Nvidia on Monday announced its new GeForce RTX 40 SUPER series GPUs, promising significant performance gains for gaming, creative workflows and artificial intelligence capabilities over previous models. The new lineup includes the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER, RTX 4070 Ti SUPER and RTX 4070 SUPER GPUs. Nvidia said the chips deliver up to 52 shader teraflops, 121 ray tracing teraflops and 836 AI teraflops.

The top-of-the-line RTX 4080 SUPER model will go on sale starting Jan. 31 priced from $999, while the RTX 4070 Ti SUPER and RTX 4070 SUPER will hit shelves on Jan. 24 and Jan. 17 respectively, priced at $799 and $599. The company said the new GPUs can accelerate ray tracing visuals in games by up to 4 times with Nvidia's Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology. DLSS uses AI to boost frame rates in games while maintaining image quality.

Compared to its predecessor, the RTX 4080 SUPER is 1.4 times faster at 4K gaming than Nvidia's previous top gaming GPU, the RTX 3080 Ti, without DLSS enabled, Nvidia said. With DLSS Frame Generation switched on, the performance gap widens to 2 times as fast. The new GPU lineup also promises significant gains in AI workloads often used by creative professionals, such as video generation and image upscaling, Nvidia said.

Long-time Slashdot reader xetdog shared this report from IEEE Spectrum: High in the Andes mountains where the borders of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile intersect, white expanses of salt stretch for thousands of kilometers. Under these flats lie reservoirs of brine that contain upwards of 58% of the world's lithium. For decades, producers have extracted that lithium by pumping the water up to the surface and letting it evaporate until the lithium salts become concentrated enough to filter out. The process takes 12 to 18 months, leaving behind piles of waste containing other metals. It also evaporates nearly 2 million liters of local water resources, harming indigenous communities.

To keep up, many companies are now developing processes to chemically or physically filter out lithium from brines and inject the brine back underground. These direct lithium extraction (DLE) technologies take hours instead of months and could double the production of lithium from existing brine operations. Much as shale extraction did for oil, DLE is a "potential game-changing technology for lithium supply," because it could unlock new sources of lithium, according to a recent report by Goldman Sachs. But in contrast to shale's fracking risks, DLE brings environmental benefits, reducing land and water use, and waste...

In China, a handful of commercial projects already use Chinese DLE innovator Sunresin's technology.
More than 12 startups are pursuing new DLE processes, according to the article, "with the intent of commercial production as early as 2025."

And America's Department of Energy is also investing millions of dollars in new DLE tech "to extract lithium from geothermal brines in the U.S., such as the Salton Sea in California, which the National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates could provide over 24,000 metric tons of lithium a year."

A year ago the Washington Post reported "there are only seven working offshore wind turbines in the entire United States," adding that a massive wind project south of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts "is years behind schedule amid regulatory delays and litigation from opponents."

But this week a local public radio station reported that electricity from America's first large-scale offshore wind project "is officially flowing into Massachusetts and helping to power the New England grid." The Vineyard Wind project achieved "first power" late Tuesday when one operating turbine near Martha's Vineyard delivered approximately five megawatts of electricity to the grid. The company said it expects to have five turbines operating at full capacity in early 2024... Once it's finished sometime in 2024, it will consist of 62 turbines spaced about a mile apart and rising more than 800 feet out of the water. The project will generate up to 800 megawatts of power, or about enough electricity for 400,000 homes in Massachusetts.

Another smaller project near Long Island, South Fork Wind, also began producing electricity in early December. When that project is complete, its 12 turbines will generate about 132 megawatts of power...

Massachusetts, in partnership with Rhode Island and Connecticut, is currently seeking bids for another 3,600 megawatts of offshore wind power... "This is a historic moment for the American offshore wind industry," wrote Gov. Maura Healey. "This is clean, affordable energy made possible by the many advocates, public servants, union workers, and business leaders who worked for decades to accomplish this achievement.
Last year America's seven offshore wind turbines generated "a paltry 42 megawatts," according to the article, "far less than the average natural gas power plant."

The CEO of one of the company's behind the project hailed the last 12 months as "a historic year defined by steel in the water and people at work."

Huawei's newest laptop runs on a chip made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., a teardown of the device showed, quashing talk of another Chinese technological breakthrough. From a report: The Qingyun L540 notebook contains a 5-nanometer chip made by the Taiwanese company in 2020, around the time US sanctions cut off Huawei's access to the chipmaker, research firm TechInsights found after dismantling the device for Bloomberg News. That counters speculation that Huawei's mainland Chinese chipmaking partner, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., may have achieved a major leap in fabrication technique.

Huawei caused a stir in the US and China last August when it released a smartphone with a 7nm processor made by Shanghai-based SMIC. A teardown by the Canada-based research outfit for Bloomberg News showed the Mate 60 Pro's chip was only a few years behind the cutting edge, a feat that US trade curbs were meant to prevent. That revelation spurred celebration across the Chinese tech scene, and a debate in the US about the effectiveness of sanctions.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The DeepMind robotics team has revealed three new advances that it says will help robots make faster, better, and safer decisions in the wild. One includes a system for gathering training data with a "Robot Constitution" to make sure your robot office assistant can fetch you more printer paper -- but without mowing down a human co-worker who happens to be in the way.

Google's data gathering system, AutoRT, can use a visual language model (VLM) and large language model (LLM) working hand in hand to understand its environment, adapt to unfamiliar settings, and decide on appropriate tasks. The Robot Constitution, which is inspired by Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics," is described as a set of "safety-focused prompts" instructing the LLM to avoid choosing tasks that involve humans, animals, sharp objects, and even electrical appliances.

For additional safety, DeepMind programmed the robots to stop automatically if the force on its joints goes past a certain threshold and included a physical kill switch human operators can use to deactivate them. Over a period of seven months, Google deployed a fleet of 53 AutoRT robots into four different office buildings and conducted over 77,000 trials. Some robots were controlled remotely by human operators, while others operated either based on a script or completely autonomously using Google's Robotic Transformer (RT-2) AI learning model.

Qualcomm today unveiled a new Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 chipset, a single-chip architecture that will likely power Apple Vision Pro competitors from Meta, Samsung, Google and HTC, among others. ZDNet reports: Succeeding last year's XR2 Gen 2, the plus variant brings improved GPU and CPU frequency -- up 15% and 20% respectively, support for 4.3K per eye resolution at 90fps, and the ability for headsets to field 12 or more cameras with on-device AI capabilities. The latter allows equipped models to better track user movements and surrounding objects for more immersive (and harmonious) VR and MR experiences. As for efficiency gains, you'll still be getting the 50% improvement as the previous XR2 Gen 2 when stacked against the XR2 Gen 1 platform. Basically, there's no change on that front.

"(Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2) will take XR productivity and entertainment to the next level by bringing spectacularly clear visuals to use cases such as room-scale screens, life-size overlays and virtual desktops," said Hugo Swart, vice president and general manager of XR, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc, in a Thursday press release. Clearly, the new silicon is aimed at headsets that can do it all -- with feature parity to the $3,500 gorilla in the room, Apple's upcoming Vision Pro headset -- though Qualcomm says it'll be priced accessibly for manufacturers to build hardware around.

How affordable will these competing wearables be? Your guess is as good as mine. But considering we've already gotten products like the $500 Meta Quest 3 fielding the slightly less capable XR2 Gen 2 chip, the future of XR may not be as expensive as it seems. The new Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 chipset is made in collaboration with Google and Samsung, both of which bring expertise in the Android ecosystem and developing mobile VR devices. The trio had announced plans to develop an XR platform back in February of 2023, likely in reaction to the then-rumored headset by Apple.

Honda and Mitsubishi are collaborating in a two-year project in Shunan City, Japan, to evaluate the feasibility and environmental benefits of powering a data center with fuel cells taken from electric vehicles. The Register reports: Hydrogen for the fuel cell power station will be provided by a third Japanese company, Tokuyama Corporation, as a byproduct from its salt water electrolysis business, which manufactures about 50,000 tons of sodium hypochlorite each year. The project was proposed by Japan's New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), which promotes the research, development and adoption of industrial, energy and environmental technologies. The objective is to consider ways of reducing costs for organizations to install and operate stationary fuel cell systems, which could ultimately contribute to the decarbonization of the electric power supply. No details were disclosed of the kind of datacenter infrastructure that Mitsubishi will operate as part of this project, so it is unknown how much power the fuel cell power station will be required to supply. [...]

Hydrogen can be considered a clean fuel because it produces only water as a byproduct when consumed in a fuel cell. But the problem is in sourcing the hydrogen. Much commercially produced hydrogen is extracted from methane gas via an energy-intensive process typically powered by fossil fuels. It is likely that the process Tokuyama uses in its salt water electrolysis is ultimately powered by fossil fuels, but the hydrogen is produced as a byproduct and this is currently just a demonstration project to evaluate the feasibility of integrated hydrogen business models. In addition to verifying the use of fuel cells for primary and backup power sources in datacenters, the project will also look at the potential for grid-balancing applications.

smooth wombat writes: The advent of streaming services heralded a new era of movie watching. No longer tied to an inconvenient time at a theater, movies could now be watched at your convenience any time of the day or night in your own home. However, with that convenience comes a sinister side: those same movies disappearing from streaming services. Once the movie is removed from the streaming service you can't watch it again. As a result, more people, particularly younger people, are buying DVDs, and even records, to preserve their ability to watch and listen to what they want when they want. Before his release of Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan encouraged fans to embrace "a version you can buy and own at home and put on a shelf so no evil streaming service can come steal it from you". From the BBC article:

Other directors have chimed in to sing the praises of physical media. James Cameron told Variety:"The streamers are denying us any access whatsoever to certain films. And I think people are responding with their natural reaction, which is 'I'm going to buy it, and I'm going to watch it any time I want.'" Guillermo del Toro posted on X that "If you own a great 4K HD, Blu-ray, DVD etc etc of a film or films you love... you are the custodian of those films for generations to come." His tweet prompted people to reply, sharing evidence of their vast DVD collections. [...]

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Microsoft's MS-DOS (and its IBM-branded counterpart, PC DOS) eventually became software juggernauts, powering the vast majority of PCs throughout the '80s and serving as the underpinnings of Windows throughout the '90s. But the software had humble beginnings, as we've detailed in our history of the IBM PC and elsewhere. It began in mid-1980 as QDOS, or "Quick and Dirty Operating System," the work of developer Tim Paterson at a company called Seattle Computer Products (SCP). It was later renamed 86-DOS, after the Intel 8086 processor, and this was the version that Microsoft licensed and eventually purchased.

Last week, Internet Archive user f15sim discovered and uploaded a new-old version of 86-DOS to the Internet Archive. Version 0.1-C of 86-DOS is available for download here and can be run using the SIMH emulator; before this, the earliest extant version of 86-DOS was version 0.34, also uploaded by f15sim. This version of 86-DOS is rudimentary even by the standards of early-'80s-era DOS builds and includes just a handful of utilities, a text-based chess game, and documentation for said chess game. But as early as it is, it remains essentially recognizable as the DOS that would go on to take over the entire PC business. If you're just interested in screenshots, some have been posted by user NTDEV on the site that used to be Twitter.

According to the version history available on Wikipedia, this build of 86-DOS would date back to roughly August of 1980, shortly after it lost the "QDOS" moniker. By late 1980, SCP was sharing version 0.3x of the software with Microsoft, and by early 1981, it was being developed as the primary operating system of the then-secret IBM Personal Computer. By the middle of 1981, roughly a year after 86-DOS began life as QDOS, Microsoft had purchased the software outright and renamed it MS-DOS. Microsoft and IBM continued to co-develop MS-DOS for many years; the version IBM licensed and sold on its PCs was called PC DOS, though for most of their history the two products were identical. Microsoft also retained the ability to license the software to other computer manufacturers as MS-DOS, which contributed to the rise of a market of mostly interoperable PC clones. The PC market as we know it today still more or less resembles the PC-compatible market of the mid-to-late 1980s, albeit with dramatically faster and more capable components.

"[F]or years it was written off," writes CNN. " 'The economics were just way out,' said Martin Soltau, CEO of the UK-based company Space Solar.

"That may now be changing as the cost of launching satellites falls sharply, solar and robotics technology advances swiftly, and the need for abundant clean energy to replace planet-heating fossil fuels becomes more urgent." There's a "nexus of different technologies coming together right now just when we need it," said Craig Underwood, emeritus professor of spacecraft engineering at the University of Surrey in the U.K. The problem is, these technologies would need to be deployed at a scale unlike anything ever done before... "The big stumbling block has been simply the sheer cost of putting a power station into orbit." Over the last decade, that has begun to change as companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin started developing reusable rockets. Today's launch costs at around $1,500 per kilogram are about 30 times less than in the Space Shuttle era of the early 1980s.

And while launching thousands of tons of material into space sounds like it would have a huge carbon footprint, space solar would likely have a footprint at least comparable to terrestrial solar per unit of energy, if not a smaller, because of its increased efficiency as sunlight is available nearly constantly, said Mamatha Maheshwarappa, payload systems lead at UK Space Agency. Some experts go further. Underwood said the carbon footprint of space-based solar would be around half that of a terrestrial solar farm producing the same power, even with the rocket launch...

There is still a huge gulf between concept and commercialization. We know how to build a satellite, and we know how to build a solar array, Maheshwarappa said. "What we don't know is how to build something this big in space..." Scientists also need to figure out how to use AI and robotics to construct and maintain these structures in space. "The enabling technologies are still in a very low technology readiness," Maheshwarappa said. Then there's regulating this new energy system, to ensure the satellites are built sustainably, there's no debris risk, and they have an end-of-life plan, as well as to determine where rectenna sites should be located. Public buy-in could be another huge obstacle, Maheshwarappa said. There can be an instinctive fear when it comes to beaming power from space.

But such fears are unfounded, according to some experts. The energy density at the center of the rectenna would be about a quarter of the midday sun. "It is no different than standing in front of a heat lamp," Hajimiri said.
The article argues that governments and companies around the world "believe there is huge promise in space-based solar to help meet burgeoning demand for abundant, clean energy and tackle the climate crisis." And they cite several specific examples:

• In 2020 the U.S. Naval Research Lab launched a module on an orbital test vehicle, to test solar hardware in space conditions.

• This year Caltech electrical engineering professor led a team that successfully launched a 30-centimeter prototype equipped with transmitters — and successfully beamed detectable energy down to earth.

• In June the U.K. government announced over $5 million in funding to universities and tech companies "to drive forward innovation" in the space-based solar sector.

• The U.S. Air Force Research Lab plans to launch a small demonstrator in 2025.

• Europe's its Solaris program aims to prove "the technical and political viability of space-based solar, in preparation for a possible decision in 2025 to launch a full development program."

• One Chinese spacecraft designer and manufacturer hopes to send a solar satellite into low orbit in 2028 and high orbit by 2030, according to a 2022 South China Morning News report.

Deliveries of the world's first mass-produced electric vehicle equipped with a sodium-ion battery will begin in January 2024. According to CarNewsChina, they're being produced by JAC Motors, a Volkswagen-backed Chinese automaker, through its new Yiwei EV brand. From the report: The Yiwei EV hatchback will have a cylindrical sodium-ion pack from Beijing-based HiNa Battery and adopt JAC's UE (Unitized Encapsulation) module technology. UE is also known as a honeycomb design because of its appearance. It is another battery structure concept like CATL's CTP (cell-to-pack) or BYD's Blade battery. Yiwei is a new EV brand under Anhui Jianghuai Automobile (JAC), established in 2023. JAC's parent company, Anhui Jianghuai Automobile Group Holdings (JAG), is 50% state-owned, and 50% belongs to Volkswagen Group. The German automotive giant acquired its stake in 2020 in an unprecedented move to invest in China's state-owned car maker.

[...] In February 2023, JAC announced they were the first automaker to put the lithium-free sodium-ion battery on an electric vehicle. That EV was a Sehol E10X hatchback, and the Na+ battery had the following specifications: 25 kWh capacity, 120 Wh/kg energy density (single cell 140 Wh/kg), 3C to 4C charging (10% - 80% in 20 minutes), 252 km (157 miles) range for E10X, and HiNa NaCR32140 cell. Sehol was a brand under Volkswagen Anhui JV, which VW transferred to JAC in 2021. When the Yiwei brand was launched in May 2023, JAC announced that it would ditch the Sehol brand, and all vehicles are being rebadged to JAC or Yiwei. The pictures JAC released today tell us that the new sodium-ion-powered EV is the Sehol E10X. JAC hasn't yet confirmed the name of the new car under the Yiwei brand; it could be Yiwei E10X, but we have to wait for JAC's confirmation.

JAC recently pushed a lot into sodium-ion batteries R&D. During the Shanghai Auto Show in April 2023, the company showcased its first car under the Yiwei brand called Yiwei 3, which was equipped with a sodium-ion battery. However, the EV launched later in June, only with a classic LFP lithium battery, and promised the Na+ variant would come later. The Yiwei 3 is a compact hatchback that competes with Wuling Bingo, BYD Seagull, or ORA Funky Cat. It has two power train options, both front-wheel drive: 70 kW and 100 kW motor. The maximum cruising range is 505 km CLTC with a 51.5 kWh battery.

Melbourne-based developer xssfox has championed a unique "diagonal mode" for monitors by utilizing Linux's xrandr (x resize and rotate) tool, finding a 22-degree tilt to the left to be the ideal angle for software development on her 32:9 aspect ratio monitor. As Tom's Hardware notes, Linux is the "only OS to support a diagonal monitor mode, which you can customize to any tilt of your liking." It begs the question, could 2024 be the year of the Linux diagonal desktop? From the report: Xssfox devised a consistent method to appraise various screen rotations, working through the staid old landscape and portrait modes, before deploying xrandr to test rotations like the slightly skewed 1 degree and an indecisive 45 degrees. These produced mixed results of questionable benefits, so the search for the Goldilocks solution continued. It turns out that a 22-degree tilt to the left was the sweet spot for xssfox. This rotation delivered the best working screen space on what looks like a 32:9 aspect ratio monitor from Dell. "So this here, I think, is the best monitor orientation for software development," the developer commented. "It provides the longest line lengths and no longer need to worry about that pesky 80-column limit."

If you have a monitor with the same aspect ratio, the 22-degree angle might work well for you, too. However, people with other non-conventional monitor rotation needs can use xssfox's javascript calculator to generate the xrandr command for given inputs. People who own the almost perfectly square LG DualUp 28MQ780 might be tempted to try 'diamond mode,' for example. We note that Windows users with AMD and Nvidia drivers are currently shackled to applying screen rotations using 90-degree steps. MacOS users apparently face the same restrictions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Just before the holiday break, the US Energy Information Agency released data on the country's electrical generation. Because of delays in reporting, the monthly data runs through October, so it doesn't provide a complete picture of the changes we've seen in 2023. But some of the trends now seem locked in for the year: wind and solar are likely to be in a dead heat with coal, and all carbon-emissions-free sources combined will account for roughly 40 percent of US electricity production. [...]

At this point last year, coal had produced nearly 20 percent of the electricity in the US. This year, it's down to 16.2 percent, and only accounts for 15.5 percent of October's production. Wind and solar combined are presently at 16 percent of year-to-date production, meaning they're likely to be in a dead heat with coal this year and easily surpass it next year. Year-to-date, wind is largely unchanged since 2022, accounting for about 10 percent of total generation, and it's up to over 11 percent in the October data, so that's unlikely to change much by the end of the year. Solar has seen a significant change, going from five to six percent of the total electricity production (this figure includes both utility-scale generation and the EIA's estimate of residential production). And it's largely unchanged in October alone, suggesting that new construction is offsetting some of the seasonal decline.

Hydroelectric production has dropped by about six percent since last year, causing it to slip from 6.1 percent to 5.8 percent of the total production. Depending on the next couple of months, that may allow solar to pass hydro on the list of renewables. Combined, the three major renewables account for about 22 percent of year-to-date electricity generation, up about 0.5 percent since last year. They're up by even more in the October data, placing them well ahead of both nuclear and coal. Nuclear itself is largely unchanged, allowing it to pass coal thanks to the latter's decline. Its output has been boosted by a new, 1.1 Gigawatt reactor that come online this year (a second at the same site, Vogtle in Georgia, is set to start commercial production at any moment). But that's likely to be the end of new nuclear capacity for this decade; the challenge will be keeping existing plants open despite their age and high costs. If we combine nuclear and renewables under the umbrella of carbon-free generation, then that's up by nearly 1 percent since 2022 and is likely to surpass 40 percent for the first time. "The only thing that's keeping carbon-free power from growing faster is natural gas, which is the fastest-growing source of generation at the moment, going from 40 percent of the year-to-date total in 2022 to 43.3 percent this year," notes Ars.

"Outside of natural gas, however, all the trends in US generation are good, especially considering that the rise of renewable production would have seemed like an impossibility a decade ago. Unfortunately, the pace is currently too slow for the US to have a net-zero electric grid by the end of the decade."

Apple is reinvesting in gaming with advanced Mac hardware, improvements to Apple silicon, and gaming-focused software, aiming not to repeat its past mistakes and capture a larger share of the gaming market. In an article for Inverse, Raymond Wong provides an in-depth overview of this endeavor, including commentary from Apple's marketing managers Gordon Keppel, Leland Martin, and Doug Brooks. Here's an excerpt from the report: Gaming on the Mac in the 1990s until 2020, when Apple made a big shift to its own custom silicon, could be boiled down to this: Apple was in a hardware arms race with the PC that it couldn't win. Mac gamers were hopeful that the switch from PowerPC to Intel CPUs starting in 2005 would turn things around, but it didn't because by then, GPUs started becoming the more important hardware component for running 3D games, and the Mac's support for third-party GPUs could only be described as lackluster. Fast forward to 2023, and Apple has a renewed interest in gaming on the Mac, the likes of which it hasn't shown in the last 25 years. "Apple silicon has changed all that," Keppel tells Inverse. "Now, every Mac that ships with Apple silicon can play AAA games pretty fantastically. Apple silicon has been transformative of our mainstream systems that got tremendous boosts in graphics with M1, M2, and now with M3."

Ask any gadget reviewer (including myself) and they will tell you Keppel isn't just drinking the Kool-Aid because Apple pays him to. Macs with Apple silicon really are performant computers that can play some of the latest PC and console games. In three generations of desktop-class chip design, Apple has created a platform with "tens of millions of Apple silicon Macs," according to Keppel. That's tens of millions of Macs with monstrous CPU and GPU capabilities for running graphics-intensive games. Apple's upgrades to the GPUs on its silicon are especially impressive. The latest Apple silicon, the M3 family of chips, supports hardware-accelerated ray-tracing and mesh shading, features that only a few years ago didn't seem like they would ever be a priority, let alone ones that are built into the entire spectrum of MacBook Pros.

The "magic" of Apple silicon isn't just performance, says Leland Martin, an Apple software marketing manager. Whereas Apple's fallout with game developers on the Mac previously came down to not supporting specific computer hardware, Martin says Apple silicon started fresh with a unified hardware platform that not only makes it easier for developers to create Mac games for, but will allow for those games to run on other Apple devices. "If you look at the Mac lineup just a few years ago, there was a mix of both integrated and discrete GPUs," Martin says. "That can add complexity when you're developing games. Because you have multiple different hardware permutations to consider. Today, we've effectively eliminated that completely with Apple silicon, creating a unified gaming platform now across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Once a game is designed for one platform, it's a straightforward process to bring it to the other two. We're seeing this play out with games like Resident Evil Village that launched first [on Mac] followed by iPhone and iPad."

"Gaming was fundamentally part of the Apple silicon design,â Doug Brooks, also on the Mac product marketing team, tells Inverse. "Before a chip even exists, gaming is fundamentally incorporated during those early planning stages and then throughout development. I think, big picture, when we design our chips, we really look at building balanced systems that provide great CPU, GPU, and memory performance. Of course, [games] need powerful GPUs, but they need all of those features, and our chips are designed to deliver on that goal. If you look at the chips that go in the latest consoles, they look a lot like that with integrated CPU, GPU, and memory." [...] "One thing we're excited about with this most recent launch of the M3 family of chips is that we're able to bring these powerful new technologies, Dynamic Caching, as well as ray-tracing and mesh shading across our entire line of chips," Brook adds. "We didn't start at the high end and trickle them down over time. We really wanted to bring that to as many customers as possible."

Microsoft is working on significant updates to its Surface Pro and Surface Laptop lines. According to Windows Central, new devices "will be announced in the spring and will be marketed as Microsoft's first true next-gen AI PCs." From the report: For the first time, both Surface Pro and Surface Laptop will be available in Intel and Arm flavors, and both will have next-gen NPU (neural processing unit) silicon. Sources are particularly excited about the Arm variants, which I understand will be powered by a custom version of Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X Series chips. Internally, Microsoft is calling next-generation Arm devices powered by Qualcomm's new chips "CADMUS" PCs. These PCs are purpose-built for the next version of Windows, codenamed Hudson Valley, and will utilize many of the upcoming next-gen AI experiences Microsoft is building into the 2024 release of Windows. Specifically, Microsoft touts CADMUS PCs as being genuinely competitive with Apple Silicon, sporting similar battery life, performance, and security. The next Surface Pro and Surface Laptop are expected to be some of the first CADMUS PCs to ship next year in preparation for the Hudson Valley release coming later in 2024.

So, what's changing with the Surface Laptop 6? I'm told this new Surface Laptop will finally have an updated design with thinner bezels, rounded display corners, and more ports. This will be the first time that Microsoft's Surface Laptop line is getting a design refresh, which is well overdue. The Surface Laptop 6 will again be available in two sizes. However, I'm told the smaller model will have a slightly larger 13.8-inch display, up from 13.5 inches on the Surface Laptop 5. Sources say the larger model remains at 15-inches. I'm told Surface Laptop 6 will also have an expanded selection of ports, including two USB-C ports and one USB-A port, along with the magnetic Surface Connect charging port. Microsoft is also adding a haptic touchpad (likely with Sensel technology) and a dedicated Copilot button on the keyboard deck for quick access to Windows Copilot.

The next Surface Pro is also shaping into a big update, although not as drastic as the Surface Laptop 6. According to my sources, the most significant changes coming to Surface Pro 10 are mostly related to its display, which sources say is now brighter with support for HDR content, has a new anti-reflective coating to reduce glare, and now also sports rounded display corners. I've also heard that Microsoft is testing a version of Surface Pro 10 with a slightly lower-resolution 2160 x 1440 display, down from the 2880 x 1920 screen found on previous Surface Pro models. Sources say this lower-resolution panel is only being considered for lower-tier models, meaning the more expensive models will continue to ship with the higher-resolution display. Lastly, I also hear Microsoft is equipping the next Surface Pro with an NFC reader for commercial customers and a wider FoV webcam, which will be enhanced with Windows Studio Effects. It should also be available in new colors. I've also heard we may get an updated Type Cover accessory with a dedicated Copilot button for quick access to Windows Copilot.

Amazon is making plans to produce hydrogen fuel at its fulfillment centers. The retail behemoth partnered with hydrogen company Plug Power to install the first electrolyzer -- equipment that can split water molecules to produce hydrogen -- at a fulfillment center in Aurora, Colorado. From a report: The electrolyzer will make fuel for around 225 fork lift trucks at the site, although Plug says it has the capacity to fuel up to 400 hydrogen fuel cell-powered forklifts. This is the first time Amazon has tried to make its own hydrogen on site, and it's not likely to be the last. "On-site production will make the use of hydrogen even more energy efficient for certain locations and types of facilities," Asad Jafry, Amazon's director of global hydrogen economy, said in a press release announcing the installation of the first electrolyzer yesterday. "Hydrogen is an important tool in our efforts to decarbonize our operations by 2040."

[...] Hydrogen produces water vapor instead of greenhouse gas emissions during combustion, a trait that's made it more attractive to companies and governments working to meet climate goals. The big problem they need to tackle is cleaning up the process of making hydrogen in the first place. Today, most of it is made using fossil fuels, primarily through a reaction between steam and methane. The process releases planet-heating carbon dioxide. Methane leaks are another problem since methane -- also called natural gas -- is an even more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. Plug tries to solve those problems by using electrolyzers to produce hydrogen. Instead of using methane, it uses electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. If that electricity is generated by renewable sources of energy like wind or solar, it's called green hydrogen.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: According to Modvion, the Swedish start-up that has just built the world's tallest wooden turbine tower, using wood for wind power is the future. "It's got great potential," Otto Lundman, the company's chief executive, says as we gaze upwards at the firm's brand new turbine, a short drive outside Gothenburg. It's 150m (492ft) to the tip of the highest blade and we are the first journalists to be invited to have a look inside. The 2 megawatt generator on top has just started supplying electricity to the Swedish grid, providing power for about 400 homes. The dream of Lundman and Modvion is to take the wood and wind much higher. On the horizon near the Modvion project, several very similar-looking turbines are turning. Steel, not wood, is the key material for them, as it is for almost all of the world's turbine towers. Strong and durable, steel has enabled huge turbines and wind farms to be constructed on land and at sea. But steel is not without its limitations, particularly for projects on land. As demand has grown for taller turbines that harvest stronger winds with larger generators, the diameter of the cylindrical steel towers to support them has had to grow too. In a world of road tunnels, bridges and roundabouts, many in the wind industry say getting those huge pieces of metal to turbine sites has become a real headache, in effect limiting how tall new steel turbines can be.

From the outside, there is little obvious difference between the Modvion wooden turbine and its steel cousins. Both have a thick white coating to protect them from the elements and blades made primarily from fiberglass attached to a generator, which produces electricity when it turns. It is only when we go inside the tower that the differences becomes clear. The walls have a curved raw wood finish, not unlike a sauna. The 105m (345ft) tower's strength comes from the 144 layers of laminated veneer lumber (LVL) that make its thick walls. By varying the grain of each of the 3mm-thick layers of spruce, Modvion says it has been able to control the wall's strength and flexibility. "It's our secret recipe," says company co-founder -- and former architect and boat builder -- David Olivegren, with a smile. [...] Lundman and Olivegren tell me their turbine's big selling point is that, by using wood and glue, towers can be built in smaller, more easily transported modules. That will make it much easier to build really tall towers, they say, and to take the pieces to challenging locations.

However, Dr Maximilian Schnippering, head of sustainability at Siemens Gamesa -- one of the worlds largest turbine manufacturers -- says more pieces are likely to mean more trucks, more people and more time to complete the installation. He considers the modular system "an advantage" and that wooden towers can "nicely complement" steel towers. [...] Though wind power is cheaper and cleaner than almost all other forms of electricity generation, making steel involves extremely hot furnaces and almost always the burning of fossil fuels. That means CO2 emissions -- the main driver of climate change. Modvion says using wood instead of steel eliminates the wind turbines' carbon footprint entirely, making them carbon negative. That's because the trees take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere when they are alive and, when they are chopped down, the carbon is stored in the wood. As long as the wood doesn't end up rotting or being burned, the carbon is not released. About 200 trees went into Modvion's turbine tower. They were the same species -- spruce -- that is used for Christmas trees and the company says they are farmed sustainably, meaning when they are harvested more are planted. Modvion hopes to build another even taller turbine soon with plans to open a facility that will produce 100 wooden modular turbines a year in 2027. "The industry is currently putting up 20,000 turbines a year," Lundman says. "Our ambition is that in 10 years time 10% of those turbines -- about 2,000 -- will be wooden."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: The 12VO power standard (PDF), developed by Intel, is designed to reduce the number of power cables needed to power a modern PC, ultimately reducing cost. While industry uptake of the standard has been slow, a new slew of products from MSI indicates that 12VO is gaining traction.

MSI is gearing up with two 12VO-compliant motherboards, covering both Intel and AMD platforms, and a 12VO Power Supply that it's releasing simultaneously: The Pro B650 12VO WiFi, Pro H610M 12VO, and MSI 12VO PSU power supply are all 'coming soon,' which presumably means they'll officially launch at CES 2024. HardwareLux got a pretty good look at MSI's offerings during its EHA (European Hardware Awards) tech tour, including the 'Project Zero' we covered earlier. One of the noticeable changes is the absence of a 24-pin ATX connector, as the ATX12VO connectors use only ten-pin connectors. The publications also saw a 12VO-compliant FSP power supply in a compact system with a thick graphics card.

A couple of years ago, we reported on FSP 650-watt and 750-watt SFX 12VO power supply. Apart from that, there is a 1x 6-pin ATX12VO termed 'extra board connector' according to its manual and a 1x 8-pin 12V power connector for the CPU. There are two smaller 4-pin connectors that will provide the 5V power needed for SATA drives. It is likely each of these connectors provides power to two SATA-based drives. Intel proposed the ATX12VO standard several years ago, but adoption has been slow until now. This standard is designed to provide 12v exclusively, completely removing a direct 3.3v and 5v supply. The success of the new standard will depend on the wide availability of the motherboard and power supplies.

An appeals court on Wednesday temporarily stopped the import ban on Apple's latest Apple Watches, allowing the company to continue selling the wearables. CNBC reports: Apple stopped selling its Series 9 and Ultra 2 watches last week in response to an International Trade Commission order in October that found the blood oxygen sensor in the devices had infringed on intellectual property from Masimo, a medical technology company that sells to hospitals. "The motion for an interim stay is granted to the extent that the Remedial Orders are temporarily stayed," a court filing Wednesday said.

On Monday, the Biden administration declined to pause the ITC ban. Apple filed the appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Tuesday. The company continues to seek a longer stay. The ITC will need to reply by Jan. 10. The stay means Apple may be able to sell the latest models of one of its most important products during the busiest time of the year. Apple Watch sales are reported as part of Apple's wearables business, which reported $39.8 billion in sales in Apple's fiscal 2023, which ended in September.

An anonymous reader shares a report: As Moore's Law slowed to a crawl, chips, particularly those used in AI and high-performance computing (HPC), have steadily gotten hotter. In 2023 we saw accelerators enter the kilowatt range with the arrival of Nvidia's GH200 Superchips. We've known these chips would be hot for a while now -- Nvidia has been teasing the CPU-GPU franken-chip for the better part of two years. What we didn't know until recently is how OEMs and systems builders would respond to such a power-dense part. Would most of the systems be liquid cooled? Or, would most stick to air cooling? How many of these accelerators would they try to cram into a single box, and how big would the box be?

Now that the first systems based on the GH200 make their way to market, it's become clear that form factor is very much being dictated by power density than anything else. It essentially boils down to how much surface area you have to dissipate the heat. Dig through the systems available today from Supermicro, Gigabyte, QCT, Pegatron, HPE, and others and you'll quickly notice a trend. Up to about 500 W per rack unit (RU) -- 1 kW in the case of Supermicro's MGX ARS-111GL-NHR -- these systems are largely air cooled. While hot, it's still a manageable thermal load to dissipate, working out to about 21-24 kW per rack. That's well within the power delivery and thermal management capacity of modern datacenters, especially those making use of rear door heat exchangers.

However, this changes when system builders start cramming more than a kilowatt of accelerators into each chassis. At this point most of the OEM systems we looked at switched to direct liquid cooling. Gigabyte's H263-V11, for example, offers up to four GH200 nodes in a single 2U chassis. That's two kilowatts per rack unit. So while a system like Nvidia's air-cooled DGX H100 with its eight 700 W H100s and twin Sapphire Rapids CPUs has a higher TDP at 10.2 kW, it's actually less power dense at 1.2 kW/RU.