Hop behind the wheel of the North American production version of Audi’s electric E-tron SUV.
Source: CNET
We test the E-tron’s 150 kW rapid charging and challenged the 204-mile battery electric SUV to climb nearly 7,000 feet on a road trip from Napa to Tahoe.
Source: CNET
Razer’s launching new Blade Studio Edition models of its laptops and Acer’s turning up the power in its Concept D 7 notebook at Computex 2019.
Source: CNET
During its press conference in Taipei a day before Computex starts, Nvidia announced a new line of laptops that will run its RTX graphics processing units, as well as a new software platform called Studio, with SDKs and drivers to make graphics rendering and other tasks faster. The units are targeted to creative professionals, like video editors, photographers and graphic designers, and meant to compete with the 15-inch MacBook Pro.
One of Nvidia’s new Studio laptops, meant to compete against the MacBook Pro
The series will include seventeen laptops made by Nvidia’s manufacturing partners (including Acer, ASUS, Dell, Gigabyte, HP, MSI and Razer). The laptops will begin retailing in June, with prices starting at $1,599.
The 17 laptops will be equipped with Quadro RTX 5000, 4000 or 3000 GPUs or GeForce RTX 2080, 2070 and 2060 GPUs. Nvidia claims they can perform up to seven times faster than the MacBook Pro. Studio laptops with Quadro RTX 5000 GPUs will have 16GB of graphics memory, and some of the devices will also have 4K displays and Nvidia’s Max-Q tech for building thin and lightweight laptops.
The Nvidia Studio suite includes the CUDA-X AI platform for automating tasks like color matching videos or tagging photos.
Source: TechCrunch
Fiat Chrysler Automobiles has proposed merging its business with Renault that, if accepted, would create the third largest global automaker with 8.7 million in annual vehicle sales.
FCA delivered Monday a non-binding letter to Renault’s board that proposes combining the business as a 50-50 merger. FCA’s proposal illustrates the growing desire among automakers to consolidate, or form partnerships, in an environment of increasing regulatory pressure, declining sales and rising costs associated with next-generation technologies such as autonomous vehicle technology.
Under the proposal, the combined businesses would be split equally between FCA and Renault shareholders. The board would be a combined entity of 11 members, FCA said. The majority would be independent. FCA and Renault would get equal represent with four members each as well as one nominee from Nissan. The parent company would be listed on the Borsa Italiana in Milan, Euronext in Paris and the New York Stock Exchange.
French automaker Renault has an alliance with Nissan Motor. The two companies, whose relationship has become stressed in the fallout over the arrest of former Renault-Nissan Alliance CEO Carlos Ghosn and subsequent power struggle, share vehicle parts and collaborate on technology. Renault owns 43.4 percent of Nissan. Nissan owns 15 percent of Renault.
Fiat Chrysler is best known in U.S. for the company behind the Jeep and Ram trucks. But its business is far larger. Fiat, which has a market value of $20 billion, is also one of Italy’s oldest companies and owns brands like Alfa Romeo, Fiat, Lancia, and Maserati.
Fiat acquired a stake in Chrysler in 2009. The FCA people know today — which employs nearly 200,000 people — was created when the companies merged in 2014.
The proposed merger would result in cost savings. However, FCA insists it would not come from plant closures. No factories would close as a result of the merger, FCA said in its proposal. In a release describing the proposal FCA states:
The benefits of the proposed transaction are not predicated on plant closures, but would be achieved through more capital efficient investment in common global vehicle platforms, architectures, powertrains and technologies.
The combined companies would realize more than 5 billion euros in estimated annual run rate savings by collaborating on products and in certain regions, particularly when it comes to the development and commercialize of new technologies. FCA noted that these areas included connectivity, electrification and autonomous driving.
FCA argued that is has a history of “successfully combining OEMs with disparate cultures to create strong leadership teams and organizations dedicated to a single purpose.”
Those cost savings will be crucial for both companies if there’s a downturn in sales — a reality that other automakers like GM and Ford are already preparing for. It would also allow the companies to pursue technologies such as advanced driver assistance systems and autonomous vehicles.
FCA, which operates 46 research and development centers, has invested in advanced driver assistance systems like its highway assist feature offered in its Maserati brand. It has also relied on partnerships such as the one with self-driving vehicle company Waymo .
Last year, the company announced an expanded partnership with Waymo that will add up to 62,000 more Chrysler Pacifica minivans to Waymo’s self-driving car fleet. The two companies are also working on ways to license Waymo’s self-driving car technology in order to deploy the tech in cars for consumers.
Source: TechCrunch
AMD showed off how its 7nm-based Ryzen 3 processors with Zen 2 cores and its Navi-powered Radeon 5000 graphics edges out competing Intel or Nvidia solutions in performance. AMD’s beastly Ryzen 3 processor tops out with 12 cores.
The post AMD’s long-awaited Ryzen 3 has arrived, and it includes a $499 12-core monster appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
AMD CEO Lisa Su gave the Computex keynote in Taipei today, the first time the company has been invited to do so (the event officially starts tomorrow). During the presentation, AMD unveiled news about its chips and graphics processors that will increase pressure on competitors Intel and Nvidia, both in terms of pricing and performance.
Chips
All new third-generation Ryzen CPUs, the first with 7-nanometer desktop chips, will go on sale on July 7. The showstopper of Su’s keynote was the announcement of AMD’s 12-core, 24-thread Ryzen 9 3900x chip, the flagship of its third-generation Ryzen family. It will retail starting at $499, half the price of Intel’s competing Core i9 9920X chipset, which is priced at $1,189 and up.
The 3900x has 4.6 Ghz boost speed and 70 MB of total cache and uses 105 watts of thermal design power (versus the i9 9920x’s 165 watts), making it more efficient. AMD says that in a Blender demo against Intel i9-9920x, the 3900x finished about 18 percent more quickly.
Here’s an exclusive #COMPUTEX2019 look at the newest edition to the Ryzen family, the 12 core/24 thread 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen 9 3900X processor. https://t.co/OgLHoqWv9T pic.twitter.com/75FzfpdiKx
— AMD Ryzen (@AMDRyzen) May 27, 2019
Starting prices for other chips in the family are $199 for the 6-core, 12-thread 3600; $329 for the 8-core, 16-thread Ryzen 3700x (with 4.4 Ghz boost, 36 MB of total cache and a 65 watt TDP); and $399 for the 8-core, 16-thread Ryzen 3800X (4.5 Ghz, 32MB cache, 105w).
GPUs
AMD also revealed that its first Navi graphics processor units will be the Radeon RX 5000 series. Pricing is being closely watched because it may pressure Nvidia to bring down prices on competing products. AMD announced that the GPUs will be available in July, but more details, including pricing, performance and new features, won’t be announced until E3 next month in Los Angeles.
Introducing the world’s first “Navi” gaming GPU family based on the all new RDNA gaming architecture: the AMD Radeon RX 5700 series. Learn more from #COMPUTEX2019: https://t.co/xwexmdDMin pic.twitter.com/rY2dAsq52l
— AMD (@AMD) May 27, 2019
Data processors
AMD announced that its EPYC Rome data center processors, first demoed at CES in January, will launch next quarter, one quarter earlier than previously anticipated, to compete with Intel’s Cascade Lake. AMD says that during a benchmark test, EPYC Rome performed twice as fast as Cascade Lake.
AMD CEO @LisaSu just gave the first public competitive demonstration of a 2nd Gen AMD #EPYC server platform outperforming the competition in a NAMD Apo1 v2.12 benchmark test by more than 2x. #COMPUTEX2019 https://t.co/ZHmrqBigjB pic.twitter.com/HQI5EPLmFf
— AMD EPYC (@AMDServer) May 27, 2019
Source: TechCrunch
Arm, the company that designs the basic chip architecture for most of the world’s smartphones, today announced the launch of its next suite of designs for premium phones. It’ll be a while before you’ll see the first phones that use chips based on this design, but typically we see the first actual chips before the end of the year. With this launch, the company is announcing the Cortex-A77 CPU, the Mali-G77 GPU and a more energy efficient and powerful machine learning processor.
Given recent trends, it’s no surprise that the new Cortex-A77 doesn’t only focus on overall performance improvements, though the company’s promise of 20% IPC performance improvement over the last generation is nothing to sneer at. Thanks to a combination of hardware and software optimizations, the Cortex-A77 now promises significantly better machine learning performance, too.
Why focus on that when the company also offers a machine learning processor? Arm argues that most smartphones today don’t use a dedicated neural processor. Indeed, the company argues that 85 percent of smartphones today run machine learning workloads with only a CPU or a CPU+GPU combo. And even when an accelerator is available, the CPU has to hand that over to the accelerator, no matter whether that’s a GPU or a dedicated machine learning chip.
Like with every new generation of Arm CPUs, the Cortex A77 also promises to be more power efficient and offer better raw processing performance. Indeed, Arm says that it has been able to improve performance by 4x since 2013.
Another area Arm is betting on is mobile gaming — and by extension, mobile VR and AR experiences. The new Mail-G77 GPU architecture is the first one based on the company’s Valhall GPU design and promises a 1.4x performance improvement over the G76. It’s also 30 percent more energy efficient and — and I’m guessing you can spot a theme here — 60% faster at running machine learning inference and neural net workloads.
For the machine learning processor, Arm notes that it already offers Project Trillium, its heterogeneous machine learning compute platform that runs in combination with the company’s CPUs. Since announcing Trillium last year, the company has managed to bring up energy efficiency by 2x and scaled performance up to 8 cores and 32 TOP/s.
“Every new smartphone experience begins with more hardware performance and features to enable developers to unleash further software innovation,” the company notes in today’s announcement. “For developers, the CPU is more critical than ever as it not only handles general-compute tasks as well as much of the device’s ML compute which must scale beyond today’s limits. The same holds true for more immersive untethered AR/VR applications, and HD gaming on the go.”
Source: TechCrunch
We used to think that as video games matured, as a medium, they would become more like Hollywood, becoming more focused on character development, plot reversals, and tight, suspense-driven narratives, rather than action set pieces alternating with cinematic cut scenes. Hoo boy, were we wrong. Instead the exact inverse has happened. Action movies have become more like video games. And you know what, this is no bad thing.
I thought of this while watching John Wick 3 last night. (Which I loved, as I did 1 and 2.) It’s not just that its ballet of bullets — especially the one with the dogs — are so like video games, in both structure and form, that they seem to have been practically been torn from a controller; you can practically see health bars and Stun markets hovering over the heads of the characters.
It’s also that the series’s primary costars, after Keanu — with apologies to Halle Berry and Ian McShane — is not any other individual character, but the world of John Wick, the Continental, and the High Table. Worldbuilding has long been a first-class citizen in video and tabletop role-playing games; now it has graduated to movies as well.
Speaking of role-playing games, ensemble-cast movies are more and more like them as well. Consider the Fast and Furious movies, or Game of Thrones. Each has a core group who are clearly the “player characters,” as well as disposable villains and extras who are “NPCs.” Each starts with the characters at a relatively low level of skill/power, and over the course of the series grow to worldshaking might.
In The Fast & The Furious Vin Diesel’s character is a really good driver and mechanic; by the time we get to The Fate of The Furious he’s a superspy capable of singlehandedly opposing entire intelligence agencies. In Game of Thrones we watch Arya become a high-level assassin before our eyes, and Jon Snow happens to become one of the deadliest swordsmen in all of Westeros, casually dispatching dozens of enemies, often several simultaneously, while rarely even breaking a sweat, because — well, there’s no real reason for it, other than that’s what happens to player characters, isn’t it? They level up and become the best.
That didn’t use to be the case. Jason Bourne and James Bond were superspies, but they didn’t really get better over the course of their series, or become so ridiculously puissant that they can casually take out a dozen heavily armed/armored expert fighters in thirty seconds, singlehandedly, as Shaw does in the trailer of the new Fast & Furious movie. Most of Jason Bourne’s action sequences are escapes; most of John Wick’s are hunts. And of course “one hunting a horde” has been the basic mode of first-person shooters since long before Doom.
Does the introduction of these new tropes / styles / narrative conceits make things worse? Well — not necessarily. The Bourne series is a lot grittier, in terms of emotional resonance and suspense, than the John Wick series, but the latter is far more stylish, semiotically rich, and immersive. I love them both about equally. It would be a shame if the only kind of action movie we ever saw from here on in was the stylized un/hyperreality of John Wick — but similarly it would be a shame if Hollywood had never made those movies on the grounds they were too brutally unrealistic.
Ultimately, video games have expanded Hollywood’s possibility space, and to my mind that’s always a good thing. Is it a universal rule that when technology introduces a new medium of storytelling, old media soon adopts the new medium’s styles and tropes? Did plays become more like novels after Don Quixote? Did radio become more like television after TV was introduced? And if/when we figure out the most compelling structure(s) for AR/VR storytelling, will video games become more like that? It seems fairly inevitable to me that the answer is yes.
Source: TechCrunch
Las Fuerzas Armadas de EE. UU. lanzarán junto al MIT una incubadora de inteligencia artificial para desarrollar tecnologías que sirvan al “bien público” y que optimicen el día a día del organismo. Para evitar polémicas, ambas entidades afirman que no trabajarán en aplicaciones armamentísticas
Source: MIT