Hardware

Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3080 has appeared in another leak online, as the spillage around the firm’s next-gen Ampere graphics cards intensifies ahead of their imminent launch, following an RTX 3090 leak which we just covered.

This one comes from the well-known leaker Rogame on Twitter, who shared a benchmark with spec details of the RTX 3080 (but keep the salt shaker handy).

Last October, during a long day of closed-door sessions and windowless-lab meetings with executives and product managers, the kind of closeness that would now make me shudder in the context of a pandemic, Microsoft revealed its dual-screened phone. The joke at the time was that Microsoft refused to call the Surface Duo a phone, identifying it instead as a brand-new kind of hybrid device, even though it runs Android and makes phone calls.

This month marks the 20th anniversary of the Power Mac G4 Cube, which debuted July 19, 2000. It also marks the 19th anniversary of Apple’s announcement that it was putting the Cube on ice. That’s not my joke—it’s Apple’s, straight from the headline of its July 3, 2001, press release that officially pulled the plug.

Hey, you! Do you want to control the future of basically every mobile device on Earth, and even some laptops and desktops? Have I got a deal for you! ARM Limited is for sale, the company in charge of the ubiquitous ARM CPU architecture that powers the majority of devices that run on a battery. It will only cost a few tens of billions of dollars. Bloomberg has two reports on the matter, one stating that Nvidia is interested in buying ARM and another saying that Apple isn't.

Last August, Apple announced that it would distribute special iPhones to elite security researchers. The idea was to offer a device that had fewer constraints, allowing researchers to home in on security vulnerabilities more easily without first having to work around standard iOS defenses. Starting today, those devices are finally going into circulation.

Last week, we covered the launch of Kano's new Windows-powered build-it-yourself PC. The Kano PC is an extremely chunky 11.6" tablet/laptop form factor PC with both specs and a $300 price similar to low-end Chromebooks—but instead of running ChromeOS, it offers a full Windows 10 experience.

Intel has outlined what to expect from the new Thunderbolt 4 standard, which is expected to start appearing in consumer devices later this year.

While it won't offer an increase over the 40GB/s that Thunderbolt 3 does, Thunderbolt 4 has steeper minimum requirements than Thunderbolt 3 for devices to claim certification—and that makes some new features and perks standard.

These are the specifications for Thunderbolt 4, according to Intel:

Nearly 20 years after its initial release, a hacker has found a way to run homebrew software on an unmodified PlayStation 2 using nothing but a carefully burned DVD-ROM.

Previous efforts to hack the PS2 relied on internal modifications, external hardware (like pre-hacked memory cards and hard drives), or errors found only on very specific models of the system. The newly discovered FreeDVDBoot differs from this previous work by exploiting an error in the console's DVD video player to create a fully software-based method for running arbitrary code on the system.

Boston Dynamics, easily the world's leading robotics company, is selling a robot to the public for the first time in its 28-year history. The company's robotic quadruped, "Spot," is now for sale on shop.bostondynamics.com, where you can take home your very own robotic dog for a cool $74,500.

On Tuesday, AMD announced three new additions to its desktop Ryzen CPU line: Ryzen 9 3900XT, Ryzen 7 3800XT, and Ryzen 5 3600XT. The new processor designs are expected to become generally available on July 7, the anniversary of the original launch date of 7nm Zen 2.