Intel has announced its hotly anticipated 14th gen Core Ultra Meteor Lake based processors
will launch on December 14th, making good on its promise to get the new chips out in
2023. But just barely! I'm James Shrive, this is TechLington, and this is an Intel press release saying the
new CPUs offer all the performance of 13th gen Raptor Lake chips with half the power draw.
With Meteor Lake, Intel finally joins its competitors with its first CPU that uses independently
fabricated chiplets for each component that have been assembled.
While some of these tiles will be created using Intel's bleeding edge Intel 4 process, others
will use TSMC's 5nm process.
It's good too. The chips use a new type of efficiency core, which Intel calls a low power island, designed
to handle light workloads without powering up a more energy-hungry compute tile, reportedly
doubling integrated graphics performance per watt.
December 14th will also be the launch of Intel's faster and more powerful 5th gen Xeon processors,
which they hope will help democratize the AI-enabled Siliconomy, until likewise showed off its
cutting edge new substrate material, glass, which they say will allow for 50% greater
density of chiplets and interconnections.
Amazon held their 2023 devices and services event where they announced that their assistant
ALEXA would finally be getting that LLM glow up glam, infusing her dialogue with naturalistic
pauses, umms, and laughs so you can reenact the plot of her and have a whirlwind romance
with your smart speaker. And if you're not happy with the Ursus, Scarlett Johansson, Alexa will be getting 25 unique
personalities via character.ai, allowing lonely users to roleplay what it's like to have
friends. They're even adding an eye gaze feature, this is unrelated, where users can activate preset
actions by giving Alexa the smolder.
Alexa will also be getting real-time captioning for audio and video calls, and in the US,
Alexa Emergency Assist, a hands-free way to contact emergency services with pre-programmed
critical information like the user's address, medications, and allergies.
It costs $6 a month, but if you don't have the spare cash, you definitely can't pay
for an ambulance anyway. So in terms of actual devices and not just software, Amazon unveiled its next-gen Echo
Frame smart glasses, which amazingly actually look like something a person would intentionally
wear. Otherwise, there was a refresh of Amazon's various gadgets and doodads, including the
Echo Hub, the Euromax 7 router, the Fire TV Stick 4K Max, and the freaky little cameras
Jeff Bezos uses to watch you sleep. Video's DLSS 3.5 debuts this week on September 21st in Cyberpunk 2077 in the lead-up to next
week's launch of its Phantom Liberty DLC.
In addition to DLSS 3's super-resolution, deep learning anti-aliasing, and frame generation,
DLS 3.5 adds ray reconstruction, which uses a supercomputer-trained AI network to generate
higher-quality pixels in-between sampled rays by recognizing lighting patterns from training
data and recreating them during play. But this isn't just about hyper-accurate simulations and picture-perfect aesthetics
while you team up with Idris Elba to rescue the president.
There's reportedly a distinct performance bump, and video claims an 8% frame rate boost
in Cyberpunk 2077 over DLSS 3.0, and early users say the new overdrive ray tracing mode
is less demanding on the GPU. Users will be getting access to DLSS 3.5 this week by a Chaos Vantage, which I'm given
to understand is a creative tool and not an edgy comic book anti-hero or a sex move.
The UK's online safety bill is set to become a law, but while its government touts the
bill as a way to protect the children, its solutions could seriously affect privacy.
The bill mandates online platforms verify users' ages and the only effective methods
to do that risk linking people's browsing history to their legal identity.
This is why a similar Californian law was blocked after the state tried to argue that
collecting face scans to estimate users' age was minimally invasive.
That's like calling a home intruder a surprised house guest.
I Fix It has decided to retroactively drop the iPhone 14's repairability score after
previously calling it the most repairable iPhone in years.
While the phone's hardware technically makes it easy to swap parts, software will prevent
the repaired phone from working properly if Daddy Tim Cook didn't give his blessing.
And he'll only give it if you buy your replacement parts directly from Apple, preventing anyone
from recycling harvested parts. What would Mother Octavia Spencer say, Tim?
New information on the infamous 7nm SOC found in Huawei's Mate 60 Pro phones suggests that
half of the processor cores were designed in-house, with most of the chip's components
vulnerable to current US sanctions replaced with homegrown products.
Despite this, just yesterday, the US Commerce Secretary said they have no evidence Huawei
can manufacture the chips at scale, meaning the Mate 60 Pro will probably only be available
to the most elite exclusive selection of CCP spy targets.
The Danher Corporation, which produces diagnostic machines for tuberculosis, has agreed to
lower the cost of its basic test cartridges by 20% in high TB countries in response to
criticism of its printer ink-like business model.
You know the one where the device is cheap but the ink costs more than a high-end perfume.
Danher claims the new price of $7.97 per test is the at-cost price where they receive no
profit. They have not agreed to lower the cost on their advanced tests used to confirm drug-resistant
TB, which magically does not kill people.
And Elon Musk's Neuralink has received approval for human clinical trials, sign me up, and
is looking to recruit patients with crudgiplegia that also haven't heard about the allegedly
cruel animal trials former Neuralink employees called hack jobs.
Once recruits are found, Neuralink will move forward with what it calls the prime study.
For some reason, Neuralink expects us to believe that prime stands for precise, robotically
implanted brain-computer interface E. In a poor attempt to hide that Elon probably chose
the name to dab on Bezos. And you better dab back on Wednesday for more tech links before we become a Neuralink
exclusive.