My opinions are italicized.
Intel is rebranding Core i to Core Ultra
Intel appears to drop their iconic “i” branding in the coming months. The new moniker that they would use is “Ultra”, for example it might be Core Ultra 9 13900K instead of Core i9 13900K. The Intel Core Ultra 5 1003H CPU recently made an appearance in the Ashes of the Singularity benchmark. It seems as if the data has been removed from the website as of the time of writing. There’s no indication as to what the “Ultra” moniker means yet. After these rumors have spread, Intel made a statement on Twitter confirming that they were making some brand changes and there would be more information in the coming weeks. They did not state in that Tweet that it would change to Ultra, so it is possible that they could change to an even weirder naming scheme for their products.
Intel’s naming for their products is the best in the industry right now. First, there is the product class, as in the i3, i5, i7, and i9, and after that there is the generation, like 13th gen. Compare this to AMD’s naming scheme, where it went from the Ryzen 1000 to 2000 to 3000 and then for no reason it jumped to 5000 and after that to 7000. They claim it is for separating their laptop chips from desktop, but that is a poor excuse. If I were to talk about Nvidia’s naming scheme or AMD’s GPU naming scheme, I would need another paragraph so look it up yourself.
Jedi Survivor performance issues being blamed on Windows 10
Jedi Survivor is having a rough start on PC. Performance is choppy in the largest areas of the game and having an over the top GPU does not even allow you to have a 60 FPS experience. The reason this seems to be happening is the game’s inability to utilize the full power of your hardware and its unending hunger for VRAM. EA made a poor statement that said that the problem was only for people who used Windows 10 instead of 11 and had more powerful GPUs coupled with less powerful CPUs. This message was posted only a few hours after the launch of the game, so it is possible that they had it ready to post before the game was released. Hardware Unboxed has found that the game actually runs better on Windows 10 compared to 11.
I find that the way gaming in general has changed over the years to be at fault instead of it being entirely on EA, even though they still shouldn’t have done this. Back in the day of physical games, as in they were on a disc or a cartridge, game publishers had to make sure that there were very little to no performance issues. This is because back in those days it was harder to update the game. These days, games are hundreds of gigabytes in size, poorly optimized, and require insane amounts of VRAM due to that poor optimization. It seems that game publishers don’t even bug test the game before they released it. Any amount of bug testing would have found the obvious performance issues on Jedi Survivor.
Gmail now has verified checkmarks
Gmail will start displaying a familiar-looking blue checkmark next to a sender’s name to verify their identity. Google stated in a blog post that the feature is supposed to help users figure out whether the email they’ve received is from a legitimate source or a scammer. The verified checkmark builds upon Gmail’s existing Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) feature. As shown in the image provided by Google, hovering over the checkmark says that “the sender of this email has verified” own the domain and profile image that they’re using to send the email.
I find that all of this checkmark verification is just really stupid. Now you know that the companies that send you spam emails are legit and they are trying to scam you out of your money. All I can say is I am glad that this is not a paid feature.
Pixel Fold announced
The Pixel Fold has been rumored for years but recently, there have been a lot of leaks for it. So many leaks and rumors that the entire product has already been revealed without Google needing to post anything online. Just to confirm what everyone already knew, Google posted on Twitter a short render of the Fold from almost every angle. There was no need for this Tweet since renders were leaked months ago. Google’s I/O event where they would announce the phone again is on May 10th.
ESA funding several space initiatives
For those who don’t know, ESA stands for the European Space Agency and they are funding some concepts. The first one is a nuclear rocket designed for deep space exploration. Nuclear propulsion can be more efficient than the most efficient chemical propulsion or overcome solar-limited electric propulsion, enabling exploration of places no other technology can reach. While the benefits are clear, the dangers that come with launching nuclear rockets are immense. If a nuclear rocket explodes before it reaches orbit, than nuclear waste would rain down from the sky. This study is going under the acronym “RocketRoll” and it had to be the worst acronym to even be created. “RocketRoll” stands for pReliminary eurOpean reCKon on nuclEar elecTric pROpuLsion for space appLications. I capitalized the letters that appear in the acronym. The next project that they funded was a space-based solar power plant. This is currently just a concept but the idea is to put solar panels in space and have the energy shot down from space in the form of a LASER.
