An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechRadar: When the GeForce RTX 3060 was launched on February 25, Nvidia announced that the mining efficiency of the graphics card was deliberately being reduced by around 50% in a bid to get more of the GPUs directly to gamers. However, this limitation appears to have been quickly bypassed by Chinese cryptocurrency miners using customized mods. There was already concern brewing about how well the limiter would stand against savvy miners, but Nvidia has been vocally confident in the hash rate limit. A statement was given to PC Gamer regarding how difficult it would be to get around the protections placed on the GPUs, claiming "End users cannot remove the hash limiter from the driver. There is a secure handshake between the driver, the RTX 3060 silicon, and the BIOS (firmware) that prevents removal of the hash rate limiter."

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 can deliver around 40-45 MH/s for standard performance but this dropped down to 20-25 MH/s if the GPU detected mining-related activity, providing the limiter is in place. A picture spotted by I_Leak_VN reveals a Chinese mod developed to help miners unlock the full hash potential of the GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card, with the image showing the Geforce RTX 3060 delivering 45 MH/s in Ethereum. The hash-rate limiter mod has also been separately confirmed to work by a Vietnamese Facebook group, apparently even capable of outputting 50 MH/s. So far, according to Wccftech, it appears that the cryptomining algorithm in question is for Octopus, which is different than cryptocurrency than Ethereum, which the hashrate limiter was designed to thwart. That means its possible that an updated driver could introduce a limiter for that cryptocurrency as well, but as we explored earlier this month, Nvidia's efforts to thwart cryptomining is likely fraught with legal issues that might prevent such an update.

InfoQ reports: Deno 1.8 recently shipped with plenty of new features, including WebGPU support, internationalization APIs, stabilized import maps, support for fetching private modules, and more. The Deno permissions API is now stable. Deno 1.8 additionally ships with TypeScript 4.2.

The release note explained the motivation behind the support for the WebGPU APIs as follows:

These days, most neural networks are defined in Python with the computation offloaded to GPUs. We believe JavaScript, instead of Python, could act as an ideal language for expressing mathematical ideas if the proper infrastructure existed. Providing WebGPU support out-of-the-box in Deno is a step in this direction. Our goal is to run Tensorflow.js on Deno, with GPU acceleration. We expect this to be achieved in the coming weeks or months.

WebGPU is an API originally proposed by Apple that exposes the GPU computation functionality available on many devices. WebGPU may provide better performance than WebGL in tasks that benefit from parallel processing — as often occurs in scientific computing, machine learning, graphics and games development...

Deno users can upgrade by running deno upgrade in a terminal.

According to Bloomberg, Nintendo is planning to unveil a model of its Switch gaming console equipped with a bigger Samsung OLED display and support for 4K. It's expected to arrive before Christmas. From the report: Samsung Display Co. will start mass production of 7-inch, 720p-resolution OLED panels as early as June with an initial monthly target of just under a million units. The displays are slated for shipment to assemblers around July. The gaming community has speculated online about the introduction of an OLED or organic light-emitting diode screen, but Nintendo has stayed mum and President Shuntaro Furukawa said in February his company has no plans to announce a new Switch "anytime soon." Samsung's involvement is the strongest indication that Nintendo is serious about updating the console, and on a large scale.

Nintendo decided to go with rigid OLED panels for the new model, the people said, a cheaper but less flexible alternative to the type commonly used for high-end smartphones. The latest model will also come with 4K ultra-high definition graphics when paired with TVs, they said. That could intensify a longstanding complaint of developers, who have struggled with the difference in resolution between handheld and TV modes and now face a bigger gap between the two.

MojoKid writes: AMD announced a new member of its Radeon RX 6000 series graphics card line-up today, dubbed Radeon RX 6700 XT. Based on AMD's RDNA 2 GPU architecture, the Radeon RX 6700 XT targets high frame rate 1440p gaming at max image quality with an MSRP of $479. The new GPU has 40 Compute Units (CUs) with 40 Ray Tracing Accelerators, 96MB of on-chip Infinity Cache, and 12Gb of GDDR6 memory. Game Clocks of up to 2424MHz will be possible and board power is rated for 230 watts. Versus NVIDIA's current competitive offerings, AMD is claiming wins for the Radeon RX 6700 XT across many titles at 1440p/max settings versus the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070, but with the added benefit of a larger 12GB frame buffer, which should add a measure of future-proofing as games get more graphically complex. Finally, AMD also revealed that it will be doing something a bit different with the launch of the Radeon RX 6700 XT. AMD-built reference cards will be available directly from AMD.com and numerous partner boards will be available from retailers and system builders, all on March 18th.

There's 29 hours left in a Kickstarter campaign to fund "an open source, Linux-based, highly modular, customizable portable computer kit that accommodates anything from a Raspberry Pi to a Ryzen x86 4x4 single-board computer and more," writes READY!100: Reminiscent of 1980s executive portable computers, the READY! 100 is fully modern with 12 input output ports and 4 antenna ports. Perfect for hackers, ham radio operators, and audio/video folks, it can even be used with external graphics cards.
Engadget hailed it as "a Raspberry Pi enclosure for cyberpunk enthusiasts." Thanks to their diminutive size and low-power consumption, single-board computers like the Raspberry Pi can come in all shapes and sizes. We've seen DIY enthusiasts like Guy Dupont put a $10 Raspberry Pi Zero W into the shell of a 2004 iPod Classic to create a device that can access Spotify. But few are as cool as this recent Kickstarter project we spotted from a Toronto-based company called Ready! Computer Corporation.

The company's Ready! Model 100 is essentially a case for your single-board computer that includes a mechanical keyboard, stereo speakers, a touchscreen display and enough I/O ports to connect almost anything you need. The enclosure allows you to fit an SBC that's about the size of a 4x4 Intel NUC board. Oh, and you can carry it around with a guitar strap.

Basically, it allows you to build the cyberdeck of your dreams.

Nvidia has shared its Q4 2021 earnings, and despite the company's GPUs being in extremely low supply, it didn't seem to hurt how much money the company made. From a report: In fact, it reported a record $5 billion in revenue, which is up 61 percent year-over-year. What's more impressive is that Nvidia expects to make another $5 billion in revenue during Q1 2022. This positive outlook is surprising given that Q1 is generally slower than other quarters, even for the biggest tech companies, as it follows the rush of people buying lots of products during the holiday period. It's generally a slower period in general for product releases across tech and gaming. Also, let's not forget the GPU shortage is still happening. Nvidia reiterated that sparse supply will continue through the next quarter, but that's likely factored into its rosy revenue prediction.

Nvidia says it expects most of that $5 billion revenue estimate in Q1 2022 to come from the gaming market, despite being the segment it's currently having the toughest time serving. Since the launch of the RTX 30-series desktop graphics cards, leading with the RTX 3080, 3090, 3070, and followed by other products, Nvidia hasn't been able to meet the demand -- though it's not the only company affected. AMD has also struggled, perhaps more than Nvidia, to keep a steady stock of graphics cards heading to retailers.

Despite America's vast population of nearly 330 million people, 43.6 million Americans have already received one or both doses of a Covid-19 vaccine.

Axios writes: The U.S. has carried out more vaccinations than any country in the world, and given a first dose to a higher percentage of its population (12%) than all but five countries: Israel, the Seychelles, the UAE, the U.K. and Bahrain. In fact, the U.S. is distributing doses three times as quickly as the EU, adjusted for population, and nearly five times as quickly as Canada.

The U.S. has some major advantages over most of the world. Not only does America have the money to reserve more doses than it could possibly use, it also has the capacity to manufacture them domestically. Canada's slow rollout and the recent dispute over doses between the EU and U.K. have underlined the difficulties of relying on imports...

It also helps that the two most effective vaccines on the market were developed entirely (Moderna) or partially (Pfizer/BioNTech) in the U.S.
Their article concludes that "Despite crumbling infrastructure and chaotic politics, the U.S. remains a scientific, technological and manufacturing powerhouse."

The Associated Press reports that America's daily inoculation average "climbed to 1.7 million shots per day last week," adding "but as many as double that number of doses are soon expected to be available on average each day."

Worried that the GeForce RTX 3060 will be sold out as cryptocurrency miners snap up every GPU in sight? NVIDIA thinks it has a simple way to help: make the new card unattractive to the crypto crowd. From a report: The company has revealed that it's cutting the hash rate (mining efficiency) of the RTX 3060 in half for Ethereum miners. The driver software can detect the Ethereum mining algorithm and throttle performance in response. The rationale is simple: NVIDIA wants to put GeForce cards "in the hands of gamers," not just those hoping to turn a profit by generating digital money. While the extremely high demand from miners has been good for NVIDIA's bottom line in the short term, it has frustrated gamers, professionals and everyday users who just want better than integrated graphics -- NVIDIA even brought back years-old GPUs just to give customers some options. Scalping and price gouging have been all too common for those GPUs that do become available.

It's not leaving miners empty-handed. The firm is launching a new CMP (Cryptocurrency Mining Processor) line of add-in cards that doesn't do graphics, but is fine-tuned for crypto mining performance. The absence of video ports allows for greater airflow and more densely-packed cards, for example. The first CMP designs are the 26 megahash per second 30HX and 36 megahash 40HX, both of which should be available this quarter from vendors like ASUS, EVGA and Gigabyte. More powerful 50X (45MH/s) and 90HX (86MH/s) boards are due in the second quarter. The company said it won't limit the performance of GPUs that are already sold.

Sometimes one screen isn't enough and you need two. Sometimes even two doesn't get the job done, and you need three. If your job requires seven screens, a UK firm now has you covered. Gizmodo reports: The Aurora 7 laptop seems lifted straight from the imagination of a Hollywood prop builder working on a bad hacker flick. But with seven foldout screens, there's little chance anyone could actually use this beast on their laps. It's a mobile transforming workstation for those who need more screen real estate than they have room for monitors. Created by a UK company called Expanscape, the Aurora 7 is very much just a prototype at this stage in the game (as is evident by the extensive use of 3D-printed parts), but it's designed to be true mobile workstation for everyone from developers to content creators to even well-funded gamers wanting a more immersive experience from a computer they don't have to leave at home. Powered by an Intel i9 9900K processor backed by 64GB of DDR4 RAM and an NVIDIA GTX 1060 series graphics card, the Aurora 7 also comes with 2TB of hard drive storage and an additional 2.5 TB of SSD storage, plus all the ports you could ever need to expand its capacity even further. But the star of the show is the complicated mosaic of screens which includes four 17.3-inch 4K (3840 x 2160) LCDs -- two in portrait mode and two in landscape -- as well as three smaller 7-inch screens all pushing 1920 x 1200 pixels, with one located in the laptop's wrist rest. The laptop has a battery life of one hour. No word on pricing or when it starts shipping.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg wants commuting to work replaced with VR/AR telecommuting. Zuckerberg made the suggestion on a talkshow on Clubhouse, reports The International Business Times: "One of the things that [VR] will unlock is the ability to live anywhere you want and be present in another place and really feel like you are there," the Facebook CEO said."It is going to unlock a lot of economic opportunity because people will be able to live where they want and increasingly work where they want and kind of teleport into place. I am also pretty optimistic about the impact on climate, in reducing the amount of commuting that people have to do. I think the advance in electric cars in reducing emissions is great and exciting, but I tell my team that it is easier to move bits of atoms around so we should be teleporting, not driving...."

Zuckerberg suggested a combination of both VR and AR technologies to achieve the dream of teleportation... Zuckerberg said the progress is steady at his labs on foundational technologies that will revolutionize the future of travel with the help of both VR and AR. "There is getting all the graphics and visual systems to really feel like you are immersed in the space. There's a long path of technology that needs to get done to kind of get that to be as realistic as you would want on VR," he said.
Business Insider notes the three-week-old talkshow — the same one visited by Elon Musk — is hosted by a Facebook employee and her VC husband, and is "focused on optimism... Guests on the show talk about future innovations without skepticism... Unlike traditional interviewers, Krishnan and Ramamurthy, as well as their guests, do not appear to push back against the ideas discussed, instead letting them flow freely."

CNET notes the appearance drew a skeptical response on Twitter from Ellen Pao, former CEO of social media company Reddit. "FB execs going on Clubhouse shows CH is all about tight control over messaging and avoiding hard questions and accountability."

Zuckerberg summarized his position with seven words. "We should be teleporting, not transporting, ourselves."

31.9 million Americans have already received one or both doses of a Covid-19 vaccine — including more than 9.3 million people who have been fully vaccinated.

And now USA Today reports: Pfizer expects to nearly cut in half the amount of time it takes to produce a batch of COVID-19 vaccine from 110 days to an average of 60 as it makes the process more efficient and production is built out, the company told USA TODAY. As the nation revs up its vaccination programs, the increase could help relieve bottlenecks caused by vaccine shortages.

"We call this 'Project Light Speed,' and it's called that for a reason," said Chaz Calitri, Pfizer's vice president for operations for sterile injectables, who runs the company's plant in Kalamazoo, Michigan. "Just in the last month we've doubled output."

The increased speed and capacity is not unexpected, said Robert Van Exan, president of Immunization Policy and Knowledge Translation, a vaccine production consulting firm. "Nobody's ever produced mRNA vaccines at this scale, so you can bet your bottom dollar the manufacturers are learning as they go. I bet you every day they run into some vaccine challenge and every day they solve it, and that goes into their playbook," he said...

As soon as vials of vaccine began coming off the production line, engineers started analyzing how production could work faster and better. "We made a lot of really slick enhancements," he said. Production is getting faster. For example, making the DNA that starts the vaccine process first took 16 days; soon it will take nine or 10. Though quality control and testing has accelerated, company officials say FDA regulations and best manufacturing practices are still being met. Along with improving speed, Pfizer also is increasing output by adding manufacturing lines in all three plants.

As the vaccine effort continues, more efficiencies are expected.
Across America a bout 20.6 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine have already been administered.

Long ago there were plans for a remastered Xbox 360 version of the Nintendo 64 game "Goldeneye 007" — but they never materialized, and that game became a lost legend. But then Monday Ars Technica interviewed longtime Spanish game streamer Graslu00, who had somehow uploaded a two-hour video demo-ing the lost game. The files came with a peculiar note: "Never say never, release coming soon, James."
Days later Engadget reported: This week, a ROM of a canceled 2007 Xbox 360 remaster of the game appeared online, allowing those with a PC to play it using an emulator. According to VGC (via Polygon), the leaked ROM includes the game's entire single-player campaign, as well as its multiplayer component. It also allows players to seamlessly toggle between the remaster's enhanced textures and effects and the original's blocky N64 graphics.
So this weekend the BBC tracked down videogame designer David Doak, who'd worked on the original 1997 game, who admitted it was fun finally seeing the remastered game "out in the wild." "It is always heart-warming to see that the original game is still so fondly remembered and has obviously brought joy to so many people over almost 25 years since release.

"The current excitement over the leak of this 'naughty remaster' speaks volumes for the impact and enduring legacy of GoldenEye 007."

David Doak also appeared as a character called Dr Doak in the original game, but was replaced in the remastered version. Some gamers have already modified the leaked software to put him back in, which he said was "particularly touching."
Since 2009 he's been using the Twitter handle @DrDoak.

In March he'd tweeted, "Dr Doak works in a chemical weapons facility. He washes his hands regularly and is careful to avoid touching his face. This is good practice. Be like Dr Doak."

Nvidia is now requiring, not just encouraging, companies selling laptops with its new RTX 30-series graphics chips to be more transparent about the kind of power people can expect. From a report: Nvidia tells The Verge these companies will have to disclose specific clock speed stats and total graphics power on online product pages -- all of which tells people everything they need to know about a laptop's graphics potential, for better or worse. However, companies won't have to mention that these chips are Max-Q variants because, according to an Nvidia spokesperson, "Max-Q is no longer part of the GPU name." Rather, Max-Q is now solely used to communicate that a laptop with an RTX 30-series graphics chip ships with efficiency features like Whisper Mode 2, Dynamic Boost 2, and Advanced Optimus. Previously, seeing Max-Q branding made it easy to determine a laptop's general performance without having to know its specific clock speeds. It's encouraging to see Nvidia no longer allows companies to hide this vital information from marketing materials. It should go far enough in helping buyers make an educated purchase without having to wait on reviewers and early adopters to report on the specs.

An anonymous reader shares an opinion piece from Bloomberg, written by Liam Denning and Elaine He: Electrifying U.S. vehicles wipes out the equivalent of our entire current power demand. The U.S. consumes a lot of energy; last year, about 100 quadrillion BTUs (equivalent to 17 billion barrels of oil; which, we'll admit, is only marginally less abstract). But only about a third of that is ultimately used in terms of actually lighting lights, turning wheels and so forth. The second law of thermodynamics means, for every unit of thermal energy we actually put to useful work, roughly another two end up wasted as heat. How we don't use energy is just as important to understand as how we use it. Here's a simplified version of a Sankey diagram from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory showing the various inputs to the U.S. energy system and where they end up.

Large-scale waste is unavoidable with a thermal energy system, or one where we mostly burn stuff or split atoms (97% of the inputs in 2019). Burning fossil fuels also generates the carbon emissions causing climate change; so wasted energy is a proxy for the damage being done (apart from nuclear power). In contrast, renewables such as wind, solar and hydropower capture energy directly from infinite sources. While a small amount is lost in transmission, the vast majority is used. So here's a thought experiment: What if the entire U.S. light-duty vehicle fleet (currently about 270 million cars and trucks) were electrified by 2030 and we expanded wind and solar generation at a rapid pace, while eliminating coal power, at the same time? The result is that we not only end up with a drop in U.S. carbon emissions of almost 30%, but also a far more efficient system overall.

Ryan Smith, writing at AnandTech: Following plans first unveiled last year during the launch of their DG1 GPU, Intel sends word this morning that the first Iris Xe video cards have finally begun shipping to OEMs. Based on the DG1 discrete GPU that's already being used in Intel's Iris Xe MAX laptop accelerators, the Iris Xe family of video cards are their desktop counterpart, implementing the GPU on a traditional video card. Overall, with specifications almost identical to Xe MAX, Intel is similarly positioning these cards for the entry-level market, where they are being released as an OEM-only part. As a quick refresher, the DG1 GPU is based on the same Xe-LP graphics architecture as Tiger Lake's integrated GPU. In fact, in broad terms the DG1 can be thought of as a nearly 1-to-1 discrete version of that iGPU, containing the same 96 EUs and 128-bit LPDDR4X memory interface as Tiger Lake itself. Consequently, while DG1 is a big first step for Intel -- marking the launch of their first discrete GPU of the modern era -- the company is planning very modestly for this generation of parts. The first DG1 GPUs were shipped in the fall as part of Intel's Iris Xe MAX graphics solution for laptops. At the time, Intel also indicated that a desktop card for OEMs would also be coming in 2021, and now, right on schedule, those desktop cards have begun shipping out. Further reading: Intel's Iris Xe DG1 Graphics Cards Not Compatible with AMD, Older Systems.

Honor, the Chinese smartphone brand formerly owned by Huawei, launched the V40, its first device since being sold off. CNBC reports: Huawei sold Honor, its budget smartphone brand, in November to a consortium of buyers in China, as a way to help the unit survive in the face of U.S. sanctions. In 2019, Huawei was put on a U.S. export blacklist called the Entity List which restricted American firms from selling certain components to the Chinese technology giant. This included both semiconductors and software.

Honor's new smartphone is called the V40. It boasts a 6.72-inch display and comes in three colors: silver, black and rose gold. Honor talked up the phone's graphics processing and touchscreen capabilities, features that enhance gaming on the device, a popular use of smartphones in China. It has the ability to connect to next-generation 5G mobile networks, a key requirement in China which is the world's largest market for 5G phones. The V40 uses a key 5G chip from Taiwan's MediaTek, a company which became China's number one smartphone semiconductor supplier in 2020. Honor's V40 starts at 3,599 yuan ($556) for the 128GB storage option and 3,999 yuan for the 256GB version. It will be released in China but it is unclear if it will be launched internationally.

niftydude writes: Developers at ARM virtualisation company Corellium have managed to get Ubuntu 20.04 up and running on the new Apple Silicon Mac Mini. And we're not talking 'it boots and prints a load of text' running here. No, this is the full Ubuntu desktop experience -- and it's already being described as "completely usable!"

Pretty impressive, right? Even Linus Torvalds wasn't convinced that Linux M1 support was likely to appear anytime soon. He told ZDnet's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols that: "...the main problem with the M1 for me is the GPU and other devices around it, because that's likely what would hold me off using it because it wouldn't have any Linux support unless Apple opens up." Not that he was entirely wrong, mind. GPU support is indeed a current sticking point in Correllium's Linux for M1 effort. It doesn't (yet) include M1 GPU support meaning 'graphics' handling is done via software rendering.

CD Projekt Red is still trying to contain the damage from widespread reports of major technical problems in the versions of Cyberpunk 2077 released for the PS4 and Xbox One last month. From a report: To that end, studio co-founder and CEO Marcin Iwinski today tweeted a video message seeking to explain the internal situation leading up to the problematic launch. "Despite good reviews on PC, the console version of Cyberpunk 2077 did not meet the quality standard we wanted it to meet," Iwinski said in the message. "I, and the entire leadership team, are deeply sorry for this, and this video is me publicly owning up to that." The core of the problem, Iwinski said, was the "in-game streaming system" that Cyberpunk 2077 used to "feed" content and game mechanics to the engine without frequent breaks for loading. That system had to be "constantly improved" for last-gen consoles during development, Iwinski said, in order to keep up with the "epic" look of the PC version (which saw its graphics and other assets scaled down to work on more limited, older console hardware).

"Things did not look super difficult at first, [but] I think that time has proven we underestimated the task," Iwinski said. "Because the city is so packed and the disk bandwidth of old-gen consoles is what it is, it constantly challenged us." winski was less direct about why these problems with the console versions weren't discovered and either fixed or delayed before launch. "Every change and improvement needed to be tested, and as it turned out, our testing did not show a big part of the issues you experienced while playing the game," Iwinski said. He added that communication problems caused by the team working from home amid COVID-related restrictions meant some issues got lost over video calls or emails. "We saw significant improvements each and every day leading up to release [and] really thought we'd deliver in the day zero [version on consoles]," he said.

Wine 6.0 has been released today and contains over 8,300 changes, according to its full release notes. Windows Central reports: The new release of version 6.0 has thousands of changes, but Wine's website highlights some of the biggest improvements: Core modules in PE format; Vulkan backend for WineD3D; DirectShow and Media Foundation support; and Text console redesign. The full release notes for Wine 6.0 explain that the core DLLs, which include NTDLL, KERNEL32, GDI32, and USER32 are now built in the Portable Executable (PE) format. As a result, people should see improvements for certain copy protection schemes.

The update also includes a new mechanism to associate a Unix library with the PE module. This change makes it so systems can call Unix libraries from PE when trying to perform a function that can't be handled by Win32 APIs. Wine 6.0 also includes an experimental Vulkan rendered that translates Direct3D shaders to SPIR-V shaders. In another change related to Direct3D, the Direct3D graphics card database now recognizes more graphics cards and includes updated driver versions.

Apple is planning upgraded MacBook Pro laptops this year with much faster processors, updated displays and the return of its magnetic charger, Bloomberg reported Friday, citing a person with knowledge of the plans. From the report: The new laptops are planned to come in two screen sizes, a 14-inch model codenamed J314 and a 16-inch version internally dubbed J316. Both will use next-generation versions of Apple's in-house Mac processors, upgraded with more cores and enhanced graphics, the person said, asking not to be named as the products are not yet announced.

These devices will mark Apple's first high-end laptops to move away from Intel components. The company updated its base 13-inch MacBook Pro with its own M1 chip in November, to broadly positive reviews. Beyond the more powerful chips, Apple is also planning to step up the displays in its new MacBook Pros with brighter, higher-contrast panels, the person said. The new Macs will look similar to the current versions, albeit with minor design changes. Apple is aiming to launch the new MacBook Pros around the middle of the year. A major change to the new computers will be how they charge. Over the past five years, Apple has relied on USB-C ports for both power and data transfer on its laptops, making them compatible with other manufacturers' chargers. But the company is now bringing back MagSafe, the magnetic power adapter that means any accidental yanking of the power cable would simply detach it from the laptop rather than pull down the entire computer.