This week, on a more focused episode of The TT Show, Jak and Kosta break down and go through the crazy Helldivers 2 controversy on PC. If you were offline for a few days (and this all played out throughout a single weekend), the decision to force the Helddivers 2's PC players to link their Steam Account to a PlayStation Network (PSN) account caused a veritable backlash storm.

From the review bombing to developers being grilled to Sony and developer Arrowhead's damage control to the surprisingly swift happy ending, Jak and Kosta discuss the implications and consider what might happen in the aftermath.

This week's other big story comes from the world of Apple, with the company lifting the lid on its new iPad Pro lineup powered by the new AI-powered 3 nanometer M4 chip. The big thing here is that it represents Apple's first dip into the world of OLED displays, with a groundbreaking 1000-nit SDR and HDR screen that has two OLED panels in one!

The first human to accept a Neuralink brain chip implant was able to control a PC through their thoughts, and now the Elon Musk-led company is looking for its second participant.

In early March, Neuralink showcased a 29-year-old man named Nolan Arbaugh, who was unfortunately paralyzed from the neck down following a tragic diving accident eight years ago. Arbaugh demonstrated the capabilities of the Neuralink brain chip called "Telepathy" in a video that showed him controlling the cursor on a PC and even playing a game of Mario Kart against another player.

Neuralink has since taken to its official X account to share a video of Arbaugh talking about his motivations behind agreeing to participate in the trial, saying that he wants to help future quadriplegics based on what is learned from his involvement now. Notably, Arbaugh said the surgery for the brain implant was "super easy," and there was a significant learning process to differentiate "imagined movement versus attempted movement" in order to control a cursor on a PC.

NVIDIA's RTX Remix (available now) tool for modders is a powerful tool that has opened the door to a new type of remaster. Ray-tracing, AI-enhanced textures, and direct control over a game's visuals, effects, models, and more are already delivering stunning results. The best part is that it takes older DirectX games and gives them a modern makeover.

EA's Need For Speed: Underground from 2003 is a great example, primarily because the Need For Speed: Underground RTX mod (via modDB) is the work of a single person - alessandro893. With RTX Remix, the game's lighting is now fully ray-traced, including over 1,000 additional lights to the world to help improve immersion. Several in-game textures have also been enhanced.

It's still a work in progress, with some sections looking better than others, and elements like car headlights still need the RTX and ray-tracing treatment, but it's showing great promise. Need For Speed: Underground is one of the most beloved entries in the series, and it's fantastic to see it with full ray-tracing and updated visuals.

Dell Technologies World (DTW) will be held at The Venetian in Las Vegas from May 20-23, 2024. Dell and its partners will showcase the latest technology and AI innovations for businesses. KIOXIA, the pioneer of NAND flash memory, will be there with its range of SSD and memory solutions, including high-performance PCIe 5.0 SSDs, to demonstrate their benefits over PCIe 4.0.

KIOXIA (booth #436) will be on the show floor with real-world server and storage configurations, including its KIOXIA CD8 Series Data Center U.2 NVMeTM SSDs, KIOXIA CM7 Series Enterprise E3.S NVMe SSDs, and more. As AI is a transformative technology, KIOXIA SSDs are pivotal in Dell's AI solutions.

"Since the day we invented it more than 35 years ago, flash memory has been a dynamic force propelling innovation forward," noted Alex Mei, vice president of corporate marketing for KIOXIA America, Inc. "With groundbreaking technologies such as PCIe 5.0 and EDSFF SSDs, we empower our customers to not only elevate application performance but also drive down total cost of ownership, all while fostering a more sustainable future."

Google recently announced at its I/O event its sixth tensor processing unit (TPU) called Trillium, and according to the company the new processor is designed for powerful next-generation AI models.

The company initially created the TPUs for its own internal products such as Gmail, Google Maps and YouTube, which leverage machine learning workloads. Now, Google has created six generations of this technology and according to the company Trillium will arrive with a 4.7x increase in peak compute performance, along with double the high bandwidth memory capacity, compared to its TPU v5e design.

More specifically, Google's claim of a 4.7x increase in peak compute performance means the new TPU is capable of pushing 926 teraFLOPS at BF16 and 1,847 teraFLOPS at INT8, making it about twice as fast as TPU v5p accelerators that Google announced less than six months ago. How did Google do this? The company said the performance increase can be traced back to the decision to increase the size of TPU's matrix multiple units (MXUs), and boosting the clock speed.

Officials have confirmed the Sun has launched the strongest solar flare of this solar cycle, an 11-year period that takes the Sun from its least active to its most active.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center recently announced the eruption of a solar flare that measured X8.7, which resulted in radio blackouts and widespread auroras around our planet. Notably, researchers pinpointed the source of the massive solar flare to the sunspot region 3664, which reports indicate measure at least 15 Earths wide.

For those that don't know, a solar flare is caused by magnetic disturbances in the Sun, specifically when the magnetic field lines of the Sun are twisted and contorted. The snapping of these magnetic field lines results in the release of powerful exertion of X-rays and ultraviolet radiation. Additionally, a solar flare can also release what is called a coronal mass ejection (CME), which is a powerful wave of charged solar particles that can hit Earth if the planet is in the direction of its trajectory.

A team of researchers has created an advanced version of silicon that could be used as the foundation for the next generation of computing.

The new breakthrough technology is described as an extremely pure form of silicon, the semiconductor material used in traditional computers, and has been detailed in a new study published in the journal Nature Communications Materials. According to the paper, the new form of silicon could be used to bring quantum computing to silicon-based hardware, making these powerful next-generation computers much more accessible to everyone.

A rudimentary explanation of quantum computing is as follows. Traditional computers operate by encoding in binary, 1's or 0's. A quantum computer can encode data separately and in both 1's and 0's, or what is called a qubit, superposition of both of these states. This state is called "coherence" and enables processing calculations much faster than traditional forms of encoding. However, quantum computing has its challenges, as qubits have proven to be "noisy," which means outside elements can easily interfere with the stability of the quantum state of data.

NVIDIA will play a central role in developing Japan's generative AI infrastructure, as the country seeks to capitalize on the technology's economic potential, and further develop its workforce.

The announcement from NVIDIA comes after Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry on the future of AI with NVIDIA in the country. NVIDIA is collaborating with key digital infrastructure providers, including GMO Internet Group, Highreso, KDDI Corporation, RUTILEA, SAKURA internet Inc. and SoftBank Corp., which the ministry has certified to spearhead the development of cloud infrastructure crucial for AI applications.

The ministry announced plans to provide $740 million in funding to help 6 local firms in this new AI initiative, which means Japan is the latest nation to embrace the concept of sovereign AI by fortifying Japanese startups, enterprises, and research with advanced AI technologies.

Intel teased some more details about its next-generation Falcon Shores CPU at the ISC 24 event, with some rather huge power consumption numbers revealed.

The next-gen Intel Falcon Shores GPU will use up to 1500W of power, with no air-cooling variant planned. Falcon Shores is the true next-generation GPU architecture to Xe, with Falcon Shores originally planned years ago as an XPU th at featured both an x86-based CPU and GPU cores similar to how AMD's new Instinct MI300A APU.

Intel later downgraded Falcon Shores to be a GPU-only design, so it will now take the best parts of Intel's Gaudi AI accelerators, combined with next-gen Xe graphics architecture for HPC and other compute-heavy workloads. Intel's new Falcon Shores GPU will also be backed up by a huge software ecosystem called oneAPI.

Sabrent has a hefty 40% discount ($189.99 down to $114) on its USB-C Universal Docking Station (DC-UICA) which has near-limitless potential with a slew of ports and features that will amplify your computing experience.

If you've got a laptop, ultrabook, Chromebook, Android smartphone or tablet, Apple MacBook, iPhone, or iPad, then the Sabrent USB-C Universal Docking Station would be your new BFF. We've got the entire thing connected through a 10Gbps (USB 3.2 Gen 2x1) USB-C upstream host port that's designed for the latest systems.

Downstream, the Sabrent USB-C Universal Docking Station features 2 x 10Gbps USB-C ports, 2 x 5Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 1x1 USB-A ports, and 2 x 480Mbps USB 2.0 USB-A ports. The first four of those can deliver 5V/1.5A, while the latter will be perfect for keyboards and mice.

Intel's next-generation Lunar Lake CPUs are still in the ovens inside of their labs, but now we're hearing about the new Core Ultra 5 238V processor with 32GB of LPDDR5X on-package memory.

If you don't know about on-package memory, Intel's new Lunar Lake CPUs will have 16GB or 32GB of on-package memory, right next to the CPU, GPU, and NPU on the chip. Lunar Lake is for low-power devices with 8W to 30W TDP designs, using Intel's latest CPU and GPU architectures combined with a brand-new AI accelerator.