U.S. chip group Intel is on track to deliver five upgrades to its advanced manufacturing process in four years, CEO Pat Gelsinger said on Tuesday as the company faces pressure to reassure PC and server-making clients that its technology will remain competitive. From a report: Speaking at Intel Innovation Day in Taipei, Gelsinger said the company's most advanced chip design, the 18A, will move into the test production phase by the first quarter of 2024. "For 18A, we have many test wafers coming out at this moment," the CEO said. "The invention phase of the 18A is now complete, and now we're racing to production."

This production node represents Intel's big bet to reclaim semiconductor manufacturing leadership by 2025. The company also announced it will use this production technology to make chips for outside customers such as Ericsson, instead of using it only for its own products. Its two biggest rivals, Samsung of South Korea and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., are racing to put their own most advanced chips into production in 2025. These 2-nanometer chips are seen as being at a similar level as Intel's 18A. Gelsinger said his company has been aggressively pursuing its "five nodes in four years" plan since he returned to the company in 2021. It usually takes at least two years for a chipmaker to move forward to a new production node.

Tech YouTuber Dave Lee provided a hands-on first look at the new PlayStation 5 "slim" and gave a preview of how it looks compared to the original 2020 launch versions. Kotaku reports: One of his biggest takeaways is that the console, while lighter, doesn't necessarily feel that much smaller in contrast to initial predictions. Maybe that's why Sony's not officially marketing the new device as a "slim" version. From there, Lee runs through some of the less obvious changes. A few we already knew about like the USB-a slot on the front being replaced by two USB-c ports, as well as the t side panels split into two pieces to accommodate the new detachable disc drive. Lee actually showed how the disc drive comes out, and it looks really simple and convenient. There's no screws involved. Instead, putting pressure on a tab releases it from the housing while a socket near the bottom is how it plugs into the rest of the console.

Less neat are the new see-thru plastic pegs that stabilize the console when it's laid horizontal. While they've been added to help secure the PS5 given its new detachable disc drive design, Lee was unimpressed. I kind of agree. They're not a very elegant solution. The same goes for the divided panels themselves. I didn't realize this before, but they actually have different finishes. The bottom is a matte white that's a little different from the current PS5 plates and the top has a glossy finish.

Inside the new PS5, Lee pointed out a handful of differences. The top heat exhaust is less stylized, with plain vents instead of a snail shell like spiral. The internal SSD unit layout is also different. That's the piece that powers the PS5's lighting-quick load speeds, and it's not yet clear if the new design will impact performance at all. Lee's initial testing showed there was no real difference. It will also be interesting to see how the new PS5s deal with heat given its the same CPU running in a smaller layout.

Canon plans to price its new chipmaking gear at a fraction of the cost of ASML Holding NV's best lithography machines, seeking to make inroads in the cutting-edge equipment now playing a central role in the US-China tech rivalry. From a report: The Tokyo-based company's new nanoimprint technology would open up a way for smaller semiconductor makers to produce advanced chips, now almost wholly the domain of the sector's biggest firms, Chief Executive Officer Fujio Mitarai said. "The price will have one digit less than ASML's EUVs," said the 88-year-old, now on his third stint as Canon's president after last stepping back from day-to-day operations in 2016. He added that a final pricing decision hasn't been made.

Veldhoven, Netherlands-based ASML is the only supplier of extreme ultraviolet lithography tools, the world's most advanced chipmaking machines costing hundreds of millions of dollars each. The product of decades of research and investment, EUV rigs are essential for mass-producing the fastest and most energy-efficient chips, which cram millions of transistors into every square millimeter of silicon. Only a handful of cash-rich companies can afford to invest in the tools, which are now under scrutiny for their linchpin status in the tech supply chain. ASML is banned from exporting EUV systems to Chinese customers, following US pressure on its allies to restrict technology flows to Beijing.

The state of Maine is "poised to vote on an unprecedented plan to rid themselves of the state's two largest electric utilities and start with a clean slate," reports the Associated Press: The proposed takeover of two investor-owned utilities that distribute 97% of electricity in the state would mark the first time a U.S. state's utilities were forcibly removed at the same time. The referendum calls for dismantling Central Maine Power and Versant Power and replacing them with a nonprofit utility called Pine Tree Power to operate 28,000 miles (45,000 kilometers) of transmission lines...

The referendum calls for creation of a nonprofit utility with a board made up of mostly elected members and a few appointed ones. A primary selling point is that the new utility would be beholden only to ratepayers, not corporate shareholders, allowing lower costs, greater investments in the grid and improved performance, supporters said. Interest rates for long-term borrowing for capital improvements also would be less costly for Pine Tree Power. Supporters say there's little to lose: Both investor-owned utilities rank near the bottom in customer satisfaction, with longer-than-average response to power outages and higher-than-average electricity rates.

But critics, including Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, worry about the power grid becoming politicized. They also question savings projections because of the billions of dollars needed to buy out the utilities, and worry about the prospect of lengthy litigation. Maine Public Advocate William Harwood contends legal disputes could postpone the new utility's implementation by five to 10 years.
The American Public Power Association estimates that investor-owned utilities serve 66% of America's electricity consumers, according to the article. So the Associated Press notes that "Across the country, ratepayers who are unhappy with their utilities are watching what happens," citing this quote from energy-related research firm Clear View Energy Partners.

"What we say about state policy and trends is that it could become contagious."

Thanks to Slashdot reader jenningsthecat for sharing the article.

Smartphones and electric cars are both powered by lithium-ion batteries, notes the Economist. These "Li-ion" batteries "form the guts of a growing number of grid-storage systems that smooth the flow of electricity from wind and solar power stations. Without them, the electrification needed to avoid the worst effects of global warming would be unimaginable." But unfortunately, building them requires scarce metals.

"A clutch of companies, though, think they have an alternative: making batteries with sodium instead..." And the idea of building "Na-ion" batteries at scale is "gaining traction." Engineers are tweaking designs. Factories, particularly in China, are springing up. For the first time since the Li-ion revolution began, lithium's place on the electrochemical pedestal is being challenged... [A]ccording to Rory McNulty, a research analyst at Benchmark, Chinese firms have 34 Na-ion-battery factories built, being built or announced inside the country, and one planned in Malaysia. Established battery-makers in other places, by contrast, are not yet showing much interest. Even without a five-year plan to guide them, though, some non-Chinese startups are seeking to steal a march by developing alternatives to layered oxides, in the hope of improving the technology, reducing its cost, or both.

One of the most intriguing of these neophytes is Natron Energy, of Santa Clara, California... Natron claims that its cells can endure 50,000 cycles of charging and discharging — between ten and 100 times more than commercial Li-ion batteries can manage. The firm has built a factory in Michigan, which it says will begin production later this year. Other non-Chinese firms are less far advanced, but full of hope. Altris, in Sweden, which is also building a factory, employs a material called Prussian white that substitutes some of the iron in Prussian blue with sodium. Tiamat, in France, uses a polyanionic design involving vanadium. And Faradion, in Britain (now owned by Reliance, an Indian firm), intends to stick with a layered-metal-oxide system.
Thanks to Slashdot reader echo123 for sharing the article.

Bill Gates, noted billionaire philanthropist, discussed the need for "impatient optimism" about both climate change and global development last month during an interview at an international affairs think tank: Q: If you go back a decade, are you more or less optimistic about where we are on climate change now, or then?

Bill Gates: I'm certainly more optimistic because in 2015, when the Paris Agreement was signed, there were so many areas of emission where there wasn't any activity...

Q: if you go back a decade, solar and wind were the most expensive energy sources we had. Since then, the price of solar has dropped 90%, and the price of wind has dropped 70%, and electric vehicles are now economically viable... I know you get excited about innovation. What are some of the areas that you're most excited about for innovation?

Bill Gates: Across this portfolio of 100 companies it's hard to pick my favorite. Some are kind of straightforward, like a company that makes windows where the temperature doesn't cross over, but instead, it blocks getting cold in the winter or hot in the summer, which is very cheap. Or there is a company where you leave your home, and you pump this air through, but it's got a chemical in it. When it sees cracks, it actually seals those cracks. You don't have to find the cracks; you just pump the air in. You can reduce the amount of heat loss between the windows and getting rid of those cracks. You can reduce the energy bill by a factor of two, which then means less load on the overall energy system...

The cement and steel ones are the ones, in a way, I'm most impressed by, because I wasn't sure we'd find anything in those spaces...

Q: The problem, I guess, with cement is that you are taking basically limestone, and then you are converting it to calcium oxide. But the byproduct you get in that conversion process is CO2. Basically, you need a way to capture that CO2....

Bill Gates: As you heat the limestone, that releases CO2. It's exactly as you say, it's an equal number amount of emissions. One of our companies doesn't use limestone. They actually go and find another source of calcium, which fortunately turns out to be quite abundant and cheap. They make exactly the same cement that we make today, but not using limestone as the input. I was stunned that you could do that.
Gates also hopes to see nuclear power in an economically viable form. "The nuclear industry basically failed, because their product was too expensive. It wasn't because of the waste or safety-type issues, which we can get into those, but it was economics." Bill Gates: First and foremost, you must have a much different economic proposition. The nuclear reactor I'm involved in, TerraPower, we only generate electricity when the renewable sources that have very little marginal costs aren't generating. We just make heat all day, and then only when the bid price of electricity is high enough, do we actually generate electricity, because otherwise, you have all this capital cost that half the time, the solar bid into that market is going to be very low.

I think fission, we shouldn't give up on it. I'm involved in that company only because it may be able to make a significant contribution to [fighting] climate change... I can't overstate how much easier it is to solve the problem if you can mix in some degree of fission or fusion that are there to fill in the periods where renewables are not generating. Cold snaps or where you have these cold fronts just sitting there, that's when houses need the most heating. That's when neither wind nor solar are generating.

Tuesday Orsted cancelled two wind farms near New Jersey that would've generated about 2.2 gigawatts of energy. But the same day America's Interior Department approved plans to install up to 176 wind turbines off the coast of Virginia with an estimated capacity of about 2.6 gigawatts of clean energy.

Located approximately 27 miles from the shores of Virginia Beach, the project will be America's largest offshore wind project, capable of powering over 900,000 homes. In just its first 10 years it should save customers $3 billion in fuel costs, Dominion Energy told the Associated Press: Dominion expects construction to be completed by late 2026... Construction of the project in Virginia is expected to support about 900 jobs each year and then an estimated 1,100 annual jobs during operations, the Interior Department said. The initiative has gained wide support from Virginia policymakers and political leaders, including Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who last week attended a reception marking the arrival of eight monopile foundations for the windfarm.
Two pilot turbines have already been in place since 2020, the article points out. And when finished the new wind farm "would bolster and eventually replace the mostly natural gas-powered electricity that is contributing to costly climate change," reports MarketWatch President Biden, early in his first term, announced a goal of installing 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2030, enough to power 10 million homes and prevent the spewing of 78 million metric tons of carbon-dioxide emissions... U.S. offshore wind has been helped along by nearly $8 billion in investments since Biden signed his signature, climate-heavy Inflation Reduction Act a little over a year ago... Biden's team has projected that the U.S. could install 110 gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2050, a major jump considering there is less than 1 gigawatt installed today. Land-based wind farms across the U.S. already produce more than 140 gigawatts of energy, contributing to about 10% of the nation's energy portfolio...

When measured by announced plans and pledges, the country has been barreling toward its offshore goal. To date, the Department of the Interior has approved four New England-based projects that, together with the new Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, promise to deliver 5 gigawatts of electricity, enough to power 1.75 million homes with average power use. A total of more than 51 gigawatts of wind power capacity is in the works off U.S. shores and the most ambitious 10 coastal states have combined offshore wind goals of generating more than 81 gigawatts.

Officially, Intel's Itanium chips and their IA-64 architecture died back in 2021, when the company shipped its last processors. But failed technology often dies a million little deaths. From a report: To name just a few: Itanium also died in 2013, when Intel effectively decided to stop improving it; in 2017, when the last new Itanium CPUs shipped; in 2020, when the last Itanium-compatible version of Windows Server stopped getting updates; and in 2003, when AMD introduced a 64-bit processor lineup that didn't break compatibility with existing 32-bit x86 operating systems and applications.

Itanium is dying another death in the next version of the Linux kernel. According to Phoronix, all code related to Itanium support is being removed from the kernel in the upcoming 6.7 release after several months of deliberation. Linus Torvalds removed some 65,219 lines of Itanium-supporting code in a commit earlier this week, giving the architecture a "well-earned retirement as planned."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: There's plenty of fear, uncertainty, and doubt about electric cars and the potential risk of battery fires, but the regular old 12 V battery is responsible for Toyota issuing a recall for more than 1.8 million cars this week. Toyota says the problem is due to differences in the sizes of replacement batteries -- some have smaller tops than others, and if a smaller-top battery isn't held in properly by its clamp, the battery could move under hard cornering, letting the positive terminal contact the clamp, causing a short-circuit and possible fire risk.

The problem affects 2013-2018 RAV4s -- about 1,854,000 of them, according to Toyota. The official National Highway Traffic Safety Administration safety recall notice has not yet been posted, but NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation has had an open case looking into the problem since February 2021, after 11 complaints about "non-crash thermal events" starting in the engine bays of RAV4s. Toyota says that it's working on a new hold-down clamp, battery tray, and positive terminal cover. Once those are ready, the automaker will replace those components for free. The automaker says owners should be contacted about the recall by late December.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A relatively new venture founded by Navneet Dalal, an ex-Google research scientist, Matic, formerly known as Matician, is developing robots that can navigate homes to clean "more like a human," as Dalal puts it. Matic today revealed that it has raised $29.5 million, inclusive of a $24 million Series A led by a who's who of tech luminaries, including GitHub co-founder Nat Friedman, Stripe co-founders John and Patrick Collison, Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo and Twitter co-founder and Block CEO Jack Dorsey.

Dalal co-founded Matic in 2017 with Mehul Nariyawala, previously a lead product manager at Nest, where he oversaw Nest's security camera portfolio. [...] Early on, Matic focused on building robot vacuums -- but not because Dalal, who serves as the company's CEO, saw Matic competing with the iRobots and Ecovacs of the world. Rather, floor-cleaning robots provided a convenient means to thoroughly map indoor spaces, he and Nariyawala believed. "Robot vacuums became our initial focus due to their need to cover every inch of indoor surfaces, making them ideal for mapping," Dalal said. "Moreover, the floor-cleaning robot market was ripe for innovation." [...] "Matic was inspired by busy working parents who want to live in a tidy home, but don't want to spend their limited free time cleaning," Dalal said. "It's the first fully autonomous floor cleaning robot that continuously learns and adapts to users' cleaning preferences without ever compromising their privacy."

There are a lot of bold claims in that statement. But on the subject of privacy, Matic does indeed -- or at least claims to -- ensure data doesn't leave a customer's home. All processing happens on the robot (on hardware "equivalent to an iPhone 6," Dalal says), and mapping and telemetry data is saved locally, not in the cloud, unless users opt in to sharing. Matic doesn't even require an internet connection to get up and running -- only a smartphone paired over a local Wi-Fi network. The Matic vacuum understands an array of voice commands and gestures for fine-grained control. And -- unlike some robot vacuums in the market -- it can pick up cleaning tasks where it left off in the event that it's interrupted (say, by a wayward pet). Dalal says that Matic can also prioritize areas to clean depending on factors like the time of day and nearby rooms and furniture. Dalal insists that all this navigational lifting can be accomplished with cameras alone. "In order to run all the necessary algorithms, from 3D depth to semantics to ... controls and navigation, on the robot, we had to vertically integrate and hyper-optimize the entire codebase," Dalal said, "from the modifying kernel to building a first-of-its-kind iOS app with live 3D mapping. This enables us to deliver an affordable robot to our customers that solves a real problem with full autonomy."

The robot won't be cheap. It starts at $1,795 but will be available for a limited time at a discounted price of $1,495.

Arm today announced that it has made a strategic investment, a minority stake in Raspberry Pi -- the arm of Raspberry Pi responsible for the new Raspberry Pi 5 and past Raspberry Pi products. From a report: Arm's minority stake extends the long-term partnership between Arm and Raspberry Pi, which has seen Arm CPUs feature in all of the Raspberry Pi and Raspberry Pi Pico SoC. The partnership began way before the Raspberry Pi was available for sale, in 2008 -- when the original board was still just a dream. Fast-forward to 2023 and we have a generation of learners who have taken their first steps with coding, science and electronics thanks to the Raspberry Pi.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Pennsylvania cannot enforce a regulation to make power plant owners pay for their planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, a state court ruled Wednesday, dealing another setback to the centerpiece of former Gov. Tom Wolf's plan to fight global warming. The Commonwealth Court last year temporarily blocked Pennsylvania from becoming the first major fossil fuel-producing state to adopt a carbon-pricing program, and the new ruling makes that decision permanent. The ruling is a victory for Republican lawmakers and coal-related interests that argued that the carbon-pricing plan amounted to a tax, and therefore would have required legislative approval. Wolf, a Democrat, had sought to get around legislative opposition by unconstitutionally imposing the requirement through a regulation, they said. The court agreed in a 4-1 decision.

The regulation written by Wolf's administration had authorized Pennsylvania to join the multistate Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which imposes a price and declining cap on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. It would be up to Wolf's successor, Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, to decide whether to appeal the decision to the state Supreme Court. Shapiro's administration had no comment Wednesday on whether it would appeal, and Shapiro himself hasn't said publicly whether he would follow through on the plan to join the consortium, should the courts allow it. Still, Shapiro is "focused on addressing climate change, reducing emissions, and protecting public health while creating jobs and protecting consumers," Shapiro's administration said in a statement.

Orsted, a Danish offshore wind company, canceled its plans to build two wind farms off the coast of New Jersey -- "a blow to the state's efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions and the latest shakeout in the U.S. wind industry," reports the New York Times. From the report: The move, which will force Orsted, a Danish company, to write off as much as $5.6 billion, will crimp the Biden administration's plans to make the wind industry a critical component of plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. High inflation and soaring interest rates are making planned projects that looked like winners several years ago no longer profitable. "The world has in many ways, from a macroeconomic and industry point of view, turned upside down," Mads Nipper, Orsted's chief executive, said on a call with reporters on Wednesday.

The two projects, known as Ocean Wind 1 and 2, were destined to provide green energy to New Jersey. They were strongly backed by the state's governor, Phil Murphy, a Democrat with national ambitions who stresses his environmental credentials but who has lately drawn scorn for falling short in combating climate change. On Wednesday he suggested that Orsted was a dishonest broker and insisted that the "future of offshore wind" along the state's 130-mile coastline remained strong. Mr. Nipper said Orsted thought that losses on the New Jersey projects would rise over time, so "the only sensible thing is to draw a line in the sand."

Offshore wind and other parts of the renewable industry have hit some snags in Europe, especially in Britain. But Mr. Nipper said the problems were more acute in the United States because early contracts lacked protection from inflation and developers incurred high costs because of delays in approvals during the Trump administration. The company's stock price fell nearly 26 percent on Wednesday after it reported a loss of about $3.2 billion for the third quarter and warned that the write-downs -- essentially a reduction in the value of the company's investments -- would affect Orsted's finances. Orsted is writing off 28.4 billion krone, or about $4 billion, now. The company estimates that it may take another charge of up to 11 billion krone later in the year. The report notes that Orsted still plans to move forward with a $4 billion project called Revolution Wind intended to supply power to consumers in Rhode Island. Other projects are under construction, too, "like Vineyard Wind, which will eventually have 62 turbines in the waters off Martha's Vineyard, Mass."

Joe Rossignol reports via MacRumors: The first benchmark results for the standard M3 chip surfaced in the Geekbench 6 database today, providing a closer look at the chip's CPU performance improvements. Based on the results so far, the M3 chip has single-core and multi-core scores of around 3,000 and 11,700, respectively. The standard M2 chip has single-core and multi-core scores of around 2,600 and 9,700, respectively, so the M3 chip is up to 20% faster than the M2 chip, as Apple claimed during its "Scary Fast" event on Monday.

It's unclear if the results are for the new 14-inch MacBook Pro or iMac, both of which are available with the standard M3 chip, but performance should be similar for both machines. The results have a "Mac15,3" identifier, which Bloomberg's Mark Gurman previously reported was for a laptop with the same display resolution as a 14-inch MacBook Pro. We have yet to see any Geekbench results for the higher-end M3 Pro and M3 Max chips available in most new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.

Tanay Tanay has developed a smart vertical farming system using a Raspberry Pi 4 as the central controller, with features such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi support for remote plant monitoring, precise automated watering based on moisture levels, and environmental factor tracking. Tom's Hardware reports: The end result is a Pi-powered system with tons of cool goodies to take your plant care to the next level. Tanay is able to monitor all sorts of environmental factors like how much light is available, how moist the air is, how much water is in the soil, what the temperature is and much more. The icing on the cake is a user-friendly interface that can be used to manually water the plants.

The main board for this project is a Raspberry Pi 4 B. It's connected to an Arduino Nano R3 which is assigned to a specific plant. Some of the sensors confirmed in the design are a soil moisture sensor, an ambient light sensor as well as a water level depth detection sensor. You could always add more or take away modules depending on what you want to do with your vertical farm. For example, a camera could be used to log plant growth progress over time. Tanay explains that ThingSpeak, an IoT platform, was used in the project design. You can learn more about this Raspberry Pi project at Hackster.

Google says it'll issue a system update to fix a major storage bug in Android 14 that has caused some users to be locked out of their devices. Ars Technica reports: Apparently one more round of news reports was enough to get the gears moving at Google. Over the weekend the Issue tracker bug has been kicked up from a mid-level "P2" priority to "P0," the highest priority on the issue tracker. The bug has been assigned to someone now, and Googlers have jumped into the thread to make official statements that Google is looking into the matter. Here's the big post from Google on the bug tracker [...]. The highlights here are that Google says the bug affects devices with multiple Android users, not multiple Google accounts or (something we thought originally) users with work profiles. Setting up multiple users means going to the system settings, then "Multiple users," then "Allow multiple users," and you can add a user other than the default one. If you do this, you'll have a user switcher at the bottom of the quick settings. Multiple users all have separate data, separate apps, and separate Google accounts. Child users are probably the most popular reason to use this feature since you can lock kids out of things, like purchasing apps.

Shipping a Google Play system update as a quick Band-Aid is an interesting solution, but as Google's post suggests, this doesn't mean the problem is fixed. Play system updates (these are alternatively called Project Mainline or APEX modules) allow Google to update core system components via the Play Store, but they are really not meant for critical fixes. The big problem is that the Play system updates don't aggressively apply themselves or even let you know they have been downloaded. They just passively, silently wait for a reboot to happen so they can apply. For Pixel users, it feels like the horse has already left the barn anyway -- like most Pixel phones have automatically applied the nearly 13-day-old update by now. Users can force Play system updates to happen themselves by going to the system settings, then "Security & Privacy," then "System & updates," then "Google Play system update." If you have an update, you'll be prompted to reboot the phone. Also note that this differs from the usual OS update checker location, which is in system settings, then "System," then "System update." The system update screen will happily tell you "Your system is up to date" even if you have a pending Google Play system update. It would be great to have a single location for OS updates, Google Play System/Mainline updates, and app updates, but they are scattered everywhere and give conflicting "up to date" messages.

At Apple's "Scary Fast" event today, the company unveiled a refreshed 24-inch iMac, entry-evel MacBook Pro that ditches the Touch Bar, and its latest "M3" in-house chips. The Verge reports: As expected, Apple's M3 chips took the spotlight during this month's event. The new lineup includes the M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max chips, which Apple says mark the "first personal computer chips" made using the more efficient 3-nanometer process. In addition to offering a "faster and more efficient CPU," the trio of chips comes with an updated GPU that supports ray tracing, mesh shading, and Dynamic Caching -- a feature that optimizes the amount of memory the device uses during tasks. Apple's M3 chips offer up to 128GB of unified memory, with the most powerful M3 Max chip coming with up to 92 billion transistors, a 40-core GPU, and a 16-core CPU.

The new 24-inch iMac is getting an M3-flavored upgrade that Apple says offers two times faster performance than its M1-equipped predecessor. Along with the new chip, the refreshed iMac features a 4.5K Retina display with more than 1 billion colors, support for Wi-Fi 6E, and a 1080p webcam. The iMac also offers up to 24GB of unified memory and comes in seven colors: green, yellow, orange, pink, purple, blue, and silver. There are also color-matched accessories that come with the iMac, but they still feature Lightning connectors. The 24-inch iMac costs $1,299 with an eight-core CPU or $1,499 with a 10-core chip. You can preorder it starting today, with availability starting on November 7th.

Alongside the M3 Pro and M3 Max-equipped MacBook Pro models, Apple is releasing a cheaper 14-inch MacBook Pro that comes with the base M3 chip and starts at $1,599. The device replaces the 13-inch MacBook Pro with an M2 chip that Apple released last year and offers performance that's up to 60 percent faster. The Touch Bar model is being discontinued, which means it's all physical keys from here out. There are some drawbacks to this entry-level model, though: it features a meager 8GB of RAM and comes in just silver and space gray variations -- the black color is exclusive to the higher-end MacBook Pros. The device is available to preorder today and officially launches on November 7th.

Western Digital said on Monday it would spin off its flash memory business that has been grappling with a supply glut after talks of merging the unit with Japan's Kioxia stalled. From a report: The split will leave the data storage products maker with its traditional hard-disk drive business and create two publicly traded firms, giving into demands from activist investor Elliott. The move clears years of uncertainty over Western Digital's flash memory unit that was built through its $19 billion purchase of SanDisk in 2016 and caters to the smartphone and computer industries. Demand for flash chips has slumped after the pandemic, leaving the market awash in supply and increasing the pressure on chipmakers to consolidate. Since 2021, Western Digital and its manufacturing partner Kioxia have been in talks for a merger that would create a company that controls a third of the global NAND flash market.

Bloomberg thinks they've identified the source of the advanced chips in Huawei's newest smartphone, citing to "people familiar with the matter". In a suggestion that export restrictions on Europe's most valuable tech company may have come too late to stem China's advances in chipmaking, ASML's so-called immersion deep ultraviolet machines were used in combination with tools from other companies to make the Huawei Technologies Co. chip, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing information that's not public. ASML declined to comment.

There is no suggestion that their sales violated export restrictions... ASML has never been able to sell its EUV machines to China because of export restrictions. But less advanced DUV models can be retooled with deposition and etching gear to produce 7-nanometer and possibly even more advanced chips, according to industry analysts. The process is much more expensive than using EUV, making it very difficult to scale production in a competitive market environment. In China, however, the government is willing to shoulder a significant portion of chipmaking costs.

Chinese companies have been legally stockpiling DUV gear for years — especially after the U.S. introduced its initial export controls last year before getting Japan and the Netherlands on board... According to an investor presentation published by the company last week, ASML experienced a jump in business from China this year as chipmakers there boosted orders ahead of the export controls taking full effect in 2024. China accounted for 46% of ASML's sales in the third quarter, compared with 24% in the previous quarter and 8% in the three months ending in March.
Another article from Bloomberg includes this prediction: The U.S. won't be able to stop Huawei and SMIC from making progress in chip technology, Burn J. Lin, a former Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. vice president, told Bloomberg News. Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp should be able to advance to the next generation at 5 nanometers with machines from ASML Holding NV that it already operates, said Lin, who at TSMC championed the lithography technology that transformed chipmaking.
The end result is that Huawei's profit "more than doubled during the quarter it revealed its biggest achievement in chip technology," the article reports, "adding to signs the Chinese tech leader is steadying a business rocked by US sanctions." The Shenzhen company reported a 118% surge in net profit to 26.4 billion yuan ($3.6 billion) in the September quarter, and a slight rise in sales to 145.7 billion yuan, according to Bloomberg News calculations from nine-month results released Friday. Those numbers included initial sales of the vastly popular Mate 60 Pro, which began shipping in late August... The gadget sold out almost instantly, spurring expectations it could rejuvenate Huawei's fortunes and potentially cut into Apple Inc.'s lead in China, given signs of a disappointing debut for the iPhone 15...

A resurgent Huawei would pose problems not just for Apple but also local brands from Xiaomi Corp. to Oppo and Vivo, all of which are fighting for sales in a shrinking market.

VentureBeat reports: Thursday San Francisco-based Oxide, a startup founded by computing experts from Joyent and Dell, launched what it calls the world's first "commercial cloud computer," a rack-scale system that enterprises can own to reap the benefits and flexibility of cloud computing on-premises, right within their data center. The company believes the new offering can finally put an end to the "cloud vs on-prem" dilemma enterprises face while setting up their infrastructure...

It also announced $44 million in a series A round of funding, led by Eclipse VC with participation from Intel Capital, Riot Ventures, Counterpart Ventures and Rally Ventures. Oxide plans to use this money to accelerate the adoption of its cloud computer, giving teams a new, better option to serve their customers... The round brings Oxide's total financing raised to date to $78 million.
Since 2019 Oxide has thrown a team of 60 technologists at the problem — and Thursday, Oxide also revealed an impressive list of current customers: There's the U.S. Department of Energy — specifically its Idaho National Laboratory (which has historically been involved in nuclear research) — as well as "a well-known financial services firm". Oxide also announced that within just a few months, there'll be additional installments at multiple Fortune 1000 companies. And beyond that, Oxide is also boasting that they now have "a long wait list of customers ready to install once production catches up with demand...."

Will Coffield, a partner at Riot Ventures, quipped that Oxide had "essentially wrapped all the hopes and dreams of a software engineer, IT manager, and a CFO into a single box...." Steve Tuck, CEO and co-founder of Oxide, pointed out that cloud computing "remains restricted to a centralized, rental-only model." There are many reasons why an enteprise might want to own their infrastructure — security, reliability, cost, and response time/latency issues — and as Tuck sees it, "the rental-only model has denied them modern cloud capabilities for these use cases.

"We are changing that."
Earlier this year on the Software Engineering Daily podcast, CTO/co-founder Bryan Cantrill remembered that when doing their compliance testing, "The folks at the compliance lab — they see a lot of servers — and they're like, 'Are you sure it's on?' Because it's so quiet!" (This June article notes that later on the podcast Cantrill argued that the acoustics of today's data centers are "almost like an odor. It is this visceral reminder that this domain has suffered for lack of real systemic holistic thinking...")

Oxide's press packet lays out other advantages for their servers. "Power usage is 2x efficient, takes up half the space, and can be up and running in just four hours instead of three months."