An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, is developing a smartwatch with a front-facing camera and rounded screen, according to an image of the device found inside one of the tech giant's iPhone apps. The photo shows a watch with a screen and casing that's slightly curved at the edges. The front-facing camera -- similar to what you'd see on a smartphone -- appears at the bottom of the display, and there's a control button for the watch on the right side. The image was found inside of the company's app for controlling its new smart glasses launched in partnership with Ray-Ban. The picture was located by app developer Steve Moser and shared with Bloomberg News.

The watch has a detachable wrist strap and what appears to be a button at the top of the watch case. Its large display mimics the style of Apple's watch -- rather than the more basic fitness trackers sold by Google's Fitbit and Garmin. The camera suggests the product will likely be used for videoconferencing, a feature that would make Meta's device stand out. Apple's smartwatch doesn't have a camera, nor do rival products from companies such as Samsung. Facebook has been planning to launch its first watch as early as 2022, but a final decision on timing hasn't been made yet and the debut could be later, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The company is working on three generations of the product aimed at different release time frames, the person said. The device in the image could ultimately represent a version that is never released, but it's the first evidence of the company's work on the project. Not only does the code inside the software of the watch indicate it'll work with iOS and Android devices, but it may also be used as an input device or accessory for the company's VR and AR headsets.

Physicists in China claim they've constructed two quantum computers with performance speeds that outrival competitors in the U.S., debuting a superconducting machine, in addition to an even speedier one that uses light photons to obtain unprecedented results, according to a recent study published in the peer-reviewed journals Physical Review Letters and Science Bulletin. Interesting Engineering reports: The supercomputer, called Jiuzhang 2, can calculate in a single millisecond a task that the fastest conventional computer in the world would take a mind-numbing 30 trillion years to do. The breakthrough was revealed during an interview with the research team, which was broadcast on China's state-owned CCTV on Tuesday, which could make the news suspect. But with two peer-reviewed papers, it's important to take this seriously. Pan Jianwei, lead researcher of the studies, said that Zuchongzhi 2, which is a 66-qubit programmable superconducting quantum computer is an incredible 10 million times faster than Google's 55-qubit Sycamore, making China's new machine the fastest in the world, and the first to beat Google's in two years.

The Zuchongzhi 2 is an improved version of a previous machine, completed three months ago. The Jiuzhang 2, a different quantum computer that runs on light, has fewer applications but can run at blinding speeds of 100 sextillion times faster than the biggest conventional computers of today. In case you missed it, that's a one with 23 zeroes behind it. But while the features of these new machines hint at a computing revolution, they won't hit the marketplace anytime soon. As things stand, the two machines can only operate in pristine environments, and only for hyper-specific tasks. And even with special care, they still make lots of errors. "In the next step we hope to achieve quantum error correction with four to five years of hard work," said Professor Pan of the University of Science and Technology of China, in Hefei, which is in the southeastern province of Anhui.

AnandTech reviews the recently unveiled M1 Pro and M1 Max chips : The M1 Pro and M1 Max change the narrative completely -- these designs feel like truly SoCs that have been made with power users in mind, with Apple increasing the performance metrics in all vectors. We expected large performance jumps, but we didn't expect the some of the monstrous increases that the new chips are able to achieve. On the CPU side, doubling up on the performance cores is an evident way to increase performance -- the competition also does so with some of their designs. How Apple does it differently, is that it not only scaled the CPU cores, but everything surrounding them. It's not just 4 additional performance cores, it's a whole new performance cluster with its own L2. On the memory side, Apple has scaled its memory subsystem to never before seen dimensions, and this allows the M1 Pro & Max to achieve performance figures that simply weren't even considered possible in a laptop chip. The chips here aren't only able to outclass any competitor laptop design, but also competes against the best desktop systems out there, you'd have to bring out server-class hardware to get ahead of the M1 Max -- it's just generally absurd.

On the GPU side of things, Apple's gains are also straightforward. The M1 Pro is essentially 2x the M1, and the M1 Max is 4x the M1 in terms of performance. Games are still in a very weird place for macOS and the ecosystem, maybe it's a chicken-and-egg situation, maybe gaming is still something of a niche that will take a long time to see make use of the performance the new chips are able to provide in terms of GPU. What's clearer, is that the new GPU does allow immense leaps in performance for content creation and productivity workloads which rely on GPU acceleration. To further improve content creation, the new media engine is a key feature of the chip. Particularly video editors working with ProRes or ProRes RAW, will see a many-fold improvement in their workflow as the new chips can handle the formats like a breeze -- this along is likely going to have many users of that professional background quickly adopt the new MacBook Pro's. For others, it seems that Apple knows the typical MacBook Pro power users, and has designed the silicon around the use-cases in which Macs do shine. The combination of raw performance, unique acceleration, as well as sheer power efficiency, is something that you just cannot find in any other platform right now, likely making the new MacBook Pro's not just the best laptops, but outright the very best devices for the task. It's a comprehensive review, and Intel should be panicking.

China is targeting a clean energy goal of reducing fossil fuel use to below 20% by 2060, according to an official plan published by state media. The Guardian reports: The cabinet document, released on Sunday, follows a pledge by President Xi Jinping to wean the world's biggest polluter off coal, with a target of peaking carbon emissions by 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality 30 years later. But the country has been criticized for pushing ahead with opening dozens of new coal-fired power plants. Authorities have also been wanting to ramp up production, with coal prices surging and supplies running low, both factors behind recent power outages. The guidelines come as countries gear up for a new round of climate talks in Glasgow starting on 31 October, from which Xi will be conspicuously absent. China faces a struggle to wean itself off coal, which fuels nearly 60% of its energy-hungry economy.

But on Sunday guidelines published by China's official Xinhua news agency laid out a host of targets in its path towards carbon neutrality. Among them was the proportion of non-fossil fuel consumption reaching about 25% of total energy use by 2030 -- when the nation targets peak emissions. By then, carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP would have dropped by more than 65% from 2005 levels, while the total installed capacity of wind and solar power is targeted to reach more than 1,200 gigawatts, Xinhua said. The guidelines also reiterated an earlier aim for carbon emissions per unit of GDP to fall 18% in 2025, from 2020 standards.

The US Naval Research Laboratory (AFL) is developing an Argon Fluoride (ArF) laser that may one day make fusion power a practical commercial technology. New Atlas reports: The wide-bandwidth ultraviolet laser is designed to have the shortest laser wavelength that can scale up to power a self-sustaining fusion reaction. [...] The NRL's ArF laser is intended for a test facility based on the principle of Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF). In this, a bead of deuterium or tritium, which are heavy isotopes of hydrogen, is fired upon by multiple lasers, heating and compressing it in a fraction of a second to such an extent that the hydrogen atoms implode, fuse together, and release enormous amounts of energy.

The new deep ultraviolet laser, also known as a laser driver, is claimed to transfer energy to the fuel bead with greater efficiency and produces much higher temperatures to generate the implosion. Using radiation hydrodynamics simulations the NRL scientists say that performance could be increased a hundredfold with an efficiency of 16 percent, compared to only 12 percent from the next most efficient krypton fluoride laser. Because of these improvements, the ArF laser could lead to smaller and less expensive fusion power plants. However, the team stresses that there is still a long way to go before fusion is hooked up to the national grid. The laser will need to provide the required energy, repetition rate, precision, and billion-shot class reliability for a practical plant.

To move towards this, the laboratory is running a three-phase program with the first dedicated to the basic science and technology of the ArF laser. This will be followed by phase two, which will concentrate on building and testing a full-scale high-energy ArF laser, and then phase three where an implosion facility consisting of 20 to 30 lasers will be constructed. "The advantages could facilitate the development of modest size, less expensive fusion power plant modules operating at laser energies less than one megajoule," says Steve Obenschain, Ph.D., a research physicist at NRL. "That would drastically change the existing view on laser fusion energy being too expensive and power plants being too large." The research was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: The reign of Apple's M1 SoC at the top of the Geekbench speed benchmarks may soon be over with the impending arrival of Intel's 12th-generation Alder Lake mobile processors. Hardware site Wccftech appears to have been leaked Intel's upcoming Core i9-12900HK mobile CPU, and has now revealed the first benchmarks. The results show Intel's mobile CPU narrowly outperforming Apple's flagship 10-core M1 Max, which also integrates a 32-core GPU and 64GB of unified memory.

In these latest tests, the Core i9-12900HK outperforms the M1 Max on both single-core and multi-core benchmarks. The margin is slim, but is important for Intel since Apple ditched its CPUs for its own designs in new MacBooks. Intel's Alder Lake CPU didn't beat the M1 Max by much, with respective single-core scores of 1851 and 1785. It beat the Core i9-11980HK and AMD's top mobile CPU, the Ryzen 5980HX, by a bigger margin: the latter two CPUs saw scores of 1616 and 1506, respectively. In the multi-core benchmark, the Core i9-12900HK scored 13256 versus the M1 Max's score of 12753. Again, it trounced AMD's 5980HX, which scored 8217. Wccftech's Alder Lake benchmarks were run using Windows 11, so it's possible Thread Director's hardware scheduling influenced the results.

Long-time Slashdot reader TuringTest writes: The mixed AR/VR standalone headset Lynx R1, which is undergoing an already-funded Kickstarter campaign, got this week its first third-party hands-on review by independent reviewers Cas and Chary VR.

Check also the video that the company released yesterday demonstrating for the first time the combined color pass-through AR, VR and its incorporated Ultraleap hand-tracking capabilities of the device.

This week the U.S. Air Force announced that it's chosen Alaska's Eielson Air Force Base as the site for its first "micro" nuclear reactor test program.

The Drive reports: The U.S. military, as a whole, together with the Department of Energy has been increasingly looking into micro-reactor designs as possible ways to meet ever-growing electricity demands, including for units on the battlefield, as well as to help cut costs and improve general operational efficiency by reducing reliance on fossil fuels. The base is situated deep within the interior of Alaska near the city of Fairbanks and is around 110 miles south of the Arctic Circle [and 26 miles from Fairbanks].

It is not clear exactly what the specifications might be for the reactor that is now set to be constructed at Eielson... The Air Force did say that the project in question had been initiated in response to language in the annual defense policy bill, or National Defense Authorization Act for the 2019 Fiscal Year and that the goal is for the micro-reactor to be fully operational by the end of 2027. This would seem to indicate that this reactor is the one that the Office of the Secretary of Defense's Strategic Capabilities Office is leading the development of as part of an effort known as Project Pele. The goal of that project, which started in 2019 and that you can read more about here, is to demonstrate a small reactor capable of producing between one and five megawatts of power...

In March, the Pentagon awarded contracts for prototype Project Pele reactors to X-Energy and BWX Technologies. These deals cover the continued maturation of the respective designs over the next two years, with the expectation being that a winning design will be selected afterward. The hope is that work on an actual microreactor will begin by the end of the 2022 Fiscal Year...

It is worth pointing out that 19,780 acres associated with Eielson are already designated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as a so-called "Superfund site," due to existing toxic chemical contamination related to "closed and active unlined landfills, shallow trenches where weathered tank sludge was buried, a drum storage area, and other disposal and spill areas."
Waste from the micro-reactor "will be subject to the same rigorous storage and control requirements of the commercial nuclear industry," explains an Air Force FAQ. (Though more specifically, it says that "Used fuel will be stored on-site using NRC-licensed storage casks pending a decision on the ultimate disposition of commercial spent fuel.") The FAQ also notes the reactor will not be connected to the commercial grid.

The Drive points out that currently the Air Force has just been using a fleet of diesel locomotives that bring the base trainloads of coals.

The Guardian reports: She has been described as "a vision of the future" who is every bit as good as other abstract artists today, but Ai-Da — the world's first ultra-realistic robot artist — hit a temporary snag before her latest exhibition when Egyptian security forces detained her at customs.

Ai-Da is due to open and present her work at the Great Pyramid of Giza on Thursday, the first time contemporary art has been allowed next to the pyramid in thousands of years. But because of "security issues" that may include concerns that she is part of a wider espionage plot, both Ai-Da and her sculpture were held in Egyptian customs for 10 days before being released on Wednesday, sparking a diplomatic fracas... According to Aidan Meller, the human force behind Ai-Da, border guards detained Ai-Da at first because she had a modem, and then because she had cameras in her eyes (which she uses to draw and paint). "I can ditch the modems, but I can't really gouge her eyes out," he said.

She was finally cleared through customs on Wednesday evening, hours before the exhibition was due to start, with the British embassy in Cairo saying they were "glad" the case had been resolved...

Meller, an Oxford gallerist, said he always hoped his project would prompt debate about the rapid rise of AI technology. "She is an artist robot, let's be really clear about this. She is not a spy. People fear robots, I understand that. But the whole situation is ironic, because the goal of Ai-Da was to highlight and warn of the abuse of technological development, and she's being held because she is technology. Ai-Da would appreciate that irony, I think."

Zack Nelson decided to go back in time and add a suitably classic storage medium to a retrocomputing project, in the form of a cassette interface. Hackaday reports: The cassette player he had available was a Pearlcorder L400, which uses the smaller microcassette instead of the familiar audio tapes used in your Walkman or boombox. [Zack] designed the entire thing from the ground up: first he decided to use differential Manchester encoding, which provides immunity against common disturbances like speed variations (which cause wow and flutter). The data is encoded in the frequency range from 1 kHz to 2 kHz, which suits the bandwidth of the cassette player. Next, he designed the interface between the computer and the tape recorder; built from an op-amp and a comparator with a handful of discrete components, it filters the incoming signal and clips it to provide a clean digital signal to be read out directly by the computer.

The system is demonstrated by hooking it up to an Arduino Nano, which reads out the data stream at about 3000 baud. The noise it makes should bring back memories to anyone brought up with the "PRESS PLAY ON TAPE" message.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Tim De Chant: Over the last year and a half, as the pandemic has everyone turned to their screens, demand has surged for devices (phones and laptops) and cloud services (Netflix and Zoom), all powered by a range of advanced semiconductors. Manufacturers have raced to squeeze more chips out of their fabs, but many were running near their limits before the pandemic. Still, Intel and its competitors didn't rush to build new fabs -- fabs are startlingly expensive, and without continued demand, semiconductor firms are loath to build more. But now, as the global pandemic continues to disrupt supply chains, chipmakers have decided that the current spike in demand isn't going away. Intel's $20 billion investment [to build two new chip factories in Chandler, Arizona] is only one example. Samsung announced in May that it would spend $151 billion over the next decade to boost its semiconductor capacity. TSMC made a similar announcement in April, pledging to invest $100 billion in the next three years alone.

The investments required to stay at the leading edge -- where the most advanced chips are made -- has whittled down the number of semiconductor competitors from more than 20 in 2001 to just two today. "There's really only so much room at the leading edge, just because of the huge capital costs involved," said Will Hunt, a research analyst at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology. That cost is driven by the price of the equipment that's required to etch ever-smaller features onto chips. A few years ago, the industry began to use extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) to shrink transistor sizes. EUV machines are marvels of physics and engineering, and one tool costs upwards of $120 million. To stay relevant, companies will need to buy a dozen or more annually for the next several years. For those sorts of investments to make sense, semiconductor manufacturers must produce and sell an enormous volume of chips. "When you have volume orders, then you can do yield experiments, you can improve your yield, and yield is everything because that's how you cover your costs," said Willy Shih, a professor of management at Harvard Business School. Which is why Intel, under [Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger], is doing something now that it historically has shunned. "We are now a foundry," Gelsinger said at the Arizona groundbreaking. In the coming years, he said, Intel will "open the doors of our fab wide for the community at large to serve the foundry needs of our customers -- many of them US companies that are dependent on solely having foreign supply sources today."

But becoming a leading-edge foundry isn't just about building fabs and telling customers you've got space to make their chips. Gelsinger will have to change Intel's culture and, to some extent, its technology, both of which are deep-seated. "He has to turn a huge ship around," said Robert Maire, president of Semiconductor Advisors. In the coming years, Intel has several challenges to master at once. As the company rolls out a new business model, it also needs to redouble its R&D efforts while still being careful with cash flow. (Intel has fallen so far behind that it now plans to outsource production of its most advanced chips -- and a portion of the profits that accompany them -- to TSMC.) The transition will demand intense focus. "The foundry business could be a distraction," Shih said. At the same time, he added, Apple, Google, Amazon, and other companies are moving away from Intel's standardized chips toward their own customized designs. If Intel doesn't change with the times, it risks being left behind. "There will be many challenges, and there will be tests that will face them," Shih said. "It's going to be hard."

The new 16-inch MacBook Pro with the M1 Max Apple Silicon chip will feature a new High Power Mode for intensive, sustained workloads, according to Apple. MacRumors reports: This new setting is the opposite of "Low Power Mode," which aims to decrease system performance to prolong battery life. The new mode will only be available on the 16-inch MacBook Pro with the M1 Max chip, not the 14-inch model or models with the M1 Pro. Text within the macOS Monterey beta reads, "Your Mac will optimize performance to better support resource-intensive tasks. This may result in louder fan noise." The new mode is not likely to be used in typical work cases, but instead when users may be rendering larger files or graphically intensive tasks that require an added boost of performance. The new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros both include improved thermal architecture, but Apple says the new and improved fans are not likely to be used by most users in day-to-day use.

For the first time, the price of a Raspberry Pi single-board computer is increasing and we have the global supply chain shortages to thank for it. PCMag reports: Eben Upton, chief executive of Raspberry Pi Trading, made the announcement today, but also made it clear the price increase is only temporary and only impacts one model of the Raspberry Pi 4. In February last year, the price of the Raspberry Pi 4 2GB dropped from $45 to $35 "permanently" and the 1GB model was discontinued. The 2GB model is reverting back to $45 and the 1GB model is making a comeback for industrial customers at its previous $35 price. The reason for this is one of supply chain challenges, with Upton confirming they will only manage to match 2020's shipments of around seven million units this year. The main shortages have been for the Raspberry Pi Zero and Raspberry Pi 4 2GB.

We don't know how long the price increase will last, but Upton was upbeat: "The good news is that we've been able to hold the line on pricing for all but one of our products; that we expect to have enough 28nm silicon over the next twelve months to support both our existing Raspberry Pi 4 and Compute Module 4 customers, and customers migrating from Raspberry Pi 3B+; and that we see early signs that the supply chain situation is starting to ease."

A new study by Wang and a team including researchers from the US Advanced Battery Consortium (USABC), and battery company A123 Systems, [...] shows that batteries with recycled cathodes can be as good as, or even better than those using new state-of-the-art materials. The findings have been published in the journal Joule. IEEE Spectrum reports: The team tested batteries with recycled NMC111 cathodes, the most common flavor of cathode containing a third each of nickel, manganese, and cobalt. The cathodes were made using a patented recycling technique that Battery Resources, a startup Wang co-founded, is now commercializing. The recycled material showed a more porous microscopic structure that is better for lithium ions to slip in and out of. The result: batteries with an energy density similar to those made with commercial cathodes, but which also showed up to 53% longer cycle life.

While the recycled batteries weren't tested in cars, tests were done at industrially relevant scales. The researchers made 11 Ampere-hour industry-standard pouch cells loaded with materials at the same density as EV batteries. Engineers at A123 Systems did most of the testing, Wang says, using a protocol devised by the USABC to meet commercial viability goals for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. He says the results prove that recycled cathode materials are a viable alternative to pristine materials.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The newly announced 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models have HDMI ports, but they have a limitation that could be frustrating for many users over the long term, according to Apple's specs page for both machines and as noted by Paul Haddad on Twitter. The page says the HDMI port has "support for one display with up to 4K resolution at 60 Hz." That means users with 4K displays at 120 Hz (or less likely, 8K displays at 60 Hz) won't be able to tap the full capability of those displays through this port. It implies limited throughput associated with an HDMI 2.0 port instead of the most recent HDMI 2.1 standard, though there are other possible explanations for the limitation besides the port itself, and we don't yet know which best describes the situation.

This morning, at the company's virtual hardware event, Google is finally showing us what it means to pick up and start over again. From a report: In many ways, the Pixel 6 marks the most radical departure in the history of Google's flagship devices -- and its most serious attempt to take the fight to Samsung and Apple. The company gave us our first glimpse of the device back in August. It was a surprisingly complete look at a device it would take another three and a half months to announce. Hardware head Rick Osterloh primarily focused on chips, design and the fact that Google was becoming the latest company to buck its reliance on Qualcomm by building its own in-house chip, Tensor. And now it is. The Tensor had landed, alongside the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro it powers. I have the latter in my possession, and it's immediately clear that this is a radically new direction for the Pixel line. Google's clearly gone in a premium direction with the new device, which shares more common DNA with the likes of Samsung's devices than any of the Pixels we've seen to date.

The Pixel 6 sports a 6.4-inch FHD+ OLED at 411 ppi -- that bit, at least, is keeping with mid-range specs. The Pro bumps it up to a 6.7-inch QHD+ at 512 ppi. Those displays have refresh rates of 90 and 120 Hz, respectively, protected by a Gorilla Glass Victus cover, which curves on the edges. [...] The 6 supports two lenses: a 50-megapixel wide-angle camera and 12-megapixel on the 6, plus a 48 megapixel telephoto on the 6 Pro. That last one does 4x optical or up to 20x Super Res, though even with computational photography, things are going to degrade pretty quickly. The front-facing camera, meanwhile, is eight megapixels on the 6 and 11 megapixels on the 6 Pro, with 84- and 94-degree fields of view, respectively. [...] The company has addressed some of the battery issues that plagued earlier models. The 6 and 6 Pro feature 4,614 and 5,003mAh batteries, respectively -- that's a nice jump from the Pixel 5's 4,080mAh (which, in turn, was a nice jump from the Pixel 4). The Pixel 6 starts at $599 and the Pixel 6 Pro starts at $899.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: California company Radiant has secured funding to develop a compact, portable, "low-cost" one-megawatt nuclear micro-reactor that fits in a shipping container, powers about 1,000 homes and uses a helium coolant instead of water. Founded by ex-SpaceX engineers, who decided the Mars colony power sources they were researching would make a bigger impact closer to home, Radiant has pulled in $1.2 million from angel investors to continue work on its reactors, which are specifically designed to be highly portable, quick to deploy and effective wherever they're deployed; remote communities and disaster areas are early targets.

The military is another key market here; a few of these could power an entire military base in a remote area for four to eight years before expending its "advanced particle fuel," eliminating not just the emissions of the current diesel generators, but also the need to constantly bring in trucks full of fuel for this purpose. Those trucks will still have to run -- up until the point where the military ditches diesel in all its vehicles -- but they'll be much less frequent, reducing a significant risk for transport personnel. Radiant says its fuel "does not melt down, and withstands higher temperatures when compared to traditional nuclear fuels." Using helium as the coolant "greatly reduces corrosion, boiling and contamination risks," and the company says it's received provisional patents for ideas it's developed around refueling the reactors and efficiently transporting heat out of the reactor core.

At its Fall Mac event today, Apple announced the new third-generation AirPods, featuring a slightly revamped design with shorter stems and touch-based "force sensor" and support for spatial audio. Ars Technica reports: The new AirPods retain their usual hard plastic finish and do not have in-ear tips like the AirPods Pro, though Apple says they are now officially IPX4-rated for sweat and water resistance. Apple says the earbuds have six hours of battery life and up to 30 hours when including the charging case. (That's compared to five and 24 hours, respectively, on the second-gen model.) The included case supports MagSafe and wireless charging, though the earbuds do not feature active noise cancellation or a transparency mode like their pricier siblings.

Though the second-gen AirPods were renowned more for their ease of use than their audio quality, Apple says it has updated them with a redesigned driver and an adaptive EQ feature that automatically tunes your music based on the AirPods' fit in your ear. The earbuds will also use Apple's spatial audio tech, which makes audio sound like it is coming from around the user's head. To help with that, the new AirPods support dynamic head tracking like the AirPods Pro and the over-ear AirPods Max. The third-gen AirPods cost $179 and are available to order online today, with in-store availability starting October 26. Notably, Apple will continue to sell the existing second-gen AirPods for $129 alongside the new pair.

Apple today announced M1 Pro and M1 Max, its new chips for the Mac. Apple: M1 Pro and M1 Max introduce a system-on-a-chip (SoC) architecture to pro systems for the first time. The chips feature fast unified memory, industry-leading performance per watt, and incredible power efficiency, along with increased memory bandwidth and capacity. M1 Pro offers up to 200GB/s of memory bandwidth with support for up to 32GB of unified memory. M1 Max delivers up to 400GB/s of memory bandwidth -- 2x that of M1 Pro and nearly 6x that of M1 -- and support for up to 64GB of unified memory. And while the latest PC laptops top out at 16GB of graphics memory, having this huge amount of memory enables graphics-intensive workflows previously unimaginable on a notebook. The efficient architecture of M1 Pro and M1 Max means they deliver the same level of performance whether MacBook Pro is plugged in or using the battery. M1 Pro and M1 Max also feature enhanced media engines with dedicated ProRes accelerators specifically for pro video processing. M1 Pro and M1 Max are by far the most powerful chips Apple has ever built.

Utilizing the industry-leading 5-nanometer process technology, M1 Pro packs in 33.7 billion transistors, more than 2x the amount in M1. A new 10-core CPU, including eight high-performance cores and two high-efficiency cores, is up to 70 percent faster than M1, resulting in unbelievable pro CPU performance. Compared with the latest 8-core PC laptop chip, M1 Pro delivers up to 1.7x more CPU performance at the same power level and achieves the PC chip's peak performance using up to 70 percent less power. Even the most demanding tasks, like high-resolution photo editing, are handled with ease by M1 Pro. M1 Pro has an up-to-16-core GPU that is up to 2x faster than M1 and up to 7x faster than the integrated graphics on the latest 8-core PC laptop chip.1 Compared to a powerful discrete GPU for PC notebooks, M1 Pro delivers more performance while using up to 70 percent less power. And M1 Pro can be configured with up to 32GB of fast unified memory, with up to 200GB/s of memory bandwidth, enabling creatives like 3D artists and game developers to do more on the go than ever before.

M1 Max features the same powerful 10-core CPU as M1 Pro and adds a massive 32-core GPU for up to 4x faster graphics performance than M1. With 57 billion transistors -- 70 percent more than M1 Pro and 3.5x more than M1 -- M1 Max is the largest chip Apple has ever built. In addition, the GPU delivers performance comparable to a high-end GPU in a compact pro PC laptop while consuming up to 40 percent less power, and performance similar to that of the highest-end GPU in the largest PC laptops while using up to 100 watts less power.2 This means less heat is generated, fans run quietly and less often, and battery life is amazing in the new MacBook Pro. M1 Max transforms graphics-intensive workflows, including up to 13x faster complex timeline rendering in Final Cut Pro compared to the previous-generation 13-inch MacBook Pro. M1 Max also offers a higher-bandwidth on-chip fabric, and doubles the memory interface compared with M1 Pro for up to 400GB/s, or nearly 6x the memory bandwidth of M1. This allows M1 Max to be configured with up to 64GB of fast unified memory. With its unparalleled performance, M1 Max is the most powerful chip ever built for a pro notebook.

couchslug writes: Canon, best nown for manufacturing camera equipment and printers for business and home users, is being sued for not allowing customers to use the scan or fax functions in multi-function devices if the ink runs out on numerous printer models. David Leacraft filed a class action lawsuit against Canon USA, alleging the company engaged in deceptive marketing and unjust enrichment practices.