In the olden times, technology constantly blew people's mind. Like, fire make warm and cook meat?
Now, computer pretty much alive and soon cook me.
But not this me! Microsoft continues to herald its AI future by secretly putting an AI-assisted super resolution
feature in Windows 11. The tool was first discovered on Twitter by a user at Phantom of Earth,
who posted screenshots from the 26052 preview build of Windows. Of course,
since this was a hidden feature added by Microsoft, not just anyone could find it.
You need to use an external tool to enable it.
The feature can be used to make supported games play more smoothly with enhanced details.
But seems to also work with native Windows apps and even
windowed games, meaning it could potentially support older titles. According to Tom's hardware,
your system needs a GPU with tensor cores or a processor with an NPU. But that's all part of
Microsoft's AI future. Starting this summer, AI processors will become standard for Windows PCs
as part of the major OS overhaul everyone thought would be Windows 12, but is allegedly just an
update to Windows 11 called 24H2, starring Kiefer Sutherland. The International Data Corporation
forecast 60% of PC shipments will be AI PCs within the next three years.
So it sounds like Microsoft will get their dream of a future full of hundreds of AI products
all named co-pilot. There's only one pilot. There are many co-pilots. AMD was secretly funding
a project to make CUDA compatible with Radeon cards for two years. Now, that project is open
developer Andre Yannick originally created Zluda to enable CUDA support on Intel hardware,
but team red reached out to him after he abandoned it to see if he could adapt it to work on their
graphics software stack. Now, apparently Radeon cards can run unmodified CUDA code,
i.e CUDA enabled software can run on AMD GPUs without any input from the software's developers.
Not only does Zluda love it, work on both Windows and GNU slash Linux,
but as mentioned up top, it's now fully open source. AMD decided to stop funding Yannick's
development and due to a clause in his contract, that meant he could fos the hell out of it.
While the software shows promise, there are some caveats. We can't have anything nice.
For example, code for NVIDIA optics, also known as Team Green's ray tracing API,
but it does allow Radeon GPUs to run native CUDA code in Blender 4.0 faster than AMD's own
Radeon HIP code. Some people say AHIP, I say HIP, leading to quicker rendering.
Yannick hasn't necessarily re-abandoned the project, but says without financial backing,
he will only work on improvements he is personally invested in. He's fully self-actualized.
Fortunately, that includes getting DLSS working on Radeon GPUs. Zluda's code is all on GitHub,
so if you want to contribute, get forking started. If you get that joke, I'm so proud of you.
Young Zluda is my rap name. Zluda! Yeah! Apple has apparently decided to settle the lawsuit it
brought against chip startup Reavos two years ago. The Cupertino crew, who wrote this, initially
alleged that Reavos led a coordinated campaign to recruit Apple's chip designers and instructed
the poached employees to steal trade secrets on their way out the door, though the trade secrets
claim was actually dismissed a year later. According to filings, the settlement will allow
Apple to conduct a forensic examination of Reavos systems to recover any confidential information.
Speaking of in-depth analysis, iFixit has published part two of their Vision Pro Teardown,
where they discussed the actual display resolution of the device. Turns out,
the horizontal resolution falls a bit short of the 4K standard, explaining why Apple didn't
refer to their panels as 4K. Plus, the average pixels per degree is 34, like me. While that's
great in terms of modern headsets, it's almost one-third the PPD of an iPhone 15 Pro Max held
one foot away from your face, like me. This may help explain why Mark Gurman thinks it could kill
the iPad as Apple's Mac replacement in several years. According to some of the device's designers,
it'll take four generations for the device to reach its ideal form. I'm guessing that's the
one where it's actually worth what they're charging for it. When it comes to brightening my day,
I always think of one thing. The sun! Ha! If I were to think of two things, the second thing would be
quick bits. According to reports, Xbox Head Phil Spencer, the whole head, had an internal town
hall last week where he told employees they would keep making consoles. And that's great news,
because it means the new reports that Microsoft Surface Team is going to be developing the next
Xbox devices could be legitimate. Specifically, Xbox Insider Mag claims there will be two next-gen
Xbox devices, but only one will be a traditional console. The other will be a dockable handheld
that can both stream games from the cloud and run games locally. Pretty soon, you'll be able to
verbally berate eight-year-olds from the comfort of a coffee shop, where they're not allowed.
NVIDIA has launched a new workstation GPU with the unusual name RTX 2000 A to generation. Not to
be confused with the RTX 20 series of gaming GPUs, nor the RTX A2000, which this card is replacing.
Is that clear? NVIDIA's confusing decisions continue in the specs. The new card's interface
is limited to PCIe 4.0 x8 instead of x16. And while memory has been bumped to 16 gigabytes,
its interface was downgraded from 192 to just 128-bit bus for a 22% lower memory bandwidth overall.
But at $625, the RTX 2000 A to generation is also 22% more expensive than the RTX A2000
when it was launched. So the math is perfectly aligned with what we've come to expect here.
Ten days ago, Google announced that YouTube had hit over 100 million premium subscribers,
and now Google One has reached the same milestone, possibly indicating that the Venn diagram of Google
users willing to pay for an additional cloud storage and to get rid of ads is just a circle.
100 million might sound like a lot, but it's nothing compared to Apple's billion-plus paid
subscribers for Apple Music, Apple One, and iCloud Plus. Honestly, it's kind of weird knowing that
YouTube Premium has fewer subscribers than MrBeast. Engineers at MIT have created a stamp-sized sticker
that monitors the health of a patient's internal organs using ultrasound, or at least it does in
rats. Ultra rats. Just joking. But humans, much like ultra rats, have organs inside their bodies,
so it's still pretty exciting. This small, wearable ultrasound would allow continuous monitoring,
meaning it could catch sudden changes in a transplant patient's condition before it's too late,
especially if they are rodent of some kind. They are so smart. Humans? No, the rats. They figure this out.
And this year's Super Bowl ads were full of AI! Yeah! Several companies decided to shell out
for NFL spots to show off their new fancy software. Microsoft talked about co-pilot for the 17,000th
time. Google showed off an accessibility feature to help the visually impaired take selfies,
and Etsy demonstrated how you can buy cheese for the French. They don't need our cheese.
Coca-Cola took a slightly different tactic by parodying the infamous AI-generated beer commercial
to advertise their new sports drink has no artificial sweeteners because nothing in sport
should be artificial. Everything should be natural, except the amount of head drama.
Actually, it's probably natural. It's paranormal, actually. The ghost in the helmet.
And it's only para-natural for you to come back on Wednesday for more tech news. It comes in
multiple flavors. Just lick your screen and find them all. No, don't. What? Do it.