On Tuesday's fourth-quarter earnings call, Snapchat maker Snap revealed that its future AR glasses will be powered by generative AI technology. TechCrunch reports: Social media company and Snapchat maker Snap has for years defined itself as a "camera company," despite its failures to turn its photo-and-video recording glasses known as Spectacles into a mass-market product and, more recently, its decision to kill off its camera-equipped drone. [...] Snap CEO Evan Spiegel agreed that, in the near term, there were a lot of opportunities to use generative AI to make Snap's camera more powerful. However, he noted that further down the road, AI would be critical to the growth of augmented reality, including AR glasses.

The exec said that, initially, generative AI could be used to do things like improve the resolution and clarity of a Snap after the user captures it, or could even be used for "more extreme transformations," editing images or creating Snaps based on text input. (We should note that generative AI, at least in the way the term is being thrown around today, is not necessarily required to improve photo resolution.) Spiegel didn't pin any time frames to these types of developments or announce specific products Snap had in the works, but said the company was thinking about how to integrate AI tools into its existing Lens Studio technology for AR developers. "We saw a lot of success integrating Snap ML tools into Lens Studio, and it's really enabled creators to build some incredible things. We now have 300,000 creators who built more than 3 million lenses in Lens Studio," Spiegel told investors. "So, the democratization of these tools, I think, will also be very powerful," he added, in reference to the future integrations of AI tech.

What's most interesting, perhaps, was the brief insight Spiegel offered about how Snap foresees the potential for AI when used in AR glasses. Though Snap's Spectacles have not broken any sales records, the company continues to develop the product. The most recent version, the Spectacles 3, expands beyond recording standard photos and video with the addition of new tools like 3D filters and AR graphics. Spiegel suggested that AI could have an impact on this product as well, thanks to its ability to improve the process of building for AR. "We can use generative AI to help build more of these 3D models very quickly, which can really unlock the full potential of AR and help people make their imagination real in the world," Spiegel added.

An anonymous reader shares a report: As the PC industry flounders, Intel suffered from such disastrous sales last quarter that it instituted pay cuts and other extreme measures going forward. AMD's client PC sales also dropped dramatically -- a whopping 51 percent year-over-year -- but the company managed to eke out a small profit despite the sky falling. So why aren't CPU and GPU prices falling too? In a call with investors Tuesday night, CEO Lisa Su confirmed that AMD has been "undershipping" chips for a while now to balance supply and demand (read: keep prices up). "We have been undershipping the sell-through or consumption for the last two quarters," Su said, as spotted by PC Gamer. "We undershipped in Q3, we undershipped in Q4. We will undership, to a lesser extent, in Q1."

With the pandemic winding down and inflation ramping up, far fewer people are buying CPUs, GPUs, and PCs. It's a hard, sudden reverse from just months ago, when companies like Nvidia and AMD were churning out graphic cards as quickly as possible to keep up with booming demand from cryptocurrency miners and PC gamers alike. Now that GPU mining is dead, shelves are brimming with unsold chips. Despite the painfully high price tags of new next-gen GPUs, last-gen GeForce RTX 30-series and Radeon RX 6000-series graphics cards are still selling for very high prices considering their two-year-old status. Strategic under-shipping helps companies maintain higher prices for their wares.

Phoronix compares the performance of Firefox and Chrome on the Linux desktop. They used recent releases (at default settings) for both browsers on an Intel Core i9 13900K "Raptor Lake" system with Radeon RX 6700XT graphics, concluding "out-of-the-box Google Chrome continues performing much better overall than Mozilla Firefox."

One area where Firefox does better out-of-the-box is around the HTML5 Canvas such as measured via the CanvasMark test case. For the demanding JetStream 2 benchmark as one of the most demanding browser tests currently, Chrome on Linux was 67% faster than Firefox on this same Intel Raptor Lake desktop.

Firefox did have a small win in the rather basic JavaScript Maze solver benchmark. Firefox at least was in a competitive space for the WebAssembly (WASM) benchmarks, but aside from that Google Chrome continues holding strong on Linux in the performance department.

Apple has announced new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros, featuring its latest M2 Pro and Max chips. From a report: The M2 Pro model will launch with a 12-core CPU, up to 19-core GPU, and up to 32GB of unified memory, while the M2 Max includes up to 38 cores of GPU power and support for up to 96GB of unified memory. The new 14-inch MacBook Pro with M2 Pro starts at $1,999, with the 16-inch model starting at $2,499. Both are available to order online today and will start shipping and appearing in Apple stores on January 24th.

Apple says the M2 Pro has double the amount of transistors the M2 shipped with and nearly 20 percent more than the M1 Pro. It also features 200GB/s of unified memory bandwidth, twice what's available on the regular M2. All of this power should result in better performance in apps like Adobe Photoshop and Xcode. Apple claims the MacBook Pro with M2 Pro "is able to process images in Adobe Photoshop up to 40 percent faster than with M1 Pro, and as much as 80 percent faster than MacBook Pro with an Intel Core i9 processor." The M2 Max chip has the same 12-core CPU as the M2 Pro, but much like the M1 Max, it really pushes the GPU power more. Apple claims the M2 Max is up to 30 percent faster than the M1 Max in graphics and can apparently "tackle graphics-intensive projects that competing systems can't even run." Chips aside, the latest MacBook Pro models now include Wi-Fi 6E3 and a "more advanced HDMI" (probably HDMI 2.1) that supports 8K displays up to 60Hz and 4K displays up to 240Hz.

Jacob Ridley writes via PC Gamer: MSI Afterburner is an app used the world over for graphics card monitoring, overclocking, and undervolting. It's become pretty synonymous with general GPU tinkering, yet the app's developer has suggested it might not have long left to live in a forum post earlier this month. MSI disagrees, telling us "we fully intend to continue with MSI Afterburner." MSI Afterburner is developed by Alexey 'Unwinder' Nicolaychuk, a Russian national who has kept the overclocking app functioning over many years. Nicolaychuk is also responsible for the development of RivaTuner Statistics Server, which is part of the foundational software layer powering Afterburner. In a post on the Guru3D forums (via TechPowerUp), Nicolaychuk suggests that Afterburner's development has been "semi-abandoned." "...MSI afterburner project is probably dead," Nicolaychuk says.

"War and politics are the reasons. I didn't mention it in MSI Afterburner development news thread, but the project is semi abandoned by company during quite a long time already. Actually we're approaching the one year mark since the day when MSI stopped performing their obligations under Afterburner license agreement due to 'politic [sic] situation'." Nicolaychuk says development of the app has continued over the past 11 months, but that may also be ending soon. "I tried to continue performing my obligations and worked on the project on my own during the last 11 months, but it resulted in nothing but disappointment; I have a feeling that I'm just beating a dead horse and waste energy on something that is no longer needed by company. "Anyway I'll try to continue supporting it myself while I have some free time, but will probably need to drop it and switch to something else, allowing me to pay my bills."

Development of the RivaTuner Statistics Server -- software is pivotal to many of the functions of Afterburner -- is materially separate from Afterburner and will continue, Nicolaychuk notes. Nicolaychuk suggests the issue comes down to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and we've since confirmed with MSI that this is the case. MSI has stated to PC Gamer that the payments were halted due to the ongoing war in Ukraine, saying: "payments had been put on hold due to the RU/UA war and the economic regulations that entailed." [...] On this being the end for Afterburner, MSI disagrees. "We fully intend to continue with MSI Afterburner," MSI tells PC Gamer. "MSI have been working on a solution and expect it to be resolved soon."

Alienware is unveiling a refreshed lineup of its M- and X-series gaming laptops at CES 2023. Like some other laptop companies, including Razer and Acer, Alienware is shifting focus away from 15- and 17-inch laptops toward thin, powerful 16- and 18-inch models. From a report: The brand is going big with the new M18, an 18-inch model that's being pitched as a desktop replacement. This is actually a resurrection following the M18's previous spec update way back in 2015. The 2023 model will feature Intel's 13th Generation HX CPUs and Nvidia's RTX 4090 mobile graphics card. The latest processors and graphics options from AMD will be available in the M18 later in 2023. Not only is the M18 massive and powerful -- it's a big deal in other ways. It can be configured with an 18-inch QHD Plus screen in the taller 16:10 aspect ratio and set up to include a ton of ports, including two Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI 2.1, Ethernet, an SD card reader, and many others. It supports user-upgradeable dual DDR5 RAM slots, and you can also cram up to 9TB of NVMe M.2 storage in it. This model starts at $2,099, but the first configuration it's releasing will cost $2,899.

Nvidia unveiled the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti graphics card using its latest graphics processing unit (GPU) chip. It also showed off laptops with a whole family of 40 Series GPUs. From a report: The 4070 desktop GPU will sell for $800 and will be available on January 5 for custom add-on boards. The Santa Clara, California-based company said the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti is faster than the predecessor GeForce RTX 3090 Ti, at nearly half the power, thanks to its new Nvidia Ada Lovelace architecture innovations and Nvidia DLSS 3 (deep learning super sampling) technology. The GPUs are part of the 40 Series family that the company began introducing last fall, and they will compete against the latest offerings from Advanced Micro Devices' Radeon GPU family. Nvidia made the announcement at an online event ahead of the CES 2023 tech trade show in Las Vegas.

Nvidia said that the GPUs will be built into more than 170 laptop models. The laptops use the new 4070, 4060 and 4050 GPUs from Nvidia. And 4090- and 4080-based laptops will start shipping for $2,000 on February 8. Other 40 Series RTX laptops (4050/60/70 starting at $1,000) will start shipping on February 22. Nvidia said the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti will max out a 1440p monitor, delivering over 120 FPS in modern games like A Plague Tale: Requiem, Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, and F1 22. Nvidia showed off a bunch of games that will take advantage of the hardware. Other titles that will use RTX's ray tracing include Cyberpunk 2077, Portal with RTX, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and many more.

Intel has finally pulled the proverbial trigger on its non-K series SKUs, with sixteen new Raptor Lake-S series processors for desktops. AnandTech: Varied across a mixture of bare multiplier locked SKUs such as the Core i9-13900 and Core i7-13700 with a TDP of 65 W, Intel has also announced its T series models with a TDP of just 35 W for lower powered computing, including the Core i9-13900T. Furthermore, Intel has launched its Core i3 series family, offering decent performance levels, albeit with just performance (P) cores and no efficiency (E) cores, at a more affordable price starting from $109. Although the overclockable parts typically get consumers' attention when they launch, most of Intel's sales come through its regular non-K parts. Despite not being world record holders regarding performance or overclocking ability, the non-K series SKUs account for most system builders and OEM systems across the entry-level and mid-range offerings.

Intel's non-K launch offerings as part of its Raptor Lake-S architecture all come with a TDP of 65 W or lower, with variants representing the Core i9, Core i7, and Core i5; Intel has also now pulled the trigger on its 13th Gen Core i3 series. Intel has sixteen new desktop processors with varying performance, specification, and price levels, ranging from 24-core (8P+16E) to quad-core (4P+0E) options. Memory support on the Core i9 and Core i7 series includes both DDR5-5600 and DDR4-3200, while the new Core i5 and Core i3 series support DDR5-4800 and DDR4-3200 as per JEDEC specifications. There are three new Intel 13th Gen Core i9 series processors to select from, starting at $549 with the Core i9-13900. All Core i9 series non-K parts include 8P+16E cores for 32 threads, and 36 MB of Intel Smart L3 cache, with the Core i9-13900 ($549) and Core i9-13900F ($524) sharing the same 5.6 GHz turbo clock speed and a base frequency of 3.3 GHz on the performance (P) cores. Both models also include a base TDP of 65 W and a turbo TDP of 219 W, which is plenty of power budget for turbo clock speeds on both the P and E cores. The only caveat is that the Core i9-13900F doesn't include Intel's UHD 770 integrated graphics (32 EUs); consequently, it has a $25 lower MSRP.

The third of Intel's Core i9 non-K series chips is the Core i9-13900T, with the T signifying that it's a 35 W part. A lower power envelope means it sacrifices plenty of MHz to account for the drop in power. The Core i9-13900 has a P-core base frequency of 1.1 GHz, with a turbo clock speed of up to 5.3 GHz; the E-core specifications are similar, with a base frequency of 800 MHz and a turbo of 3.9 GHz. Even though the Core i9-13900T ($549) comes with a 35 W base TDP, it has a turbo TDP of 106 W. Moving onto the Core i5 family, Intel has three new Raptor Lake-S desktop processors, including two 65 W and one T series (35 W) part. All three include 30 MB of Intel The Core i7-13700 and Core i7-13700F both feature a P-core turbo clock speed of 5.2 GHz, while the restrictions in power mean that the P-core base frequency sits at just 2.1 GHz. For the efficiency (E) cores, this means that they have a base frequency of 1.5 GHz and a turbo clock speed of 4.1 GHz, while both conform to Intel's interpretation of 65 W; they both have a turbo TDP of 219 W. The Core i7-13700T, as per the specifications, has a base TDP of 35 W, but it has a turbo TDP of 106 W. As with other T-series family products, the lower TDP puts constraints on raw frequency, with a P-core base frequency of just 1.4 GHz, but the eight performance cores boost to 4.9 GHz, while the eight efficiency cores turbo up to 3.6 GHz. It shares the same level of 30 MB of L3 cache as the other Raptor Lake-S desktop Core i7 processors and includes Intel's UHD 770 integrated graphics chip.

A new leak could confirm rumors that Nvidia's planning on releasing the "unlaunched" 12GB RTX 4080 graphics card as the RTX 4070 Ti. From a report: The company briefly posted the specs for its upcoming RTX 4070 Ti GPU on its website, but Twitter user @momomo_us managed to snag a screenshot before Nvidia pulled the page down. So far, the leaked specs look identical to that of the 12GB RTX 4080, with the chip sporting 7,680 CUDA cores, a 2.61 GHz boost clock, and 12GB of memory. It also says the GPU could run 4K at up to 240Hz or 8K at 60Hz with DSC and HDR, while an included chart indicates that the RTX 4070 Ti could outperform the RTX 3080 by about 3.5 times when playing Cyberpunk 2077 with its new Ray-Tracing: Overdrive mode. In October, Nvidia faced criticism over its decision to launch the 12GB RTX 4080 GPU under the RTX 4080 moniker because of how much it differs from its much more powerful 16GB counterpart.

VentureBeat's lead gaming writer made 10 predictions for 2023. Prediction #8? "Gaming will become more open in 2023." There are many forces at play that will make gaming more open. The web browser is poised for a comeback. Companies are working on ways to get around the restrictions of the app stores by turning to the open web. In the past, this meant bad graphics and limited interactivity. But new standards like glTF and proprietary technologies could enable speedier delivery.

The open web could be succeeded one day by the open metaverse. That won't happen real soon, but enough people are talking about this that the conversation is top of mind at some of the biggest and most important companies in the industry....

Gatekeepers who create platforms still take a 30% cut of royalties. Matthew Ball, author of the bestselling book The Metaverse, has argued that this stands in the way of progress as it weakens the developers who are in the best position to push forward ideas like the metaverse. While the industry isn't going to change overnight, the added awareness to the costs of closed platforms is a catalyst for change.

Epic isn't fighting for this all by itself. The Open Metaverse Standards group has formed to push for better open standards, and USD is making progress as an interoperable 3D file format. Forte and Lamina1 have raised a lot of money and they believe that blockchain technology infrastructure can also improve the openness of sectors such as gaming, enabling players to finally own their stuff.

Overall, more business models and technologies — like Web3 or cloud gaming or subscriptions — will yield more choice for both developers and consumers.

Demand for graphics cards significantly increased during the pandemic as some people spent more time at home playing games, whereas others tried to mine Ethereum to get some cash. But it looks like now that the world has re-opened and Ethereum mining on GPUs is dead, demand for desktop discrete GPUs has dropped dramatically. From a report: In fact, shipments of discrete graphics cards hit a ~20-year low in Q3 2022, according to data from Jon Peddie Research. The industry shipped around 6.9 million standalone graphics boards for desktop PCs -- including the best graphics cards for gaming -- and a similar number of discrete GPUs for notebooks in the third quarter.

In total, AMD, Intel, and Nvidia shipped around 14 million standalone graphics processors for desktops and laptops, down 42% year-over-year based on data from JPR. Meanwhile, shipments of integrated GPUs totaled around 61.5 million units in Q3 2022. In fact, 6.9 million desktop discrete add-in-boards (AIBs) is the lowest number of graphics cards shipped since at least Q3 2005 and, keeping in mind sales of standalone AIBs were strong in the early 2000s as integrated GPUs were not good enough back then, it is safe to say that in Q3 2022 shipments of desktop graphics boards hit at least a 20-year low.

HandBrake, the popular free and open source video transcoder, has been updated to version 1.6.0. This major point upgrade is notable for facilitating AV1 video encoding for the first time in a general release. Moreover, those with Intel Quick Sync Video (QSV) enabled processors, and those with Intel Arc GPUs will be able to encode AV1 video with hardware acceleration. From a report: HandBrake 1.6.0 can encode AV1 videos on any of its supported systems. In the current release its SVT-AV1 encoder offers the widest support, encoding on your processor through software. However, those with Intel QSV supporting CPUs or discrete Arc graphics can use the QSV-AV1 encoder for hardware accelerated processing. QSV isn't supported if your CPU is an 'F' suffixed model (i.e. it doesn't have an iGPU), or it is older than the Skylake generation. If you are lucky enough to have multiple QSV accelerators in your system, support for Intel Deep Link Hyper Encode should accelerate processing further. While AMD and Nvidia have AV1 encoders available for their latest GPUs, they currently aren't integrated with HandBrake. AV1 video is set to become the dominant codec across app-based streaming services and the wider internet, offering attractions such as; an open and royalty-free architecture, improved compression enabling efficient 8K video streaming, and support for the newest HDR standards.

Game developer Archer Maclean recently passed away at the age of 60. Maclean was a longtime programmer and designer best known for Dropzone on the Atari 8-bit and Commodore 64. Game Developer reports: Born January 28, 1962, Maclean's first game was the aforementioned Dropzone. Following the success of that title, he would go on to do design and graphics for 1986's International Karate (and its 1987 sequel, International Karate+), and several snooker simulation games, including Archer Maclean Presents Pool Paradise. Several of these titles were developed at Awesome Studios, a subsidiary of the now defunct Ignition Entertainment. Maclean co-founded Awesome in 2002, and later left the developer in 2005. He went on to found Awesome Play, creators of the 2009 Nintendo Wii title Speedzone (or Wheelspin in Europe). Though Speedzone marked the end of his time as a game developer, Maclean also wrote columns for Retro Gamer Magazine.

The number of GPU startups in China is extraordinary as the country tries to gain AI prowess as well as semiconductor sovereignty, according to a new report from Jon Peddie Research. From a report: In addition, the number of GPU makers grew worldwide in recent years as demand for artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC), and graphics processing increased at a rather unprecedented rate. When it comes to discrete graphics for PCs, AMD and Nvidia maintain lead, whereas Intel is trying to catch up.

Tens of companies developed graphics cards and discrete graphics processors in the 1980s and the 1990s, but cut-throat competition for the highest performance in 3D games drove the vast majority of them out of business. By 2010, only AMD and Nvidia could offer competitive standalone GPUs for gaming and compute, whereas others focused either on integrated GPUs or GPU IP. The mid-2010s found the number of China-based PC GPU developers increasing rapidly, fueled by the country's push for tech self-sufficiency as well as the advent of AI and HPC as high-tech megatrends.

In total, there are 18 companies developing and producing GPUs, according to Jon Peddie Research. There are two companies that develop SoC-bound GPUs primarily with smartphones and notebooks in mind, there are six GPU IP providers, and there are 11 GPU developers focused on GPUs for PCs and datacenters, including AMD, Intel, and Nvidia, which design graphics cards that end up in our list of the best graphics cards. In fact, if we added other China-based companies like Biren Technology and Tianshu Zhixin to the list, there would be even more GPU designers. However, Biren and Tianshu Zhixin are solely focused on AI and HPC for now, so JPR does not consider them GPU developers.

For three years Stockholm-based games studio Embark has been working on the Rust-gpu project to make Rust "a first class language and ecosystem for GPU programming." The project's latest announcement? rust-gpu now supports ray-tracing.

Their original announcement explained the rationale for this years-long dvelopment effort: Historically in games GPU programming has been done through writing either HLSL, or to a lesser extent GLSL. These are simple programming languages that have evolved along with rendering APIs over the years. However, as game engines have evolved, these languages have failed to provide mechanisms for dealing with large codebases, and have generally stayed behind the curve compared to other programming languages.

In part this is because it's a niche language for a niche market, and in part this has been because the industry as a whole has sunk quite a lot of time and effort into the status quo. While over-all better alternatives to both languages exist, none of them are in a place to replace HLSL or GLSL. Either because they are vendor locked, or because they don't support the traditional graphics pipeline. Examples of this include CUDA and OpenCL. And while attempts have been made to create language in this space, none of them have gained any notable traction in the gamedev community.

Our hope with this project is that we push the industry forward by bringing an existing, low-level, safe, and high performance language to the GPU; namely Rust. And with it come some additional benefits that can't be overlooked: a package/module system that's one of the industry's best, built in safety against race-conditions or out of bounds memory access, a wide range of tools and utilities to improve programmer workflows, and many others!
Along with ray-tracing, this week they announced plans to keep rust-gpu on the same schedule as the stable Rust release, "so you can use your favorite new language features as new stable versions of Rust are being released, by just updating your rust-gpu version."

Thanks to Slashdot reader guest reader for sharing the news!

An anonymous reader shares a report: While AMD provided upstream open-source driver support for the Radeon RX 7900 series launch, the initial user experience can be less than desirable if running a new Radeon GPU but initially running an out-of-date kernel or lacking the necessary firmware support. With a new patch series posted AMD is looking to improve the experience by being able to more easily fallback to the firmware frame-buffer when their AMDGPU kernel graphics driver fails to properly load.

With the new IP-based discovery "block by block" approach to how the open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver is managing the hardware initialization with RDNA3 and moving forward, the AMDGPU driver will try to probe all Radeon GPUs even if it might not end up being fully supported. In turn that ends up destroying the system firmware frame-buffer. But right now in the case of booting an RDNA3 GPU with a slightly out of date kernel (pre-6.0) or lacking the necessary RDNA3 firmware for hardware initialization, it can mean the screen freezing or system appearing unresponsive.

Intel announced today that it would split its AXG graphics group to separately address the gaming and data center markets by placing it under two other business units. Raja Koduri, currently the Executive Vice President of the AXG business unit, will return to his previous role as an Intel Chief Architect. From a report: "Discrete graphics and accelerated computing are critical growth engines for Intel. With our flagship products now in production, we are evolving our structure to accelerate and scale their impact and drive go-to-market strategies with a unified voice to customers. This includes our consumer graphics teams joining our client computing group, and our accelerated computing teams joining our datacenter and AI group. In addition, Raja Koduri will return to the Intel Chief Architect role to focus on our growing efforts across CPU, GPU and AI, and accelerating high priority technical programs," Intel said.

We spoke with Intel, and the company assures us that it remains fully committed to its existing roadmap of Arc consumer discrete GPUs, meaning it intends to launch the second-gen Battlemage and third-gen Celestial gaming GPUs as planned. Those GPUs will join the recently launched Alchemist series, which will also continue to be supported.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg, written by Mark Gurman: The new high-end Mac Pro with Apple silicon is behind schedule, and you can blame changes to the company's chip and manufacturing plans. When Apple announced plans in June 2020 to transition away from Intel processors to Mac chips designed in-house, the company said the move would take about two years. Now at the tail end of 2022, it's clear that Apple has missed its self-imposed deadline for completing the shift. In addition to not offering a Mac Pro with Apple silicon, the company still only sells the high-end version of the Mac mini desktop in an Intel flavor. While Apple has said little to nothing about its future Mac desktops or the reasons behind the holdup, the company continues to actively test an all-new Mac Pro and an M2 Pro-based Mac mini to replace the remaining Intel models. Apple had aimed to introduce the new Mac Pro by now, but the high-end machine has been held up for a number of reasons, including multiple changes to its features, a significant shift in the company's plans for high-end processors and a potential relocation of its manufacturing.

When Apple first set out to build a replacement for the Intel Mac Pro, it planned a machine with a processor based on the original M1 chip. The approach called for two main configurations: one chip equal to the power of two M1 Max processors -- the highest-end MacBook Pro chip -- and another equal to four M1 Max components combined. The dual M1 Max chip ended up first launching in the Mac Studio as the M1 Ultra, and Apple decided to push back the Mac Pro to the M2 generation. The company then planned for the Mac Pro to come in two configurations: an M2 Ultra version and a double-M2 Ultra that I've dubbed the "M2 Extreme." The M2 Ultra chip is destined to have some serious specifications for professional users, including up to 24 CPU cores, 76 graphics cores and the ability to top out the machine with at least 192 gigabytes of memory. An M2 Extreme chip would have doubled that to 48 CPU cores and 152 graphics cores. But here's the bad news: The company has likely scrapped that higher-end configuration, which may disappoint Apple's most demanding users -- the photographers, editors and programmers who prize that kind of computing power.

The company made the decision because of both the complexity and cost of producing a processor that is essentially four M2 Max chips fused together. It also will help Apple and partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. save chip-production resources for higher-volume machines. Moreover, there are concerns about how much consumers are willing to spend. Using the highest-end M1 Ultra chip pushes the Mac Studio up to $5,000 -- only $1,000 less than the current Mac Pro. That's $3,000 more than the M1 Max Mac Studio. Based on Apple's current pricing structure, an M2 Extreme version of a Mac Pro would probably cost at least $10,000 -- without any other upgrades -- making it an extraordinarily niche product that likely isn't worth the development costs, engineering resources and production bandwidth it would require. Instead, the Mac Pro is expected to rely on a new-generation M2 Ultra chip (rather than the M1 Ultra) and will retain one of its hallmark features: easy expandability for additional memory, storage and other components. Gurman says the Mac Mini update "will come in regular M2 and M2 Pro variations, while new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros are arriving early next year with M2 Pro and M2 Max options." A high-end iMac Pro with Apple silicon is also in the works, "but that machine has suffered internal delays for similar reasons as the Mac Pro," he notes.

In addition, Gurman says Apple is "working on multiple new external monitors [...], including an update to the Pro Display XDR that was launching alongside the Intel Mac Pro in 2019." The new monitors will also include Apple silicon.

"Content of every type disappears from the internet all the time..." writes Popular Photography's long-time "gear editor" (for photography equipment).

But someone's doing something about it: the newly-founded Flickr Foundation, which has announced plans "to make sure Flickr will be preserved for future generations." Or, as Popular Photography puts it, to stop photos "from suffering the same ill fate as our MySpace photos" — providing the example of important historical photos.

One particular collection their article notes is The Flickr Commons, "started back in 2008 as a collaborative effort with the Library of Congress to make publicly held photography collections readily available online for people seeking them out." It's a massive, eclectic, fascinating archive that pulls images and content from around the world. This new organization hopes to integrate more partners and ensure that everything remains available and easily accessible.... If you're not already familiar with The Commons, it's a really fascinating online resource. It grants access to everything from historical portraits to scientific images and everything in between. It's easy to get lost in the sheer volume of images available on the site, but Flickr relies on curators in order to bring notable images to the forefront and keep things organized and available.

With the establishment of the new foundation, Flickr hopes that it can keep this archive running to 2122 and beyond. It will doubtlessly add countless more images along the way.
Flickr is currently hiring a new archivist, according to their announcement (which also points out that the Flickr API was one of the first public APIs ever).

Among other things, it says that the foundation hopes to "investigate preservation strategies that could last for the next century,"

After taking control of the Tomb Raider franchise earlier this year, today Crystal Dynamics announced Amazon Games will publish the next game in the series. From a report: The new Tomb Raider is currently untitled, but Amazon confirmed it will be a multiplatform release and a "single-player, narrative-driven adventure." We should expect gameplay familiar to the franchise (exploration, puzzles, creative enemy encounters), which Tomb Raider fans will be happy to hear.

Back in April, Crystal Dynamics formed part of the launch of Epic Games' Unreal Engine 5, and took the opportunity to announce it was just starting development on a new Tomb Raider game. That game will of course use Unreal Engine 5, which should offer some spectacular, super-realistic visuals on PS5, Xbox Series X, and PCs running the latest graphics cards.