New York is expected to be the first state in the U.S. to phase in a ban on fossil fuel equipment in new construction. The ban is included in the $229 billion state budget deal and will likely take effect in 2026 for most new buildings under seven stories and in 2029 for larger buildings. NPR reports: New gas stoves or propane furnaces would be a thing of the past under the proposal, which would require homes and businesses to be fully electric starting in 2026. Existing buildings would be unaffected. Any new construction seven stories and under would not be permitted to install fossil fuel equipment, though large commercial or industrial buildings 100,000 square feet or more would be exempt. By 2029, the ban would apply to all new construction.

According to Bloomberg (paywalled), Microsoft is helping finance AMD's expansion into AI chips. Meanwhile, AMD is working with Microsoft to create an in-house chipset, codenamed Athena, for the software giant's data centers. Paul Thurrott reports: Athena is designed as a cost-effective replacement for AI chipsets from Nvidia, which currently dominates this market. And it comes with newfound urgency as Microsoft's ChatGPT-powered Bing chatbot workloads are incredibly expensive using third-party chips. With Microsoft planning to expand its use of AI dramatically this year, it needs a cheaper alternative.

Microsoft's secretive hardware efforts also come amid a period of Big Tech layoffs. But the firm's new Microsoft Silicon business, led by former Intel executive Rani Borkar, is growing and now has almost 1,000 employees, several hundred of which are working on Athena. The software giant has invested about $2 billion on this effort so far, Bloomberg says. (And that's above the $11 billion it's invested in ChatGPT maker OpenAI.) Bloomberg also says that Microsoft intends to keep partnering with Nvidia too, and that it will continue buying Nvidia chipsets as needed.

An anonymous reader shares a report: We recently covered a study by Secure Data Recovery, an HDD, SSD, and RAID data recovery company, of 2,007 defective hard disk drives it received. It found the average time before failure among those drives to be 2 years and 10 months. That seemed like a short life span, but considering the limited sample size and analysis in Secure Data Recovery's report, there was room for skepticism. Today, Backblaze, a backup and cloud storage company with a reputation for detailed HDD and SSD failure analysis, followed up Secure Data Recovery's report with its own research using a much larger data set. Among the 17,155 failed HDDs Backblaze examined, the average age at which the drives failed was 2 years and 6 months.

Backblaze arrived at this age by examining all of its failed drives and their respective power-on hours. The company recorded each drive's failure date, model, serial number, capacity, failure, and SMART raw value. The 17,155 drives examined include 72 different models and does not include failed boot drives, drives that had no SMART raw attribute data, or drives with out-of-bounds data. If Backblaze only looked at drives that it didn't use in its data centers anymore, there would be 3,379 drives across 35 models, and the average age of failure would be a bit longer at 2 years and 7 months. Backblaze said its results thus far "are consistent" with Secure Data Recovery's March findings. This is despite Backblaze currently using HDDs that are older than 2 years and 7 months.

Export controls imposed by the U.S. on microchips, aiming to hinder China's technological advancements, have had minimal effects on the country's tech sector. While the restrictions have slowed down variants of Nvidia's chips for the Chinese market, it has not halted China's progress in areas like AI, as the reduced performance is still an improvement for Chinese firms, and researchers are finding ways to overcome the limitations. Reuters reports: Nvidia has created variants of its chips for the Chinese market that are slowed down to meet U.S. rules. Industry experts told Reuters the newest one - the Nvidia H800, announced in March - will likely take 10% to 30% longer to carry out some AI tasks and could double some costs compared with Nvidia's fastest U.S. chips. Even the slowed Nvidia chips represent an improvement for Chinese firms. Tencent Holdings, one of China's largest tech companies, in April estimated that systems using Nvidia's H800 will cut the time it takes to train its largest AI system by more than half, from 11 days to four days. "The AI companies that we talk to seem to see the handicap as relatively small and manageable," said Charlie Chai, a Shanghai-based analyst with 86Research.

Part of the U.S. strategy in setting the rules was to avoid such a shock that the Chinese would ditch U.S. chips altogether and redouble their own chip-development efforts. "They had to draw the line somewhere, and wherever they drew it, they were going to run into the challenge of how to not be immediately disruptive, but how to also over time degrade China's capability," said one chip industry executive who requested anonymity to talk about private discussions with regulators. The export restrictions have two parts. The first puts a ceiling on a chip's ability to calculate extremely precise numbers, a measure designed to limit supercomputers that can be used in military research. Chip industry sources said that was an effective action. But calculating extremely precise numbers is less relevant in AI work like large language models where the amount of data the chip can chew through is more important. [...] The second U.S. limit is on chip-to-chip transfer speeds, which does affect AI. The models behind technologies such as ChatGPT are too large to fit onto a single chip. Instead, they must be spread over many chips - often thousands at a time -- which all need to communicate with one another.

Nvidia has not disclosed the China-only H800 chip's performance details, but a specification sheet seen by Reuters shows a chip-to-chip speed of 400 gigabytes per second, less than half the peak speed of 900 gigabytes per second for Nvidia's flagship H100 chip available outside China. Some in the AI industry believe that is still plenty of speed. Naveen Rao, chief executive of a startup called MosaicML that specializes in helping AI models to run better on limited hardware, estimated a 10-30% system slowdown. "There are ways to get around all this algorithmically," he said. "I don't see this being a boundary for a very long time -- like 10 years." Moreover, AI researchers are trying to slim down the massive systems they have built to cut the cost of training products similar to ChatGPT and other processes. Those will require fewer chips, reducing chip-to-chip communications and lessening the impact of the U.S. speed limits.

According to DigiTimes, TSMC will charge an extra 30% more for chips made in American than for chips made in Taiwan. Tom's Hardware reports: TSMC has started discussions with customers about orders and pricing for both overseas plants, which are set to begin commercial production in late 2024. Industry insiders believe that prices of chips produced on TSMC's N4 and N5 process technologies in the U.S. will be 20% -- 30% higher than those in Taiwan, while older process chips produced in Japan's Kumamoto facility on N28/N22 as well as N16/N12 nodes may cost 10% - 15% more than similar chips fabbed in Taiwan.

While American chip designers certainly won't appreciate higher costs on chip production in the U.S., it is likely that they will make chips aimed at government and less price-sensitive applications in Arizona. Therefore, they should be able to pass those extra costs on to their customers without risking their competitive positions. Given the high construction and operational costs of fabs in Japan and the U.S., TSMC is going to pass those extra expenses on to customers to maintain its gross margin target of 53%.

AMD has posted its first quarterly loss in years due to weak sales of processors for client PCs. From a report: Overall, AMD's chip sales dropped 64%. AMD's data center and gaming hardware shipments remained strong and were flat year-over-year, which is quite an achievement given the slowing purchases of servers and weak demand for gaming hardware among consumers. While AMD's management expects the CPU market to start recovering in the second half of the year, the company's outlook for Q2 is not that optimistic.

In the first quarter of FY2023, AMD's revenue amounted to $5.353 billion, which is a 9% decrease compared to the same period in the previous year and a slight decrease compared to the previous quarter. Unfortunately, the company slipped into the red with a $139 million net loss as compared to a $786 million net income in Q1 FY2022. Additionally, AMD's gross margin decreased from 48% in Q1 FY2022 to 44% in Q1 FY2023. [...] AMD's results were a mixed bag as all of the company's business units except its Client Computing business remained more or less flat compared to the first quarter of FY2022, and even remained profitable. In fact, AMD's Data Center unit even managed to modestly increase its revenue, yet its profitability declined.

When Intel debuts its forthcoming Meteor Lake client processors, the company may drop its iconic "i" CPU branding and add a new moniker. Chipzilla today told The Register "We are making brand changes as we're at an inflection point in our client roadmap in preparation for the upcoming launch of our Meteor Lake processors. We will provide more details regarding these exciting changes in the coming weeks." From the report: The Register asked Intel about branding after semiconductor analyst Dylan Patel on Monday tweeted "Imagine you're losing market share when you've been monopoly for decades, and your bright idea is to burn all brand recognition to the ground!" "That's Intel's plan by removing the 'i' in i7 i5 i3. All the decades brand recognition being lit on fire for no reason!"

Patel labelled the rebranding a "horrible very short sighted move" that won't fix Intel's woes and "will cause more harm than good, as many buyers know + recognize the i7 i5 branding, they won't once it's changed." "The new branding sounds bad with ultra strewn about + confusing scheme."

Patel's mention of "Ultra" branding appears to be a reference to this benchmark result for game Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation which lists a processor called "Intel Core Ultra 5 1003H".

Researchers at the University of Minnesota report via Phys.Org: Biocomputing is typically done either with live cells or with non-living, enzyme-free molecules. Live cells can feed themselves and can heal, but it can be difficult to redirect cells from their ordinary functions toward computation. Non-living molecules solve some of the problems of live cells, but have weak output signals and are difficult to fine-tune and regulate. In new research published in Nature Communications, a team of researchers at the University of Minnesota has developed a platform for a third method of biocomputing: Trumpet, or Transcriptional RNA Universal Multi-Purpose GatE PlaTform.

Trumpet uses biological enzymes as catalysts for DNA-based molecular computing. Researchers performed logic gate operations, similar to operations done by all computers, in test tubes using DNA molecules. A positive gate connection resulted in a phosphorescent glow. The DNA creates a circuit, and a fluorescent RNA compound lights up when the circuit is completed, just like a lightbulb when a circuit board is tested.

The research team demonstrated that:

- The Trumpet platform has the simplicity of molecular biocomputing with added signal amplification and programmability.
- The platform is reliable for encoding all universal Boolean logic gates (NAND, NOT, NOR, AND, and OR), which are fundamental to programming languages.
- The logic gates can be stacked to build more complex circuits.

The team also developed a web-based tool facilitating the design of sequences for the Trumpet platform. "Trumpet is a non-living molecular platform, so we don't have most of the problems of live cell engineering," said co-author Kate Adamala, assistant professor in the College of Biological Sciences. "We don't have to overcome evolutionary limitations against forcing cells to do things they don't want to do. This also gives Trumpet more stability and reliability, with our logic gates avoiding the leakage problems of live cell operations."

"It could make a lot of long-term neural implants possible. The applications could range from strictly medical, like healing damaged nerve connections or controlling prosthetics, to more sci-fi applications like entertainment or learning and augmented memory," added Adamala.

According to Windows Latest, Microsoft is working on new ARM chips to compete against Apple Silicon. "I have also spotted some job listings that suggest the company is building its own Silicon-based ARM chips for client devices" writes Mayank Parmar. "Additionally, I understand that Microsoft is optimizing Windows 12 for Silicon-ARM architecture." From the report: These developments coincide with the upcoming launch of Windows 12, which has a special version optimized for silicon and designed to leverage AI capabilities. The job listings (most of them have now been taken down) describe positions related to custom silicon accelerators, System on Chips (SoCs), and high-performance, high-bandwidth designs. This suggests that Microsoft is building its own ARM-based chips, aiming to compete with Apple's M chips lineup in terms of performance and efficiency.

An anonymous reader shared this report from IEEE Spectrum: Transistors inside modern computer chips are several nanometers across, and switch on and off at hundreds of gigahertz. Organic electrochemical transistors, made for biodegradable applications, are milimeters in size and switch at kilohertz rates. The world's first wooden transistor, made by a collaboration of researchers through the Wallenberg Wood Science Center and reported this week in Publications of the National Academy of Sciences, is 3 centimeters across and switches at less than one Hertz. While it may not be powering any wood-based supercomputers anytime soon, it does hold out promise for specialized applications including biodegradable computing and implanting in into living plant material.

"It was very curiosity-driven," says Isak Engquist, a professor at Linköping University who led the effort. "We thought: 'Can we do it? Let's do it, let's put it out there to the scientific community and hope that someone else has something where they see these could actually be of use in reality...'"

Wood has great structural stability while being highly porous and efficiently transporting water and nutrients. The researchers leveraged these properties to create conducting channels inside the wood's pores and electrochemically modulate their conductivity with the help of a penetrating electrolyte. Of the 60,000 species, the team chose balsa wood for its strength, even when one of the components of its structure — lignin — was largely removed to make more room for conducting materials. To remove much of the lignin, pieces of balsa wood were treated with heat and chemicals for five hours. Then, the remaining cellulose-based structure was coated with a conducting polymer...

Since the pores inside wood are made for transporting water, the PEDOT:PSS solution readily spread through the tubes. Electron microscopy and X-ray imaging of the result revealed that the polymer decorated the insides of the tube structures. The resulting wood chunks conducted electricity along their fibers.

The Independent reports: Russian troops who dug trenches in Chernobyl forest during their occupation of the area have been struck down with radiation sickness, authorities have confirmed.

Ukrainians living near the nuclear power station that exploded 37 years ago, and choked the surrounding area in radioactive contaminants, warned the Russians when they arrived against setting up camp in the forest. But the occupiers who, as one resident put it to The Times, "understood the risks" but were "just thick", installed themselves in the forest, reportedly carved out trenches, fished in the reactor's cooling channel — flush with catfish — and shot animals, leaving them dead on the roads...

In the years after the incident, teams of men were sent to dig up the contaminated topsoil and bury it below ground in the Red Forest — named after the colour the trees turned as a result of the catastrophe... Vladimir Putin's men reportedly set up camp within a six-mile radius of reactor No 4, and dug defensive positions into the poisonous ground below the surface.

On 1 April, as Ukrainian troops mounted counterattacks from Kyiv, the last of the occupiers withdrew, leaving behind piles of rubbish. Russian soldiers stationed in the forest have since been struck down with radiation sickness, diplomats have confirmed. Symptoms can start within an hour of exposure and can last for several months, often resulting in death.

This February Ford cut 3,800 jobs, according to CNN, "citing difficult economic conditions and its major push toward electric vehicles... The veteran automaker said the layoffs were primarily triggered by its transition to electric vehicles, and a reduction in 'vehicle complexity.'"

Then in March GM also "unexpectedly cut several hundred jobs to help it trim costs and form a top-tier workforce to guide its transition to an all-electric car company," according to the Detroit Free Press — while later also announcing buyouts to try to "accelerate attrition." A spokesperson explained that GM wanted "to reduce vehicle complexity and expand the use of shared systems between its internal combustion engine and future electric vehicle programs."

Up next is Stellantis, the multinational automotive giant formed when Fiat-Chrysler merged with PSA Group in 2021. It's now "trying to cut its workforce to trim expenses and stay competitive," reports the Associated Press, "as the industry makes the long and costly transition to electric vehicles." Stellantis on Wednesday said it's offering buyouts to groups of white-collar and unionized employees in the U.S., as well as hourly workers in Canada. The cuts are "in response to today's increasingly competitive global market conditions and the necessary shift to electrification," the company said in a prepared statement.

Stellantis said it's looking to reduce its hourly workforce by about 3,500, but wouldn't say how many salaried employees it's targeting. The company has about 56,000 workers in the U.S., and about 33,000 of them could get the offers. Of those, 31,000 are blue-collar workers and 2,500 salaried employees. The company has another 8,000 union workers in Canada, but it would not say how many will get offers...

The offers follow Ford and General Motors, which have trimmed their workforces in the past year through buyout offers. About 5,000 white-collar workers took General Motors up on offers to leave the company this year. Ford cut about 3,000 contract and full-time salaried workers last summer, giving them severance packages.
The article adds that Shawn Fain, the new president of the United Auto Workers union, has told reporters "that he's unhappy with all three companies" over attempts to unionize "new joint-venture factories that will make battery cells for future electric vehicles."

The Detroit Free Press has specifics: He said, for instance, that the wages are lower at the GM and LG Energy Solution Ultium Cells joint venture in Ohio compared with other auto production jobs even though the work is potentially dangerous and requires significant training... The EV transformation is crucial for the future of the industry and its workers, and the union expects its members not to "get lost in the transition," Fain said, noting that jobs are needed "that raise people up, not take us back."

Linux Magazine argues that System76's Pop!_OS offers "something rare: a commercial distribution that was integrated into the hardware, with utilities designed specifically for System76 computers and keyboards." The only other example of an integrated commercial distro of which I am aware is Purism, a company in the same niche... With hardware and software coming from the same source — what business calls vertical integration — distributions like System76/Pop!_OS offer Linux users their first experiences with what Windows and macOS users have always enjoyed — to say nothing of the closest they can currently get to open hardware. Could Linux be finally becoming mainstream at last?
They interviewed System76 CEO Carl Richell (along with a marketing director and media relations manager), who remembered how System76 was actually founded in Carl's basement around 2005: He wanted to show the world how far Linux and open source software had come by delivering it preinstalled on high-quality computers backed by caring, knowledgeable customer support. Carl felt that making Linux computers that highlight the work of the community would be a great way to introduce the broader public to open source technology and its potential...

LM: What other hardware might System76 offer in the future?

S76: We are in the research and development process of designing our own in-house laptop. We'll eventually refresh our Meerkat mini desktop with a new Thelio-style aesthetic. That project will start sometime after our first in-house laptops start shipping. [In addition,] Launch keyboards and the System76 Keyboard Configurator work on macOS and Windows! We've also prepared ISO layouts for most Launch models but don't have a time frame for release.

LM: What are you willing to say at this point about the company's future directions?

S76: We're developing COSMIC DE — a desktop environment written in Rust — as well as a prototype for an open hardware laptop manufactured in-house. Finally, Nebula, a line of computer cases based on Thelio desktops will be arriving in the coming months.
My favorite line from the interview? "Seeing a flat sheet of aluminum transformed into a beautiful desktop is strikingly rewarding."

Sony says it sold a total of 38.4 million PlayStation 5 consoles, according to the company's latest earnings release. In the first three months of the year, it shipped 6.3 million units -- "more than triple what the company shipped in the same quarter the previous year (2 million)," reports The Verge. From the report: On the software side things were more mixed, Bloomberg notes. Revenue from game software was up overall, but units shipped fell from 70.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2021 to 68 million in the same quarter of 2022. PlayStation Network monthly active users were up slightly from 106 million to 108 million, but the number of PlayStation Plus subscribers were flat at 47.4 million.

This disparity partly reflects the lack of major first-party games releases in the quarter. But there are also concerns that the PS5's earlier hardware supply issues are having a knock on effect on software sales and subscriptions, which are important if the company wants to build a "virtuous cycle" of mutually reinforcing console and game sales. CNBC notes that the company reported an operating profit of a record 1.21 trillion yen (around $8.9 billion) for the year, with revenue in the quarter rising 35 percent to 3.06 trillion yen (around $22.5 billion).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: There's a new fast-charging network coming to North America. It's called Greenlane, and it's a $650 million joint venture between Daimler, NextEra Energy Resources, and a BlackRock investment fund. But it's unlikely you'll recharge your passenger EV at a Greenlane site any time soon -- this new network is being designed specifically for medium- and heavy-duty commercial EVs. [...] Based on the company's renderings, Greenlane's sites will be much more comfortable for big rigs. The first of these sites will be in Southern California, and Greenlane says it will build out a network along critical freight routes on the East and West Coasts, as well as in Texas. To begin with, the company will focus on commercial EV recharging, but refueling infrastructure for hydrogen fuel cell EVs will follow. In time, Greenlane plans to add chargers for passenger (or light-duty) EVs. "Greenlane is designed to begin to tackle one of the greatest hurdles to the trucking industry's decarbonization -- infrastructure," said John O'Leary, Daimler Trucks North America's president and CEO.

"The nation's fleets can only transform with the critical catalyst of publicly accessible charging designed to meet the needs for medium- and heavy-duty vehicles. Together with our strong partners, BlackRock and NextEra Energy Resources, we are launching Greenlane to address the unique demands of the industry, support our mutual customers, and provide a dual benefit to all electric vehicle drivers who will be able to utilize this new network. We're excited to take this next step and look forward to sharing more of Greenlane's plans in the future," O'Leary said.

Taiwan's top chip design company MediaTek is focusing more resources on chips for cars and AI computing as its smartphone clients face a supply glut and inflation and macroeconomic uncertainty dent demand for consumer electronics. From a report: "We are definitely moving our resources very, very rapidly towards the automotive and computing areas, because those areas will provide our growth in the next three to five years," MediaTek Chief Executive Rick Tsai told an earnings call. "In this very demanding environment, we are not reducing people. We're not increasing either. The critical thing is to allocate those precious resources," he said. Tsai said everyone, including MediaTek, was rushing to claim that they were able to support generative artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT. "We're confident that we will be able to provide the capability to our customers," Tsai said. MediaTek is investing heavily in AI because the new areas the company is focusing on are all related to computing, Tsai said. The development of autonomous vehicles, for instance, requires AI chips.

UK fusion company Tokamak Energy claims to have made a breakthrough in fusion magnets, developing technology capable of withstanding the electromagnetic bombardment from a fusion reaction while holding the reaction in place. It plans to put its technology to the test at a U.S. gamma ray facility in the desert. The Register reports: At its Oxford headquarters, Tokamak Energy, which is collaborating with the UK government's nuclear fusion program, has built a specialist gamma radiation cryostat system, designed around a vacuum device which insulates the magnets from fusion energy. The system is now set to be disassembled, shipped, and rebuilt at the Gamma Irradiation Facility based at the US Department of Energy's Sandia Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Tokamak Energy said Sandia was one of the few places in the world capable of housing the system while exposing the company's superconducting magnets to gamma radiation comparable with the expected emissions of a fusion power plant. Research and analysis on sets of individual magnets will run for six months at the New Mexico facility, which is so powerful it can do a 60-year lifetime test in just two weeks, Tokamak Energy said. The company recently signed an agreement with UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) to jointly develop technology, and share resources and equipment for the development of a Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Last spring, engineers in Barcelona packed up the sperm-injecting robot they'd designed and sent it by DHL to New York City. They followed it to a clinic there, called New Hope Fertility Center, where they put the instrument back together, assembling a microscope, a mechanized needle, a tiny petri dish, and a laptop. Then one of the engineers, with no real experience in fertility medicine, used a Sony PlayStation 5 controller to position a robotic needle. Eyeing a human egg through a camera, it then moved forward on its own, penetrating the egg and dropping off a single sperm cell. Altogether, the robot was used to fertilize more than a dozen eggs. The result of the procedures, say the researchers, were healthy embryos—and now two baby girls, who they claim are the first people born after fertilization by a "robot."

The startup company that developed the robot, Overture Life, says its device is an initial step toward automating in vitro fertilization, or IVF, and potentially making the procedure less expensive and far more common than it is today. Right now, IVF labs are multimillion-dollar affairs staffed by trained embryologists who earn upwards of $125,000 a year to delicately handle sperm and eggs using ultra-thin hollow needles under a microscope. But some startups say the entire process could be carried out automatically, or nearly so. Overture, for instance, has filed a patent application describing a "biochip" for an IVF lab in miniature, complete with hidden reservoirs containing growth fluids, and tiny channels for sperm to wiggle through.

"Think of a box where sperm and eggs go in, and an embryo comes out five days later," says Santiago Munne, the prize-winning geneticist who is chief innovation officer at the Spanish company. He believes that if IVF could be carried out inside a desktop instrument, patients might never need to visit a specialized clinic, where a single attempt at getting pregnant can cost $20,000 in the US. Instead, he says, a patient's eggs might be fed directly into an automated fertility system at a gynecologist's office. "It has to be cheaper. And if any doctor could do it, it would be," says Munne.

According to The Verge, Amazon is shuttering its health-focused Halo division. All three Halo products will be discontinued and portions of the Halo team will be laid off. From the report: "We have made the difficult decision to wind down the Halo program, which will result in role reductions," Melissa Cha, Amazon's VP of smart home and health, told staffers in an email obtained by The Verge. "More recently, Halo has faced significant headwinds, including an increasingly crowded segment and an uncertain economic environment. Although our customers love many aspects of Halo, we must prioritize resources and maximize benefits to customers and the long-term health of the business."

"We continually evaluate the progress and potential of our products to deliver customer value, and we regularly make adjustments based on those assessments," Amazon spokesperson Kristy Schmidt told The Verge in an email. "We recently made the difficult decision to stop supporting Amazon Halo effective July 31, 2023. We are incredibly proud of the invention and hard work that went into building Halo on behalf of our customers, and our priorities are taking care of our customers and supporting our employees." The company says it will refund customers who bought a Halo devices or accessory band in the last 12 months. "All unused prepaid Halo subscription fees will be refunded, and users will no longer be charged," adds The Verge. Early adopters, like myself, are out of luck.

In related news, Amazon kicked off another round of layoffs today, impacting its cloud computing and human resources divisions.

In early April with the start of previews for "Windows Frontline" -- a service that provides a single license for frontline employees to use up to three Cloud PCs, Microsoft floated the idea that businesses should buy fewer PCs. The Register reports: The "Frontline" name hints at its purpose: Microsoft thinks this license will benefit organizations that employ shift workers in roles like customer support or healthcare. Microsoft imagines shift workers will log on for eight hours, then the next worker on duty will do likewise, and advances this as a fairer way to charge than assuming cloud PCs are used 24x7. To burnish that argument, Microsoft's launch material for Windows Frontline included research (PDF) by tech sustainability consultancy Px3 that tries to answer the question "Can modern work applications and endpoints abate end user computing greenhouse gas emissions and drive climate action?" The answer is "Yes," when one considers cloudy PCs to be "modern endpoints."

The research reaches that conclusion with analysis of the energy consumption of desktop computers, laptops, tablets, and thin clients, compared to the impact of running a Cloud PC. The research also considers bring your own PC plans that see business fund the acquisition of PCs that their staff use for personal and employment purposes, meaning fewer devices need to be summoned into existence and fewer resources are consumed because users operate one machine instead of two. Px3 instead imagines that end users and their sole device to access a Windows365 Cloud PC when they're on the clock. Doing so would mean corporate PC replacement cycles could stretch to eight years!

Readers will not be surprised that the research found the combination of Windows365 and a bring your own PC plan has significantly lower environmental impact and is therefore a jolly good idea. The research's concluding paragraph states "it is reasonable to state that modern work applications and endpoint computers not only abate GHG emissions, they are perhaps critical to securing a sustainable future." That's perhaps a little overblown but the point is made: slowing consumption is a good idea and it's now possible to turn down the speed of the PC upgrade treadmill.