Technology - Google News

Apple and TikTok banned an app used to arrange parties during Covid - CNN
PS5 restock disaster — here's when to expect more units - Tom's Guide
2020 put us on the edge of a processor revolution - Engadget

Apple and TikTok banned an app used to arrange parties during Covid - CNN

Posted: 30 Dec 2020 07:17 AM PST

The app used its Instagram account, which remains online, to explain why it disappeared from iPhones and iPads.

"App Store took us down!!! We will be back!!," the Instagram post said.

The Instagram account suggests using the app to "Find your vybe. Local wine nights, beer pong games and dancing in an apartment near you." The app's slogan is "Get your rebel on. Get your party on."

Neither Vybe Together, Apple (AAPL) nor TikTok immediately responded to requests for comment. The action against the app was first reported by The Verge.

Vybe Together had a now-removed FAQ page that suggested it was supporting small gatherings, not large ones, The Verge reported.

"We are aware that Covid is a major health problem to the country, our communities, our friends and family," said the FAQ page. "If we all could just be in isolation this could actually go away. Having large scale parties is very dangerous. That is why we don't support that. But Vybe is a compromise, no big parties but small gatherings. We could be living, at least a little during these times with Vybe."

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advises against holding even smaller social gatherings that bring together people from different households due to the risk of Covid-19 spread.

"The more people an individual interacts with at a gathering and the longer that interaction lasts, the higher the potential risk of becoming infected with Covid-19 and Covid-19 spreading," the CDC said in its guidelines. Many local governments have also issued directives banning gatherings.

Vybe Together got some flak on social media Tuesday, before Apple and TikTok took action. Taylor Lorenz, a tech and internet writer for the New York Times, was among those critical of the Vybe Together app.

"Some terrible people built a whole app for finding and promoting Covid-unsafe large, indoor house parties and they're using TikTok to market it to millions of ppl," he tweeted. "They're currently in the midst of promoting secret NYE ragers in nyc."

Lorenz identified a co-founder of Vybe Together, and included the person's LinkedIn profile page. That page was offline as of Wednesday morning.

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PS5 restock disaster — here's when to expect more units - Tom's Guide

Posted: 29 Dec 2020 09:29 PM PST

It's still incredibly difficult to get your hands on a PS5 right now. While buyers are still struggling to find a system out in the wild, it does look like Sony is doing its part to try and alleviate at least some of the restocking woes plaguing retailers.

In fact, there may be a resurgence of PS5 stock in the coming months, if a new report is to be believed.

The report alleges that Sony is planning to ship between 16.8 million and 18 million units in 2021, which will be possible following an increase in the units' supply stream. Digitimes claims Sony initially shipped 3.4 million PlayStation 5 units in its first month of availability.

That number is about to rise significantly going forward, thanks to more plentiful availability of the components required to put a PS5 into production. That means PS5 restocks could be coming in full force, hopefully putting something of an end to the need to buy systems from scalpers or stalking in-stock alerts.

Digitimes says AMD, which contributes custom 7nm CPUs for the PS5, secured additional capacity from semiconductor foundry TSMC to ramp up production. This should help monthly service production increase by 40 to 50%, which translates to a whopping 1.4-1.5 million units in 2021. That's a million units more than 2020's production numbers, which will no doubt help quell the demand for PS5s at least by a bit.

The CPUs are based on AMD's Ryzen Zen 2 architecture, with Radeon RDNA2 GPU. Both China's Tongfu Microelectronics and Taiwan's Silicon Precision Industries will split manufacturing duties on the back end as a 70/30 split. Sony is planning to earmark more PS5s for Asian territories after January 2021 thanks to these additional components, which will undoubtedly help ease the frustration buyers are feeling around the world from being unable to join in on the latest console generation.

Previous reports indicated that Sony had been planning to ship 10 million PS5 units ahead of March 2021, so the 3.4 million number does pan out. Previously, Sony had planned only for around 5 and 6 million units shipped by March, but changed course with demand on the rise.

With additional components going into getting more PS5 units on shelves and into the hands of customers, it looks like more users will finally be able to experience the system firsthand for themselves. In our PS5 review, we awarded the PS5 4.5 stars, calling it "the future of console gaming."

"If you manage to pick a PS5 up now, know that you'll be treated to a true next-gen experience complete with advanced haptics, beautiful graphics and almost zero friction between you and the games you want to play."

If Digitimes' sources are correct, sentiments like "managing" to grab a PS5 could perhaps be a thing of the past soon enough.

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2020 put us on the edge of a processor revolution - Engadget

Posted: 30 Dec 2020 07:10 AM PST

In this episode of our explainer show Upscaled, we took a look back at the year in CPUs. From one perspective 2020 feels like the new normal for CPUs. Intel put out another high-end chip, 10th-gen "Comet Lake", which added a few cores but is still based on its aging 14nm transistor design, and AMD countered with Zen 3, an improved version of its desktop architecture that now goes up to 16 cores. This is the same pattern we've seen for a few years, with almost no surprises: the 10-core i9-10900k is impressively fast, but not that different from the 8-core 9900K, and we already got 16 core AMD chips last year with the 3950.

But look a little closer, and there's been some impressive news in 2020. While Zen 3 didn't increase core counts or clock speeds dramatically, it did deliver a big boost in instructions per-clock without increasing power consumption. After the disastrous CPU designs of the 2010s that nearly bankrupted AMD, part of me has been waiting for something to go wrong, for a new Zen CPU to underperform or come half-baked, but Zen 3 feels like it proves AMD knows what it's doing. These chips are pricy, but blazingly fast (we think the 16-core Ryzen 9 5950X is overkill for most, but probably the best chip you can get for content creation), and they're only leaving us feeling more excited for Zen 4, when AMD is likely to move to a redesigned motherboard socket, new manufacturing process, and high-speed DDR5 memory support all in the same generation. Just don't hold your breath, Zen 4 may not arrive til 2022.

For Intel, while Comet Lake may not be terribly exciting, Intel's 2020 mobile chips are a showcase for its new architectures and manufacturing. 2020 finally saw the wide release of 10th gen "Ice Lake" laptop chips, though they technically premiered in 2020. This chips were pretty efficient, but were limited by slow clock speeds that made them a little underwhelming when it came to performance. Intel's 2020 design, Tiger Lake, or "11th gen" fixed a lot of that, with faster speeds and a massively upgraded GPU. Tiger Lake powered ultraportables like the XPS 13 are capable of some halfway decent 1080p gaming, at least in titles like Fortnite and Overwatch.

It's not quite PC technology, but Apple has also stirred things up with the M1 chips. Ditching Intel for an in-house design, the M1 is based on Apple's iPhone and iPad chips, and looks to be seriously fast, while only using a few watts of over. Maybe most impressively, Apple may be cooking up new designs with as many as eight times the CPU and GPU cores in the M1. Between these chips and some of the first RISC-V linux systems starting to ship, the next few years may become a lot more complicated than Intel versus AMD.

In this article: RISC, ryzen, amd, m1, computer, tiger lake, ice lake, zen, intel, processor, Cpu, yir2020, apple, core, engadgetupscaled, news, gear

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