11 features that aren’t normally available on typical PCs. Copilot+ PCs can do more AI processing locally on device rather than relying on the cloud, potentially improving performance and giving users more privacy.

If you don’t particularly care about generative AI, locally executed or otherwise, the Ryzen AI 300 processors also come with an updated CPU based on the same Zen 5 architecture as the desktop chips, plus an “RDNA 3.5” integrated GPU to boost gaming performance for thin-and-light systems that can’t fit a dedicated graphics processor. The chips are being manufactured on a TSMC N4 process.

  • AMD is mostly talking about the performance of the new NPU, which at least according to AMD should slightly outperform offerings from Qualcomm and Intel.

    AMD

  • The new integrated GPUs stack up well against Intel’s current Arc GPUs, though how they perform against next-gen Lunar Lake-based chips is anyone’s guess.

    AMD

AMD is announcing two chips today, both in the high-end Ryzen 9 series. The Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 includes 12 CPU cores and 16 GPU cores, up from a maximum of eight CPU cores and 12 GPU cores for the Ryzen 8040 series. The Ryzen AI 9 365 steps down to 10 CPU cores and 12 GPU cores. Both have the same NPU onboard.

Though an increase in CPU core count suggests big improvements in multi-threaded performance, note that in both chips a majority of the CPU cores (8 in the 370, 6 in the 365) actually use the “Zen 5c” architecture, a variant of Zen 5 that supports the exact same instructions and features but is optimized for small size rather than high clock speeds. The result is essentially AMD’s version of one of Intel’s E-cores, though without the truly heterogeneous CPU architecture that has caused incompatibility problems with some apps and games.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a mix of big and small CPU cores from AMD, but it is the first time we’ve seen it at the high-end. Zen 4c cores only really showed up in lower-end, lower-power CPU designs in the Ryzen 3 and 5 and Ryzen Z1 families.

Perhaps tellingly, AMD offered no direct comparisons between the CPU performance of the Ryzen AI 300 chips and the Ryzen 8040 series, opting instead to compare to offerings from Intel, Qualcomm, and Apple. This certainly doesn’t mean performance has regressed generation over generation, but it is usually code for “this isn’t the kind of improvement we want to draw attention to.”

AMD also didn’t offer performance comparisons between the new Radeon 890M and 880M and the old Radeon 780M. The company said that the 890M was an average of 36 percent faster in a small selection of games compared to the Intel Arc integrated GPU in the Meteor Lake Core Ultra chips and 60 percent faster than the Snapdragon X Elite in the 3DMark Night Raid benchmark (this was part of a slide that was specifically highlighting the performance impact of translating x86 code on Arm chips, though for the time being it’s true that the vast majority of games running on Snapdragon PCs will have to deal with the overhead of code translation).

AMD says that the Ryzen AI chips are slated to appear in “100+ platforms from OEMs” starting in July 2024, a month or so after Microsoft and Qualcomm’s first wave of Snapdragon X-equipped Copilot+ PCs. Ryzen AI will also compete with Intel’s next-gen Lunar Lake chips, also due out sometime later this year.

Listing image by AMD

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Russia and China are using OpenAI tools to spread disinformation

AI, china, disinformation, misinformation, openai, russia, syndication / /

New tool —

Iran and Israel have been getting in on the action as well.

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OpenAI said it was committed to uncovering disinformation campaigns and was building its own AI-powered tools to make detection and analysis

Enlarge / OpenAI said it was committed to uncovering disinformation campaigns and was building its own AI-powered tools to make detection and analysis “more effective.”

FT montage/NurPhoto via Getty Images

OpenAI has revealed operations linked to Russia, China, Iran and Israel have been using its artificial intelligence tools to create and spread disinformation, as technology becomes a powerful weapon in information warfare in an election-heavy year.

The San Francisco-based maker of the ChatGPT chatbot said in a report on Thursday that five covert influence operations had used its AI models to generate text and images at a high volume, with fewer language errors than previously, as well as to generate comments or replies to their own posts. OpenAI’s policies prohibit the use of its models to deceive or mislead others.

The content focused on issues “including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the conflict in Gaza, the Indian elections, politics in Europe and the United States, and criticisms of the Chinese government by Chinese dissidents and foreign governments,” OpenAI said in the report.

The networks also used AI to enhance their own productivity, applying it to tasks such as debugging code or doing research into public social media activity, it said.

Social media platforms, including Meta and Google’s YouTube, have sought to clamp down on the proliferation of disinformation campaigns in the wake of Donald Trump’s 2016 win in the US presidential election when investigators found evidence that a Russian troll farm had sought to manipulate the vote.

Pressure is mounting on fast-growing AI companies such as OpenAI, as rapid advances in their technology mean it is cheaper and easier than ever for disinformation perpetrators to create realistic deepfakes and manipulate media and then spread that content in an automated fashion.

As about 2 billion people head to the polls this year, policymakers have urged the companies to introduce and enforce appropriate guardrails.

Ben Nimmo, principal investigator for intelligence and investigations at OpenAI, said on a call with reporters that the campaigns did not appear to have “meaningfully” boosted their engagement or reach as a result of using OpenAI’s models.

But, he added, “this is not the time for complacency. History shows that influence operations which spent years failing to get anywhere can suddenly break out if nobody’s looking for them.”

Microsoft-backed OpenAI said it was committed to uncovering such disinformation campaigns and was building its own AI-powered tools to make detection and analysis “more effective.” It added its safety systems already made it difficult for the perpetrators to operate, with its models refusing in multiple instances to generate the text or images asked for.

In the report, OpenAI revealed several well-known state-affiliated disinformation actors had been using its tools. These included a Russian operation, Doppelganger, which was first discovered in 2022 and typically attempts to undermine support for Ukraine, and a Chinese network known as Spamouflage, which pushes Beijing’s interests abroad. Both campaigns used its models to generate text or comment in multiple languages before posting on platforms such as Elon Musk’s X.

It flagged a previously unreported Russian operation, dubbed Bad Grammar, saying it used OpenAI models to debug code for running a Telegram bot and to create short, political comments in Russian and English that were then posted on messaging platform Telegram.

X and Telegram have been approached for comment.

It also said it had thwarted a pro-Israel disinformation-for-hire effort, allegedly run by a Tel Aviv-based political campaign management business called STOIC, which used its models to generate articles and comments on X and across Meta’s Instagram and Facebook.

Meta on Wednesday released a report stating it removed the STOIC content. The accounts linked to these operations were terminated by OpenAI.

Additional reporting by Cristina Criddle

© 2024 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved. Not to be redistributed, copied, or modified in any way.

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driverless-racing-is-real,-terrible,-and-strangely-exciting

Driverless racing is real, terrible, and strangely exciting

A2RL, Abu Dhabi, auto racing, autonomous cars, Autonomous Driving, Cars, Features / /

people showed up to watch —

The Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League proves it’s possible, just very hard.

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Several brightly colored race cars are parked at a race course

Enlarge / No one’s entirely sure if driverless racing will be any good to watch, but before we find that out, people have to actually develop driverless race cars. A2RL in Abu Dhabi is the latest step down that path.

A2RL

ABU DHABI—We live in a weird time for autonomous vehicles. Ambitions come and go, but genuinely autonomous cars are further off than solid-state vehicle batteries. Part of the problem with developing autonomous cars is that teaching road cars to take risks is unacceptable.

A race track, though, is a decent place to potentially crash a car. You can take risks there, with every brutal crunch becoming a learning exercise. (You’d be hard-pressed to find a top racing driver without a few wrecks smoldering in their junior career records.)

That’s why 10,000 people descended on the Yas Marina race track in Abu Dhabi to watch the first four-car driverless race.

Test lab

The organizers of the Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League (A2RL) event didn’t brief me on what to expect, so I wasn’t sure if we would see much car movement. Not because the project was likely to fail—it certainly had a lot of hardware and software engineering behind it, not to mention plenty of money. But creating a high-speed, high-maneuverability vehicle that makes its own choices is an immense challenge.

Just running a Super Formula car—the chassis modified for the series—is a big task for any race team, even with an expert driver in the cockpit. I was ready to be impressed if teams got out of the pit lane without the engine stalling.

But the cars did run. Lap times weren’t close to those of a human driver or competitive across the field, but the cars did repeatedly negotiate the track. Not every car was able to do quick laps, but the ones that did looked like actual race cars being driven on a race track. Even the size of the crashes showed that the teams were finding the confidence to begin pushing limits.

Each of these Dallara Super Formula cars has been modified by its team to operate without a human driver onboard or in control.

Enlarge / Each of these Dallara Super Formula cars has been modified by its team to operate without a human driver onboard or in control.

A2RL

Is it the future of motorsport? Probably not. But it was an interesting test lab. After a year of development, six weeks of code-jam crunch, 14 days of practice, and one event, teams are going home with suitcases full of data and lessons they can use next year.

The track and the cars

A2RL is one of three competitions being run by Aspire, the “technology transition pillar” of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council.

Yas is an artificial island built as a leisure attraction, housing theme parks and hotels alongside the circuit, with an influencer photo opportunity around every corner. The island was the focus of the Emirate restyling itself for tourism, and its facilities now play secondary host to another image makeover as a technology hub. An F1 track is now finding a second use as a testing lab, and it’s probably the only track in the region that could afford the kind of excess that two weeks of round-the-clock, floodlit, robotic testing represents.

Although the early ambition was to use Formula 1 cars to reflect Yas Marina’s purpose as a circuit, the cost compared to a Super Formula car was absurd. Plus, it would have required eight identical F1 chassis. Even in the days of unrestricted F1 budgets, few teams could afford that many chassis in a season.

So Aspire’s Technology Innovation Institute (TII) went to the manufacturer Dallara, which supplies almost every high-level single-seater chassis, including parts of some F1 cars, but also every IndyCar, Super Formula, Formula E, Formula 2, and Formula 3 car, plus a whole array of endurance prototypes. Dallara was also involved in the 2021 Indy Autonomous Challenge via the IndyNXT chassis.

TII in Abu Dhabi was also involved in the Indy Autonomous Challenge as part of a university’s team, so it got to see how the cars had been rapidly adapted to accommodate a robotic “driver.”

  • The computer that controls the driving and interprets the sensor stack, situated in the cockpit—almost like a human driver.

    Hazel Southwell

  • The Meccanica42 actuators that operate throttle, brake, and steering onboard the adjusted SF23 chassis.

    Hazel Southwell

  • L-R: The robotic array that sits lower in the car’s cockpit for the actuators to operate the car, and the computer that sits above it for maximum ventilation.

    Hazel Southwell

  • A look at one of the car’s sensor pods.

    A2RL

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google-cloud-explains-how-it-accidentally-deleted-a-customer-account

Google Cloud explains how it accidentally deleted a customer account

Google, Tech / /

Flubbing the input —

UniSuper’s 647,000 users faced two weeks of downtime because of a Google Cloud bug.

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Google Cloud explains how it accidentally deleted a customer account

Earlier this month, Google Cloud experienced one of its biggest blunders ever when UniSuper, a $135 billion Australian pension fund, had its Google Cloud account wiped out due to some kind of mistake on Google’s end. At the time, UniSuper indicated it had lost everything it had stored with Google, even its backups, and that caused two weeks of downtime for its 647,000 members. There were joint statements from the Google Cloud CEO and UniSuper CEO on the matter, a lot of apologies, and presumably a lot of worried customers who wondered if their retirement fund had disappeared.

In the immediate aftermath, the explanation we got was that “the disruption arose from an unprecedented sequence of events whereby an inadvertent misconfiguration during provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services ultimately resulted in the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription.” Two weeks later, Google Cloud’s internal review of the problem is finished, and the company has a blog post up detailing what happened.

Google has a “TL;DR” at the top of the post, and it sounds like a Google employee got an input wrong.

During the initial deployment of a Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) Private Cloud for the customer using an internal tool, there was an inadvertent misconfiguration of the GCVE service by Google operators due to leaving a parameter blank. This had the unintended and then unknown consequence of defaulting the customer’s GCVE Private Cloud to a fixed term, with automatic deletion at the end of that period. The incident trigger and the downstream system behavior have both been corrected to ensure that this cannot happen again.

The most shocking thing about Google’s blunder was the sudden and irreversible deletion of a customer account. Shouldn’t there be protections, notifications, and confirmations in place to never accidentally delete something? Google says there are, but those warnings are for a “customer-initiated deletion” and didn’t work when using the admin tool. Google says, “No customer notification was sent because the deletion was triggered as a result of a parameter being left blank by Google operators using the internal tool, and not due to a customer deletion request. Any customer-initiated deletion would have been preceded by a notification to the customer.”

During its many downtime updates, UniSuper indicated it did not have access to Google Cloud backups and had to dig into a third-party (presumably less up-to-date) store to get back up and running. In the frenzy of the recovery period, UniSuper said that “UniSuper had duplication in two geographies as a protection against outages and loss. However, when the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription occurred, it caused deletion across both of these geographies… UniSuper had backups in place with an additional service provider. These backups have minimized data loss, and significantly improved the ability of UniSuper and Google Cloud to complete the restoration.”

In its post-mortem, Google now says, “Data backups that were stored in Google Cloud Storage in the same region were not impacted by the deletion, and, along with third-party backup software, were instrumental in aiding the rapid restoration.” It’s hard to square these two statements, especially with the two-week recovery period. The goal of a backup is to be quickly restored; so either UniSuper’s backups didn’t get deleted and weren’t effective, leading to two weeks of downtime, or they would have been effective had they not been partially or completely wiped out.

Google stressed many times in the post that this issue affected a single customer, has never happened before, should never happen again, and is not a systemic problem with Google Cloud. Here’s the entire “remediation” section of the blog post:

Google Cloud has since taken several actions to ensure that this incident does not and can not occur again, including:

  1. We deprecated the internal tool that triggered this sequence of events. This aspect is now fully automated and controlled by customers via the user interface, even when specific capacity management is required.
  2. We scrubbed the system database and manually reviewed all GCVE Private Clouds to ensure that no other GCVE deployments are at risk.
  3. We corrected the system behavior that sets GCVE Private Clouds for deletion for such deployment workflows.

Google says Cloud still has “safeguards in place with a combination of soft delete, advance notification, and human-in-the-loop, as appropriate,” and it confirmed these safeguards all still work.

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The 2024 Chevrolet Equinox EV shows GM can make a car for the masses

Cars, Chevrolet Equinox EV, Ultium / /

it’s a commuter car —

GM’s latest Ultium-based EV is ready for the road.

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A blue Chevrolet Equinox EV on the street

Enlarge / Until the Bolt returns, this is Chevrolet’s entry-level electric car, the Equinox EV.

Michael Teo Van Runkle

A new entry-level EV from General Motors hits the market this year bearing the name Equinox, but other than nomenclature, this Chevy is not at all related to the current internal-combustion compact crossover. Instead, the new Equinox EV rides on the smallest iteration of GM’s Ultium platform until the Bolt reboots with a new (lithium iron phosphate) Ultium battery pack.

The Equinox EV shares its chassis with the forthcoming Cadillac Optiq but aims instead to hit the market as cheaply as possible and significantly undercut Tesla’s Model Y. Deliveries will start later this year with the LT trim level, which has a starting MSRP of $34,995. Eager to prove what it no doubt hopes will be the new cash-cow EV’s bona fides, Chevrolet invited media to Detroit to drive a fleet of Equinoxes in various trim levels.

On paper, the Equinox’s stats look fairly solid. A smallish 85 kWh battery is sufficient for an EPA range estimate of 319 miles (513 km) for the front-wheel-drive base model. Output for the single motor clocks in at a respectable 213 hp (159 kW) and 236 lb-ft (320 Nm) of torque. Perhaps the only downside appears to be a max DC fast-charging rate of 150 kW, though thanks to the battery’s overall capacity, the Equinox should still add 77 miles (124 km) of range in about 10 minutes.

  • Chevrolet brought along both RS (pictured) and LT trims of the Equinox EV.

    Michael Teo Van Runkle

  • The shape shares little with the gasoline-powered Equinox.

    Michael Teo Van Runkle

  • The Equinox EV is 191 inches (4,851 mm) long, 77 inches (1.956 mm) wide, and 65 inches (1,651 mm) tall.

    Michael Teo Van Runkle

  • The 3RS can be specced with a rather bold interior.

    Chevrolet

  • A look at the back seat. This stormtrooper-spec interior is available with the 3LT.

    Chevrolet

  • There’s 26.4 cubic feet (748 L) of storage space with the rear seats in use, or 57.2 cubic feet (1,620 L) with the rear seats folded flat.

    Chevrolet

What’s the single-motor version like on the road?

From behind the wheel, I expected the FWD Equinox’s less-than-overwhelming power figures to result in sluggish acceleration. Luckily, instantaneously available grunt can produce just enough pep to cause a bit of torque steer, and I kept up with traffic without concern. Harder pulls above 45 mph (72 km/h) seem blunted, though—perhaps to maximize range.

In typical Ultium fashion, the steering can be best described as vague-ish, which Chevy’s increasingly thick-rimmed steering wheels don’t exactly help. But the Equinox never tries to play at sports car ambitions. And on Detroit’s battered roadways, the suspension runs the full gamut from smooth to stiff, depending on speed and driving style.

Keep things easy, and the Equinox treads lightly. Push harder or shift the battery pack’s mass aggressively over two wheels (via acceleration, braking, or cornering) and the dampers appear to struggle a bit. Jumping between test vehicles all day, I noticed a difference between the 19-inch and optional 21-inch wheel-and-tire combos. Making the right choice will come down to desired performance and, really, what region customers live in and how the local roads fare.

This is not a car to hustle through the turns.

Enlarge / This is not a car to hustle through the turns.

Michael Teo Van Runkle

Real-world range matters most in a commuter car, and the Equinox performed admirably, if not as well as the Silverado fleet also on hand in Detroit. For one vehicle I tracked, I used 86 miles (138 km) of claimed range to drive 78 miles (126 km), with the air conditioning blasting on a hot day in a black car, and mostly at highway speeds, where larger EVs with upright profiles—and therefore a larger frontal area—tend to struggle.

The 2024 Chevrolet Equinox EV shows GM can make a car for the masses Read More »