| From: Don Green | 6/15/2024 8:56:31 AM | | | | | | Microsoft’s Nadella Is Building an AI Empire. OpenAI Was Just the First Step.After landing the deal that launched his company to the front of the artificial-intelligence race, the tech chief is spreading his bets. Will it be enough?
By Tom Dota and Berber Jin
June 12, 2024
But Nadella is not content to simply rely on OpenAI to dominate in this new era. In recent months, he’s been spreading his bets, turning the world’s biggest company into the world’s most aggressive amasser of AI talent, tools and technology. He has hunted down new partners around the globe and invested in a range of AI startups, including pouring $1.5 billion into an Abu Dhabi-based firm in April.
Nadella has also begun building what amounts to an in-house OpenAI competitor inside Microsoft—potentially putting it on a collision course with its most important partner.
To lead Microsoft’s AI efforts, he recruited Mustafa Suleyman, a longtime rival of OpenAI’s co-founder, Sam Altman. Suleyman, who helped launch DeepMind, a pioneering AI research firm, and went on to co-found Inflection AI, an AI startup, has brought most of his team from Inflection with him to Microsoft.
The new employees have led the process to train their own artificial-intelligence model, built on technology developed at Inflection and designed to be on par with the OpenAI technology Microsoft depends on today. A person familiar with the matter said that some future Microsoft AI products could be switched from OpenAI technology to the model being developed by Suleyman’s team.
 A deconstructed Microsoft Surface Laptop on display following a showcase of the company’s AI assistant Copilot at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Wash., last month. Photo: Lindsey Wasson/Associated Press
Nadella’s approach to AI is emblematic of his decade at the helm, during which he has repeatedly reinvented big parts of Microsoft, picking new partners and retooling the tech company. He has been able to spot when one-time company strengths became vulnerabilities and upend even his own strategies.
Nadella’s moves have helped Microsoft leapfrog others—most notably the longtime AI front-runner Google—to release AI chatbots and workplace tools expected to change how people think and work. The question is whether these tactics will be enough to keep Microsoft ahead of the pack in artificial intelligence.
Google has dramatically overhauled its AI organization and put out products that rival those made by the OpenAI-Microsoft consortium, including an AI feature atop its dominant search engine. Meta Platformshas been investing billions into a powerful AI language model, Llama, that it is releasing for free under an open source license. Amazon has invested $4 billion in Anthropic, which it hosts on the largest cloud computing platform in the world.
This week, Apple announced it was integrating OpenAI’s tech into its mobile operating system, further shaking up the competitive landscapefor AI dominance.
Microsoft’s rising status has made it a target for regulators and competitors. Regulators are investigating its acquisitions and investments, worried it may already have too much control of the emerging AI market. The Federal Trade Commission recently launched an investigation into whether Microsoft’s Inflection deal was structured to avoid government antitrust review. That came on top of another FTC probe launched in January of other artificial-intelligence deals, including Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI. Companies including the New York Times are suing Microsoft and OpenAI, alleging that they illegally trained their software on the media companies’ content.
And despite a soaring stock price, company morale has struggled as outsiders have been brought in to reshape aspects of its technology.
Mikhail Parakhin, the previous head of Microsoft’s Bing and advertising businesses, plans to leave the company after initially being assigned to report to Suleyman, according to people familiar with the matter. Saurabh Tiwary, who oversaw the team of AI engineers responsible for integrating OpenAI’s tech into Bing, has already left for Google.
Microsoft said its retention rates are high and that some bumpiness is to be expected when companies make organizational changes.
Culture changesWhile he has been trying to make Microsoft move more like a startup, Nadella has been the ultimate company lifer. The 56-year-old from Hyderabad, India, worked his way up through its Bing search and cloud infrastructure businesses over the last 32 years.
He was a surprise pick as CEO, taking over after years under Steve Ballmer when the company seemed stuck. The company had grown bloated—expanding costly divisions like hardware and Xbox—and missed tech trends, such as the emergence of mobile phones. In the 14 years under Ballmer, Microsoft’s share price fell more than 30%.
When Nadella took over in 2014, Microsoft was mired in infighting among siloed groups, current and former employees say. Projects were frequently divided across separate divisions with multiple leaders. Teams often didn’t communicate with each other and fought for company resources.
One meme swapped in emails among employees: a cartoon of three organizational charts at Microsoft pointing guns at each other. A “Reservoir Dogs”-style standoff had become a symbol of the company’s culture.
Another problem, current and former employees say: It was plagued by a “not-invented-here” syndrome, where executives regularly rejected outside ideas and products.
Nadella pushed for more internal cooperation with fewer centers of power. He also embraced other tech giants more than any of his predecessors.
 Nadella at a 2014 event in San Francisco, where he unveiled Microsoft Office software for Apple’s iPad and iPhone. Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
Among his first public appearances as CEO was a press briefing, where he took the stage to debut Microsoft Office for the iPad and iPhone. For years, the company had been dismissive of Apple’s mobile devices, preferring to build its own hardware than strike a partnership.
Nadella’s first few years on the job were marked by big acquisitions, including LinkedIn in 2016 for $26.2 billion and GitHub in 2018 for $7.5 billion. He would go on to do more than 300 deals worth over $170 billion in total.
These acquisitions would not only expand Microsoft’s businesses—bringing them into new areas like professional social networks and coding collaboration—but would also infuse the company with new blood.
LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman joined Microsoft’s board of directors. LinkedIn’s head of engineering, Kevin Scott, was given the newly created role of chief technology officer.
‘Years behind’Scott fretted in a 2019 email to Nadella and then Chairman Bill Gates that the company’s AI infrastructure was far behind Google’s. And tools like Gmail autocomplete were getting “scarily good.”
“We are multiple years behind the competition,” Scott wrote.
Microsoft’s AI efforts had been spread among dozens of teams scattered across the company.
The company also had trouble recruiting top AI talent, said one Microsoft executive. Promising candidates would admit they were meeting with Microsoft as practice before going to places they would rather work—usually Google.
In 2018, Nadella met OpenAI’s Altman at the Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley, Idaho. He was impressed with the startup’s AI and thought it could expose Microsoft to more sophisticated tools. OpenAI could also become a banner customer for Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform.
 OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at the company’s office in San Francisco in March. Photo: Clara Mokri for The Wall Street Journal
When Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI, it was a controversial move internally. Even Gates was initially skeptical that Microsoft needed to invest so much in an outside company when the company had its own AI.
As part of the deal, OpenAI said it would exclusively use Microsoft’s Azure cloud and Microsoft promised to invest in the expensive chips needed to meet OpenAI’s voracious demand.
When Nadella saw an early demo of an AI-powered chatbot built into Microsoft’s Bing search engine—using OpenAI’s technology—he asked his team what they needed to make it a hit product.
Engineers told him that if millions of people were to use the chatbot, it would require every high-end chip the company had. That would mean taking the chips away from Microsoft’s many other projects and customers.
“What if I could get them for you?” he asked.
Microsoft started purchasing enormous amounts of the GPU chips used for AI and invested another $10 billion in OpenAI in 2023.
Resource fightsThe decision would ripple through Microsoft. Many divisions, including hardware, felt the pinch to their budgets. The hardware group’s leader, Panos Panay, decamped for Amazon to lead its Alexa division last fall. Rubén Caballero, the head of HoloLens, Microsoft’s augmented reality project, has also left.
In February 2023, Nadella debuted the new Bing with a splash and a promise that with AI, Microsoft could finally make Google “dance.” Microsoft integrated OpenAI’s technology into its entire lineup. It created AI assistants it calls Copilots that plug into its biggest software products including Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The pitch was that with simple language commands, people can use Copilots to quickly create sophisticated slide decks or legal contracts.
The wisdom of Nadella’s dependence on OpenAI came into doubt last fall after OpenAI’s board ousted Altman in a surprise coup. The move exposed the fragility of Microsoft’s position of dependence on a startup it didn’t control.
 Two women wearing HoloLens devices try out a Windows mixed reality immersive experience at the Microsoft Build 2017 developers conference.Photo: Elaine Thompson/Associated Press
Nadella ultimately helped outmaneuver OpenAI’s board by publicly offering to bring Altman and any departing OpenAI employees to Microsoft. Altman was reinstated and Microsoft was given a nonvoting seat on the board.
The wrangling also triggered regulators. Officials in Europe and the U.S. have begun investigating the relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI, looking into how much control the giant has over the startup.
Microsoft has repeatedly stated that it has only a non-controlling stake in the revenue produced by OpenAI’s for-profit arm.
News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.
Altman’s image as a controversial celebrity CEO has ruffled feathers at Microsoft. Some employees are concerned that the media storm after actress Scarlett Johansson claimed that OpenAI surreptitiously created an AI voice modeled on her reflected poorly on their efforts to make AI a more trusted technology.
New balance of powerAltman’s status as the most important figure determining Microsoft’s AI strategy is becoming less certain, thanks to the arrival of Suleyman and his team.
Suleyman was a co-founder of DeepMind, the trailblazing AI company that was bought by Google and became the engine of its artificial intelligence efforts. Altman, along with Elon Musk, launched OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015 partly to ensure that the future of AI was not explored in secret and controlled by Google.
Suleyman left DeepMind to help start Inflection in 2022, joining forces with LinkedIn co-founder Hoffman, one of OpenAI’s earliest investors and a board member. Altman was frustrated that Hoffman had started a competitive venture, said people familiar with the matter. Hoffman resigned from OpenAI’s board not long after he started Inflection.
Inflection’s attempt to popularize its AI companion, named Pi, wasn’t catching on despite raising $1.3 billion. Microsoft was already a fan of the company—it had invested hundreds of millions into it—when Nadella decided to recruit Suleyman.
Nadella spent more than a month discussing a potential move with Suleyman, who eventually agreed to come over with most of his team and was given the title of CEO of AI.
Microsoft insiders say the internal politics and the balance of power between the longtime rivals Suleyman and Altman have been confusing. The Inflection co-founder is set to be one of the main points of contact between Microsoft and OpenAI, said a person familiar with the matter.
Microsoft has announced that Suleyman’s Microsoft AI organization will be responsible for consumer-facing AI products like Copilots for Bing and Windows. Nadella has internally expressed frustration that Bing’s position as a distant second hasn’t improved as much as he’d hoped despite the AI upgrade, according to people familiar with the matter. Suleyman’s hiring is a gamble to fix that, they said.
 Mustafa Suleyman at The Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Tech Live Conference in Laguna Beach, Calif., last fall. Suleyman has brought most of his team from Inflection with him to Microsoft. Photo: Patrick t. fallon/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Nadella has given Suleyman’s team a large budget and wide latitude to operate. They have absorbed other AI teams. Some long-term Microsoft employees view the Inflection imports as a foreign body; these new employees communicate through Slack rather than the Microsoft-owned Teams tool.
Microsoft said that new and existing teams work together.
Even with Suleyman’s division ascendant, Microsoft has worked to quell speculation there is any friction with OpenAI. At Microsoft’s annual developer conference in May, Nadella stood beneath a giant slide saying, “Microsoft Loves OpenAI,” with the word “loves” represented by a blue heart. Altman was a special surprise guest.
All the change and pressure have weighed on employees. The sprint in particular to launch Copilot for Bing by its February deadline last year was grueling, according to people familiar with the matter. The ongoing push to put AI into more products has caused a sense of burnout from some employees on the project.
Still, Nadella isn’t slowing down. Microsoft’s shares have surged more than 10-fold under his watch, lifting it above Apple for much of this year to make it the largest company in the world by market value. One of his top priorities today is rebranding the Azure cloud as the go-to place for startups.
He has told his office that whenever he visits a city, he will take meetings that help the company close deals with AI startups. As he has repeatedly emphasized to Microsoft’s employees in all-hands meetings over the last year, the goal is to use AI to vault past rivals Amazon and Google.
In November, Nadella also approved a program giving early-stage startups free access to some of Microsoft’s computing clusters, a strategy meant to win their allegiance in the event they become the next breakout success.
The company has signed deals to bring startups such as Cohere and French startup Mistral AI onto Azure. Both companies are developing large language models that compete with OpenAI. In April, Microsoft invested $1.5 billion in Abu Dhabi-based AI company G42, which will have the company run its software and services on Azure.
Arvind Jain, CEO of Glean, an enterprise AI company, has repeatedly met with Nadella during the Microsoft chief’s recent startup charm offensive. Jain, like many other founders, didn’t initially consider Microsoft a player in the startup game but today runs his AI assistant off Microsoft’s cloud.
“Microsoft makes the effort to connect and reach out,” Jain said. “When we started our team didn’t consider Azure as an option. AI changed that.”
 An event last month at Microsoft headquarters. Nadella has begun building what amounts to an in-house OpenAI competitor inside Microsoft. Photo: Chona Kasinger/Bloomberg News
Write to Tom Dotan at tom.dotan@wsj.com and Berber Jin at berber.jin@wsj.com
The Global AI Race
Coverage of ChatGPT and other advancements in artificial intelligence, selected by the editors |
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| From: Don Green | 6/15/2024 9:00:40 AM | | | | | | You Paid Hundreds of Millions for Solar Power to Wreck the Environment
Andrew FollettJune 12, 2024
Fields of heliostat mirrors reflect sunlight at the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System near Nipton, Calif., February 27, 2022.(Bing Guan/Reuters)noneYour tax dollars will subsidize a solar company cutting down thousands of protected and rare Joshua trees and destroying habitat for the endangered desert tortoise to make way for a massive energy project in California.
The 2,300-acre Aratina Solar Project west of Barstow is intended to generate 530 megawatts of electricity. But it has infuriated residents with construction dust and a likely threat to centuries-old trees and endangered desert tortoises that are the official state reptile of California and Nevada, the usual environmental safeguards so prevalent in California notwithstanding.
Avantus, the company behind the project, operates its own political-action committee, which naturally donates almost exclusively to Democrats. Avantus changed its name from 8minute Solar Energy after the University of California sued it for misappropriating funds. As 8minute Solar, the company heavily lobbied for key federal solar subsidies.
“Let’s destroy the environment to save the environment. That seems to be the mentality,” local teacher Deric English told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s hard to comprehend.”
The company told the Times that the massive solar electricity-generating and battery-storage project’s environmental benefits will outweigh the destruction of the Joshua trees and habitat of protected wildlife. Local politicians voted unanimously to approve the project despite objections from many locals.
“While individual trees will be impacted during project construction, clean energy projects like Aratina directly address the existential threat of climate change caused by rising greenhouse gas emissions that threaten vastly more trees,” the company wrote online. The environmental-impact statement notes that roughly 4,700 Joshua trees grow on the site.
According to the National Park Service, Joshua trees are a key part of the desert ecosystem, “providing habitat for numerous birds, mammals, insects, and lizards,” and are on average 150 years old, although many are much older than that.
Until 2018, the net impact of all solar panels actually temporarily increased the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions they were intended to prevent because of the amount of energy that is used in their construction. Many older solar panels take up to a decade to accomplish a net reduction in emissions, while even more modern ones placed in the — increasingly limited — climatically ideal environments for solar power typically take many years. So any net benefit from this project will take, at best, years to manifest.
After 50 years and hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies, loads of regulatory advantages, and political support, solar power generated under 4 percent of America’s electricity in 2023, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). The majority of America’s recent CO2 emissions reductions come from the “decreased use of coal and the increased use of natural gas for electricity generation,” not the growth of solar power, according to the EIA.
Solar power also creates about 300 times more toxic waste per unit of electricity generated than nuclear-power plants do, because solar panels use extremely hazardous materials like sulfuric acid and toxic phosphine gas in their manufacturing, according to a report by Environmental Progress.
The hazards of waste from conventional nuclear, coal, or natural-gas plants are well known and can be planned for, but very little has been done to mitigate solar-waste issues, as the by-products of manufacturing and the panels themselves are enormously difficult to dispose of or recycle because of hazardous chemicals. Even the radiation hazards of nuclear waste decay relatively rapidly, losing their radiation threat in mere years or decades, and the spent fuel can be reused as reconstituted fuel for nuclear reactors or in medicine. Solar-panel waste such as lead and cadmium can remain in the environment forever because, unlike radioactive waste, they do not naturally decay into a less harmful state.
Even some environmental groups are starting to notice the negative impacts of solar power. The Center for Biological Diversity sued to block the creation of the massive $2.2 billion Ivanpah solar farm in San Bernardino California out of fear for the endangered desert tortoises and because sunlight-concentrating panels act like superheated death raysfor birds, killing tens of thousands of them annually in California alone. The group’s efforts failed. At the Ivanpah Solar Plant, reportedly “so many birds have burned up in the beams that plant workers call them ‘streamers’ — as they leave a trail of wispy smoke as they catch fire.”
“The primary environmental impact of the Ivanpah project is the loss of about 3,500 acres of native desert scrubland under the footprint of the project,” Center for Biological Diversity wrote regarding legal action against the solar-power facility. “While the project site is traversed by power lines, and is near an interstate highway, a golf course and the casinos of Primm, Nev., the land itself was relatively intact, with a resident population of desert tortoise (which has been protected under the Endangered Species Act since 1990) and various rare native plants. However, the project site is not located within the tortoise’s 6.4 million acres of designated critical habitat.”
Many environmental objections to solar power boil down to the fact that solar farms require huge amounts of space to generate electricity efficiently, as solar panels have a relatively low energy density compared with other forms of energy generation such as conventional coal, natural gas, and nuclear power. Replacing huge swaths of the natural environment such as desert scrubland with sprawling, ugly solar farms is hard to square with the traditional environmentalist aim of habitat conservation.
The Palo Verde Generating Station in Arizona is the largest nuclear-power plant in the United States, providing 4,010 megawatts of electricity on 4,000 acres of land, almost all of which is simply a safety buffer left in a natural desert state. The Edwards & Sanborn Solar and Energy Storage Project, America’s largest combined solar and energy-storage facility in California’s Mojave Desert, has a generating capacity of 864 megawattsof electricity on 4,600 acres.
And solar power is even less efficient when built up in less ideal environments, as most future solar farms necessarily will be, as the low-hanging fruit of perfect solar sites gets used up, leaving only less than ideal sites. Most of the United States is far less naturally suited to solar-energy production than the Mojave Desert. Comparing an almost four-decades-old nuclear-power plant with a brand-new energy-storage facility skews this land-use calculation in favor of solar. A fairer comparison by an environmental group found that nuclear power is about 50 times more energy-dense than solar and 500 times more energy-dense than wind. Small-footprint and high-density energy sources such as nuclear mean more space for nature and humans to thrive.
Shining some sunlight on the truth about the negative environmental impacts of solar plants, from habitat destruction to bird immolation, would go a long way toward helping the public weigh the trade-offs of solar power compared with other energy sources.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated since its original publication. |
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| To: Don Green who wrote (1756) | 6/15/2024 9:27:03 AM | | From: Don Green | | | | The Best VR Headsets for 2024
Work or play in another dimension by donning one of the top-rated standalone or tethered virtual reality headsets we've tested.
pcmag.com |
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| From: Don Green | 6/15/2024 11:31:45 PM | | | | | | 10 PC hardware misconceptions you still believe in
Story by Tanveer Singh
- CPU cores alone don't show the full picture; IPC and clock speeds also matter a lot.
- More VRAM doesn't mean a better GPU; the actual performance of the die depends on many factors.
- Blazing-fast DDR5 RAM and Gen5 NVMe SSDs are not mandatory for a great gaming experience.
- A quality motherboard matters more than you might think.
- Bottlenecking and future proofing are not worth breaking your head about.
Building a gaming PC might not be rocket science, but it still involves multiple components working together. And that inevitably gives rise to several PC building myths — big or small. But this time, I want to dive deeper and talk about some of the misconceptions we have about nearly every PC component. Despite the explosion of online information about PC building and PC gaming, these misconceptions continue to exist in 2024.
Some of these can be attributed to legacy PC building, while some have cropped up more recently. Whether you're planning to upgrade your hardware for PC gaming in 2024 or simply confused by the deluge of PC content flooding your feeds, this list might prove helpful.
More CPU cores is all that mattersPlatform architecture and frequency matter too
Close
This one has to be one of my favorites. No matter how many CPU generations we see, there will be someone shouting from the rooftops that more cores are always better. The fact is that more cores are better, yes, but only when you're comparing apples to apples. For instance, an 8-core Ryzen 7 7700X is more powerful than a 6-core Ryzen 5 7600X from the same CPU generation. But, this Ryzen 5 7600X might obliterate the much older 8-core Ryzen 7 3700X.
A newer platform almost always improves the IPC (instructions per clock) and the CPU frequency, delivering better performance in almost every workload. And this doesn't even take into account the impact of CPU cores in gaming. Most games don't need an 8-core processor to maximize performance, especially at higher resolutions like 1440p and 4K. You'll be more than fine with a 6-core processor from the same family.
Focusing on the core count alone, without seeing other specifications of a CPU, is pointless.
Additionally, gaming FPS also depends heavily on how the game engine is coded to take advantage of hyperthreading. Some games could be heavily CPU-dependent while others won't need more than 6 cores. The best CPUs for gaming are those that excel in multiple factors at the same time — clock speeds, platform improvements, power efficiency, and price. Focusing on the core count alone, without seeing other specifications of a CPU, is pointless.
More VRAM means more performanceIt's a lot more nuanced than that
Close
Back when GPUs used to be simpler, you could be forgiven for thinking that VRAM was the only indicator of GPU performance. Generally, more powerful GPUs used to ship with more VRAM than their inferior counterparts. But when that stopped happening, and we started seeing 12GB RTX 3060s next to 10GB RTX 3080s, that's when things became complicated.
The average user might conclude that the card with more VRAM is the faster card, but the story is incomplete without factors like the architecture, shading units (CUDA cores, Stream Processors), memory type (GDDR5, GDDR6), memory bus width, and, of course, clock speeds. Similar to CPUs, the best GPUs from a newer generation are generally faster than their comparable counterparts from the previous generation. More than VRAM, other factors determine the performance of a GPU.
At higher resolutions, you'll end up hitting the compute limits of your graphics card before saturating the framebuffer or VRAM.
Even if you're running your games at 4K with high-resolution textures, you'll end up hitting the compute limits of your graphics card before saturating the framebuffer or VRAM. More VRAM is necessary for creative professionals, but it only makes sense on graphics cards that are powerful enough to sustain the heavy workloads that need that additional VRAM.
Blazing-fast DDR5 RAM is essential for gamingThe sweet spot is probably lower than you think
Close
The DDR4 vs. DDR5 debate might have settled down, but many users seem to have concluded that they need the absolute fastest memory kit to maximize their gaming performance. The best DDR5 RAM for gaming in your specific use case will most often be a 6000 MT/s CL30 kit. That happens to be the sweet spot for the latest Ryzen 7000 processors, at least.
For the average user, a 6000 MT/s or 6400 MT/s kit should be the target to enjoy games at maximum performance.
Even for Intel, the performance gains are minimal unless you reach or surpass 8000 MT/s. But those kits are expensive, and more importantly, require extremely high-end motherboards to even be stable. For the average user, a 6000 MT/s or 6400 MT/s kit should be the target to enjoy games at maximum performance. Considering the price premium and stability issues related to faster DDR5 kits, it's best to save the money and invest that in a faster graphics card, if gaming is your main concern.
PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs are indispensableYou'll rarely feel the difference
Close
PCIe 5.0 SSDs have been available for some time now, and have even come down in price a lot (relatively). But do you really need one? If all you're doing is gaming, you don't. Loading times and overall performance don't improve much by moving from a Gen4 NVMe SSD to a Gen5 one. DirectStorage might change this, but we're yet to see that in action. Paying double the money for seemingly no improvement in gaming doesn't make a whole lot of sense, does it?
On the other hand, if you're a creative professional and frequently find yourself transferring huge media files, you could find value in a high-speed PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD. You'll be able to actually use the increased read/write speeds to see a tangible difference in performance. The price premium might not feel prohibitive if you're accelerating your workflows and saving time for your business.
The motherboard doesn't matterIt does, but not in the way you think
Close
You might already know that a fancy, high-end motherboard will not really boost your gaming FPS. But, that doesn't mean you can pick any low-end motherboard for your build and expect a top-tier experience. This is because the motherboard is responsible for a lot of the other components you put inside your system.
- Need to overclock a high-end processor? You need a board with capable VRMs
- Need enough M.2 ports for future SSDs? Get a premium motherboard with at least 3 high-speed M.2 slots.
- Want to run blazing-fast DDR5 RAM? You'll need a board that has your desired kit in its QVL (Qualified Vendor List)
- Packing a beefy graphics card? A board with a reinforced PCIe slot might help
Even things like lower boot time and bundled NVMe heatsinks can enhance the value of the motherboard you're buying. So, the best motherboards might not increase your FPS but they'll avoid crippling your PC experience in other ways.
Bottlenecking should be avoided at all costsIt doesn't matter as much as you think
Bottlenecking is a genuine concern among new builders and the vast majority of uninformed gamers. While it's true that your aim should be to minimize the bottlenecks in your build, you'll never be able to eliminate them completely. So, a slightly weaker CPU with a stronger GPU should not be a world-ending concern for you. Similarly, opting for an affordable memory kit, albeit one that's slightly slower, doesn't mean your performance will suffer. significantly.
Besides, the actual bottleneck might change from game to game, and even between different environments in the same game, as different areas might stress either your CPU or GPU more than the other. So, stressing about your CPU and GPU based on the games you want to play might also not work out in the end.
You should look at performance benchmarks, CPU scaling reviews, and other content before finalizing your configuration, keeping in mind your budget and preferences. As long as you match your CPU and GPU well, and pick other decent components with good price-to-performance, you'll end up with a great rig.
Bronze-rated PSUs are always badQuality of the unit matters more
Of late, I've seen a lot of focus on gold-tier or platinum-tier PSUs in the community, to the point that bronze-rated PSUs have been shunned almost entirely. It's always advisable to go for a better PSU if your budget permits, but you shouldn't overlook bronze PSUs simply due to the lower-rated efficiency. It's better to check the reviews of all the PSUs in your shortlist before making any decision.
Quality bronze-rated units will almost always trump no-name gold-rated units.
You can also check reputable lists online to verify the reliability of a PSU. Quality bronze-rated units will almost always trump no-name gold-rated units. Sometimes, even some renowned brands end up producing sub-par PSUs, so keeping a lookout for reviews and news stories about the most popular PSUs is the best way to go.
Open-air cases are dust collectorsThey're just not
Cases used to come in a familiar form factor — panels on all sides with some mesh for air intake. But, with the growing popularity of open-air cases, your components don't need to be trapped inside a closed box. The case against the best open-air cases hinges on dust buildup and poor airflow. But, the best open-air PC cases make it easy to clean any dust buildup, and with the right configuration, airflow shouldn't be a concern.
Cleaning regular cases feels like an awful chore.
PC cases, open or closed, will always gather dust. But, with open-air cases, you can at least clean the dust easily. Cleaning regular cases feels like an awful chore — I've been delaying cleaning my Lancool II Mesh for months now. So, you shouldn't pass up on some great-looking open-air cases simply due to fears of dust collection or airflow.
Gaming monitors are expensiveNot anymore
1080p gaming was, and still is, the predominant choice among PC gamers. Higher resolutions like 1440p require investing in not just a new monitor but, sometimes, a stronger graphics card too. The best 1440p monitors used to be significantly pricier than their 1080p brethren, but that isn't the case anymore. You needn't deprive yourself of 1440p gaming on account of the monitor, at least.
Some of the most popular 27-inch and 32-inch 1440p high-refresh gaming monitors can now be had for around $300. You can get models from brands like MSI, Gigabyte, Acer, and ViewSonic. Moreover, you also have curved options in this budget if that's something you prefer. I bought myself an LG 27GL850 for almost $400 around 3 years ago. The upgraded version of that model now costs less than $300.
4K monitors are still relatively expensive, considering even decent budget models cost around $400. But, prices for these models are also coming down all the time.
Future-proofing is importantA flawed endeavor
Future proofing is less important than ever before. At a time when PC components are getting outclassed by their next-gen versions at a rapid pace, it's a doomed exercise. Making your rig last longer by buying high-end and overkill components that you don't actually need is never advisable. Sure, you'll enjoy your RTX 4090 for a year or two. But you'll inevitably be replacing it with the next big thing in order to keep your rig in the same performance class.
Instead, you can invest in components that are within the price-to-performance sweet spot. That way, you'll be able to upgrade more frequently, and even get a better percentage of your initial investment back by selling your old parts (compared to top-of-the-line parts that lose more of their value every year).
PC components: The good, bad, and uglyBuilding PCs, especially gaming PCs, comes with a fair bit of research and shopping around to arrive at the best bang-for-your-buck build. Whether you're going for a balls-out enthusiast gaming PC to enjoy path tracing in all its glory, or simply need a budget gaming PC, the work you need to put in is more or less the same. But, despite the less-than-ideal aspects of putting a custom build together, you can rest assured that you'll be delighted by the end result, no matter your budget. |
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| From: Don Green | 6/16/2024 12:57:33 PM | | | | | | No Matter How You Package It, Apple Intelligence Is AIApple is eager to show us that its approach to artificial intelligence is safer, better, and more useful than the competition. Maybe that's just a hallucination, but it's working.
Steven Levy
Jun 14, 2024
Developers from all over the world attending WWDC24 at Apple Park.Courtesy of Apple
While companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and others had been upfront about their efforts in AI, for years Apple had been silent. Now, finally, its executives were talking. I got an advance look one day. Eager to shed the the impression that the most innovative of the tech giants was a laggard in this vital technology moment, its software leader Craig Federighi, services czar Eddie Cue, and top researchers argued that Apple had been a leader in AI for years but just didn’t make a big deal of it. Advanced machine learning was already deep in some of its products, and we could expect more, including advances in Siri. And since Apple valued data security more than competitors, its AI efforts would be distinguished by exacting privacy standards. How many people are working on AI at Apple, I asked. “A lot,” Federighi told me. Another executive emphasized that while AI could be transformative, Apple wanted nothing to do with the woo-woo aspects that excited some in the field, including the pursuit of superintelligence. “It’s a technique that will ultimately be a very Apple way of doing things,” said one executive. |
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| From: ig | 6/17/2024 1:57:46 AM | | | | | | Elon Musk Unveils Backpackable Starlink Device
Elon Musk announced the development of a new, highly portable Starlink device that can be easily carried in a backpack. This device is expected to provide high-speed internet access globally, with a latency of 23ms and the capability to support multiple 4K video streams simultaneously. The new Starlink device is anticipated to be more affordable than the standard version, with a lower purchase price and monthly subscription cost. Users and industry observers have expressed excitement and optimism about the potential impact of this technology, particularly in remote or underserved areas. - Grok
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