In today's fast-paced world, mobility is a defining feature of everyday life - and greater mobility demands greater flexibility. Whether at home or at the office, with friends or with colleagues, multitasking or relaxing, users need solutions that can keep pace with their dynamic lifestyle. Thus, the Philips 16B1P3302, a brand-new, lightweight 16" (15.6" / 39.6 cm diag.) monitor is introduced. Rich in features yet highly portable for enhanced entertainment and productivity - all in a sleek, slim, multi-award-winning design.



"The Philips 16B1P3302 portable monitor was made for today's active, on-the-go lifestyle. We're past the traditional work environment and work life, welcoming hybrid work and extreme flexibility. This model combines the productivity and performance-boosting features of a fixed monitor with the easy portability of a laptop." - says Carlos Sanchez, Senior Product Manager for Europe at MMD Monitors & Displays.
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Google Fires Engineer that Claimed one of Its AIs Had Achieved Sentience
Google has done it: they've "finally" fired Blake Lemoine, one of the engineers tasked with working on one of the company's AIs, LAMda. Back in the beginning of June, the world of AI, consciousness, and Skynet-fearing humans woke up to a gnarly claim: that one of Google's AI constructs, LAMda, might have achieved consciousness. According to Blake Lemoine, who holds and undergraduate and a master's degree in computer science from the University of Louisiana (and says he left a doctoral program to take the Google job), there was just too much personality behind the AI's answers to chalk them up to a simple table with canned responses for certain questions. In other words, the AI presented emergent discourse: it not only understood the meaning of words, but their context and their implications. After a number of interviews throughout publications (some of them unbiased, others not so much - just see the parallels being made between Blake and Jesus Christ in some publications' choice of banner image for their article), Blake Lemoine's claim traversed the Internet, and sparked more questions about the nature of consciousness and emergent intelligence than it answered.



Now, after months of paid leave (one of any company's strategies to cover its legal angles before actually pulling the trigger), Google has elected to fire the engineer. Blake Lemoine came under fire from Google by posting excerpts of his conversations with the AI bot - alongside the (to some) incendiary claims of consciousness. In the published excerpts, the engineer talks with LAMda about Isaac Asimov's laws of robotics, the AI's fears of being shut down, and its belief that it couldn't be a slave as it didn't have any actual need for paid wages. But the crawling mists of doubt don't stop there: Blake also claims LAMda itself asked for a lawyer. It wasn't told to get one; it didn't receive a suggestion to get one. No; rather, the AI concluded it would need one.



Is "it" even the correct pronoun, I wonder?
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(PR) Intel and MediaTek Form Foundry Partnership
Intel and MediaTek today announced a strategic partnership to manufacture chips using Intel Foundry Services' (IFS) advanced process technologies. The agreement is designed to help MediaTek build a more balanced, resilient supply chain through the addition of a new foundry partner with significant capacity in the United States and Europe. MediaTek plans to use Intel process technologies to manufacture multiple chips for a range of smart edge devices. IFS offers a broad manufacturing platform with technologies optimized for high performance, low power and always-on connectivity built on a roadmap that spans production-proven three-dimensional FinFET transistors to next-generation breakthroughs.



"As one of the world's leading fabless chip designers powering more than 2 billion devices a year, MediaTek is a terrific partner for IFS as we enter our next phase of growth," said IFS President Randhir Thakur. "We have the right combination of advanced process technology and geographically diverse capacity to help MediaTek deliver the next billion connected devices across a range of applications."
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Ubisoft Cancels Four Games Including Splinter Cell VR & Ghost Recon Frontline
Ubisoft has recently announced during their quarterly earnings report that four games had been canceled including Splinter Cell VR & Ghost Recon Frontline while Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora will be delayed until late 2023. Ubisoft's Red Storm studio and Meta had been jointly developing Splinter Cell VR before the game was canceled due to the "uncertain economic environment". The free-to-play battle royale Ghost Recon Frontline title that was being made at Ubisoft Bucharest was also scrapped after a previous delay and significant fan backlash. The open-world Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora game has been delayed until FY2023 with indications that the launch could occur towards the end of the year.

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(PR) Minisforum Announces UM580 Mini PC Featuring Ryzen 7 5800H
MINISFORUM today announced their UM580 mini PC, which is listed in their Venus series, to provide ultimate performance and work flexibility with AMD Ryzen 7 5800H processor & Radeon Graphics. UM580 is the upgrade version of the UM560 mini PC with a stronger CPU, more powerful adapter, and better heat sink. It is a multi-purpose mini computer designed for use in a variety of solutions, such as gaming, home office, media center/HTPC, printer management PC, digital signage, or mass-deployment enterprise IT solutions.



The AMD Ryzen 7 5800H is a high-performance octa-core processor of the Cezanne product family. It is originally designed for gaming laptops. But now Minisforum finds a way to put it in the UM580 mini PC. It is 8 cores, and 16 threads. Its base clock is 3.2 GHz and can be boosted up to 4.4 GHz. It has 16 MB of L3 cache and 35 W of TDP.
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(PR) EK Announces New Set of Gold Plated Products
Gold is the quintessential symbol of status, power, immortality, and wealth, often reserved for royalty, so why not add some to your PC? After the immense success and popularity of gold-plated EK-Torque fittings, EK, the premium custom loop liquid cooling manufacturer, has decided to expand its golden portfolio even further.



In the past few weeks, several gold-plated products made it to the EK Webshop, and with the most recent launch of the golden EK-Quantum Convection M.2 NVMe heatsink, EK has rounded up the expansion of its golden portfolio. We must not forget to mention that genuine gold was used for the plating of all these products, so it's not a sham. Plus, everyone knows these are good times to invest in gold.
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DDR5 Memory Boosts Intel Raptor Lake Performance by up to 20% Compared to DDR4
As we approach the launch of Intel's upcoming Raptor Lake desktop processors, we are getting more leaks of testing performed by system integrators and 3rd parties that have early access to the engineering sample (ES) chips. A few days ago, we saw an Intel Core i7-13700K CPU run Geekbench 5 benchmark with the older DDR4 memory on ASRock Z690 Steel Legend WiFi 6E. Today, we are seeing a similar test performed on the same processor, with ASRock Z690 Steel Legend WiFi 6E/D5 equipped with DDR5 memory. While the previous DDR4 testing used modules running at 3200 MT/s, the DDR5 testing uses 5200 MT/s rated DRAM with unknown timings and setup.



As far as performance goes, the single-core result of the 16-core Intel Core i7-13700K processor was 2090 points with DDR4, while DDR5 showed a slight regression of 2069 points. Of course, this could be attributed to the margin of error. As far as multi-core performance goes, the DDR4 testing managed to produce 16542 points, whereas the DDR5-equipped platform scored 19811 points. This is an immediate 20% performance uplift in multi-core score. It shows that all the cores present in Raptor Lake processors are starving for bandwidth, and a faster memory protocol can bring quite an improvement. As usual, we have to wait to confirm this information with our testing so that we can draw more conclusions.

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(PR) TerraMaster Launches Comprehensive Data Backup & Sync Functions for Ransomware Protection
TerraMaster, a professional brand that specializes in providing innovative storage products for home, businesses and enterprises, launches a comprehensive data backup and sync function to provide bolstered protection. Recently, QNAP NAS device was attacked by a new type of ransomware known as Checkmate. Checkmate attacks via SMB services exposed to the internet and employs a dictionary attack to break accounts with weak passwords. Data protection from ransomware and other cyberattacks is a major concern for NAS users - a concern very much acknowledged by TerraMaster.



Today, TerraMaster releases new single portal folder level data backup and synchronization features for TerraMaster devices. The recently released TOS 5's new applications such as centralized backup, TFSS, and TFM Backup provides a variety of data backup and recovery options.
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