Welcome back to The Tech News Show. You watch instead of Googling stuff, I guess.
I'm Riley Murdoch, but you know, feel free to disagree.
More than 50 Chinese tech companies have announced plans to use a new connector standard
that makes HDMI, DisplayPort, USB4, and Thunderbolt
seem like two cans with a string between them. The appropriately named General Purpose Media Interface,
or GPMI, supports 96 gigabits per second
of data bandwidth and 240 watts of power delivery
over a USB Type-C connector, which beats every other consumer standard on the market.
But there's also a GPMI Type-B connector with double the specs, supporting 192 gigabits per second
and 480 watts. Now, there aren't great pictures of the Type-B,
but it appears to resemble a USB-C plug stretched sideways,
thus making the hole bigger so pictures can slide through more easily.
The computer won't have to fold them in half anymore. The GPMI standard has been licensed
by the USB Implementers Forum, and TV manufacturers like TCL, Hisense, and Huawei
are on board, so GPMI products and cables
could very well arrive on non-Chinese shores
soon enough for the price of $200,000
the way tariffs are going. A modder has managed to flash a Radeon RX9070
with the BIOS of an RX9070 XT,
increasing its power draw and clock speeds in basically the GPU equivalent of the billionaire guy
who injects himself with his son's blood to make him stronger.
He's basically his own son now, and the fabric of time is in danger.
Anyway, the modder, who goes by Gerdy on the German language PC games hardware forums,
found that the XT's BIOS also unlocked
more overclocking headroom, allowing an RX9070 to match the 9070 XT's performance
in 3D marked tests, despite having a lower number of cores.
The hybrid card is apparently stable, although its ultra low power mode doesn't work,
and one of the forum members encountered some freezes
when they tried it in their setup. You know, it's like how the billionaire guy
sometimes has a little seizure where his eyes roll back in his head,
and he sees horrifying visions of his inevitable galactic conquest,
like should he accept his dark destiny, or could he avoid slaughtering billions
to become an immortal worm king? You get glitches with these kind of things.
We're still learning things about the Switch too. For example, Nintendo confirmed
that the console doesn't have Hall Effect joysticks,
despite the original Switch Joy-Cons notoriously having issues with Stick Drift.
Nintendo hasn't said how they addressed that issue, but maybe they used a newer joystick technology
called Tunnelling Magneto Resistance, or TMR,
which the Verge wrote about here, and I'm only really mentioning because it involves quantum mechanics,
which tickles my brain a little bit whenever I hear about it. Despite the Stick Uncertainty, though,
developers told Steven Toteo at Gamephile
they are extremely happy with the console's horsepower,
a claim that vibes well with these screenshots of Cyberpunk 2077 Ultimate Edition
that CD Projekt Red says were taken on the Switch too.
They look good. Even if the Switch 2 looks great, though,
fans are still calling for Nintendo to drop the price.
But as the man chosen at birth to one day become the current Nintendo of America president,
Doug Bowser, told Wired, the company is assessing the impact
of Trump's new tariffs, which they didn't factor into the price of the Switch 2
because they couldn't have, meaning if the price is changing at all,
it ain't going down, all right? Not going down tonight.
Before the quick bits, I'm not saying you should Google stuff
instead of watching the show. I watch almost every episode.
I think they're doing a great, I mean, they're doing their best. Tariffs continue to royal, great word,
the global economy, with Trump threatening to place an extra 50% tariff on China.
If the country doesn't rescind its 34% tariff
that it announced in retaliation for Trump's reciprocal tariffs announced last week.
Snip, snap, snip, snap. It's crazy. The extra 50% would bring the US's total tariffs on China
to 104%, and Trump said the country has until April 9th
to make the change, by which point global stocks may have reached Atlantis.
But hey, humans are smart. We're adapting to the new conditions.
For example, Apple reportedly flew five cargo planes
full of iPhones and other products into the US in the last week of March,
giving their warehouses a few months of supply before those hefty tariffs were put in place.
Hey, big market opportunity for smugglers.
You know, jobs are being created. Over in the UK, a judge has ruled
that Apple's fight with the government over access to its users encrypted data
cannot take place in secret, despite secrecy rules laid out
in the Investigatory Powers Act, which the Home Office used
to demand Apple provide them with a software backdoor.
The ruling is a win for privacy advocates, while another UK law just coming into effect this week
is a win for advocates of skimming online reviews and not realizing halfway through
that it doesn't make any freaking sense. I'm trying to buy a cordless drill,
and this is an essay about a hairdryer?
Is it a two-in-one? I'm wasting so much time.
Colossal Biosciences, the genetic engineering firm
whose woolly mice went a bit viral a few weeks ago,
has now claimed to have successfully brought back
the dire wolf, a species that went extinct
around 11,000 years ago. I'm very much summarizing here,
but the company says they scraped some dire wolf DNA off of some fossils,
combined it with gray wolf DNA, and edited it to get something similar
to a real dire wolf with twin males
who are now about six months old. It's being called the world's first de-extinction,
brought to you by a younger John Hammond who loves hooded leather jackets.
He actually kind of looks like John Snow, which does not bode well for any of us.
As cool as all of this sounds, this company gives me major red flags.
They named the twins Romulus and Remus, which, you know, fine, that's cool.
The mythical founders of Rome, et cetera, followed by a female named Khaleesi.
Blake Lively? They also love meming.
I feel like these people saw Jurassic Park as an instruction manual.
Also, a few years ago, scientists found that dire wolves aren't technically wolves
and are more closely related to African wild dogs,
which don't look like wolves, so I don't know what. Cool, though.
And Kawasaki unveiled the Corleo, a concept vehicle, rideable robot horse cat thing.
It's powered by 150 CC hydrogen-fueled engine,
and it will apparently carry you just fine as it leaps over icy chasms,
something ATV owners have been itching to do, basically, forever.
It's got AI, apparently, so it seems like it could act
like something in between a vehicle and a real horse,
and if it's good, you can feed it an apple.
Like, it's good, like a computer, because it's, oh, and I don't have anything to give you
if you come back on Wednesday for more tech news, unless, well, I'm already giving you something.
It's the tech news. What, you want something else, too?
I just Google it.