Quick Shots-12

Motorola Edge (2021) First Impressions: A great-looking mid-range phone loaded with features

After a few years of sticking to the mid-range, Motorola reentered the flagship space last year with its Edge series of smartphones. This year, the Lenovo-owned company is refreshing the Motorola Edge (a new Edge+ could come later), and the new phone is certainly an interesting device. The Motorola Edge (2021) packs a 144Hz display, a 108MP camera, and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 778G processor.

The launch event for the phone was held at Yankee Stadium, and after the event, there were demoes featuring five-time All Star Bernie Williams and first-ballot Hall of Famer Mariano Rivera. Journalists were invited to stay for the game after, but we weren’t given review units, so there won’t be camera samples from the game (I used the Pixel 5a for that). Oddly, we also weren’t allowed to have laptops in the stadium.

Read More at XDA

Rumored Intel ‘Royal Core’ might beat AMD and Apple by 2025

Core was a microarchitecture Intel introduced in 2006, and Intel has used the “Core” branding on its consumer processors since. Royal Core, according to the leaker, is the code name for a set of architectures that will carry Intel into the future. The reported goal to ensure that Intel can beat ARM and Apple in terms of efficiency “for the foreseeable future.”

Intel is the the process of building toward Royal Core right now, according to the leak. Alder Lake, which is a hybrid CPU architecture set to launch later this year, is the first step in that process. The idea behind a hybrid architecture is that you can piece together multiple components — like a high-performance and high-efficiency core — to increase performance and efficiency. Intel is already working with this design, and the leaker says once the company is good enough at it, Royal Core will be released.

Read more at Digital Trends

Halo Infinite will not ship with campaign co-op or forge mode

Halo Infinite will be missing two major staples of the Halo franchise when it releases. In a development update released by developer 343 Industries, Joseph Staten, the game’s creative head, announced that Halo Infinite will not have campaign co-op or a forge mode when it launches.

“Unfortunately, as we focused the team for shutdown and really focused on a quality experience for launch, we made the really tough decision to delay shipping campaign co-op for launch. And we also made the tough call to delay shipping forge past launch as well,” said Staten. “When we looked at these two experiences — campaign co-op and forge — we made the determination, they’re just not ready.”

Read more at Digital Trends

Fossil Gen 6 smartwatch news, price, leaks and everything we know so far

Fossil should be announcing the new release date of the fossil gen 6 around August/September. That’s the same time of year as it dropped the Gen 5 in 2019. Fossil did usually launch its smartwatches annually, but it stopped that in 2020.

Fossil’s latest smartwatch, the Gen 5 LTE, was priced at $349/£329 when it was released, so we expect the Gen 6 to fall around that same price. Though Fossil does sell the cheaper Gen 5 $295/£279, and the even cheaper Gen 5E $249/£199.

We could see Fossil release the Gen 6 with a lower spec cheaper model like the Gen 5E. We also expect the Gen 6 to feature more expensive versions with luxury watch straps and cases.

Read More at Techradar

GM is pausing Bolt and Bolt EUV production due to semiconductor shortage

Just like the second-best song by the Carpenters, General Motors has only just begun producing the new Bolt and Bolt EUV, but already it has to shut down production thanks to the global semiconductor shortage, according to a report Thursday by Automotive News.

The General has heretofore been able to avoid interruptions to EV production at its Orion plant, but now the Bolt is suffering the same fate as many other vehicles in the GM family, though interestingly not the Hummer EV or the Cadillac Lyriq, with the former set to launch later this year and the latter slated for an early 2022 launch.

Read More at Cnet

Motorola Moto G50 5G (Saipan) appears on Geekbench with key specs

Motorola launched the Moto G50 5G (codenamed “Ibiza”) in March, and it is planning to introduce another Moto G50 5G, codenamed “Saipan.” We saw its leaked renders last week which revealed its design, and now the smartphone has appeared on Geekbench with its key specs.

The benchmark database reveals that the Moto G50 5G (Saipan) is powered by the Dimensity 700 SoC, corroborating a recent media report. And the unit that passed through Geekbench runs Android 11 and has 4GB RAM onboard, although there could be other RAM options as well to choose from.

Read More at Gsmarena

Realme C21Y India launch set for August 23

The Realme C21Y announced in June will debut in India on August 23 at 12:30PM local time. The company has also set up a promo page on its website for the C21Y, which confirms the Indian unit will come with a Unisoc T610 chip, 6.5″ display, and a 5,000 mAh battery.

The rear panel of the C21Y, which flaunts a Geometric Art Design, houses a triple camera system consisting of 13MP primary, 2MP macro, and 2MP monochrome units. There’s also a fingerprint reader for biometric authentication.

Read More at Gsmarena

Report: Pentagon Working on Space-Based Anti-Satellite Tech

Top Pentagon officials are pushing for the declassification of anti-satellite technologies capable of taking out adversary satellites and perhaps even spacecraft, Breaking Defense reports.

The military was poised to reveal the project, but the crisis in Afghanistan and the COVID-19 pandemic appear to have delayed the declassification, according to Breaking Defense.

Since the project is classified, we still don’t know what shape these technologies will end up taking, exactly. The weapon system could take the form of a ground-based mobile laser, or even a high-powered microwave system capable of jamming electronics from space.

The news also comes shortly after the US Army unveiled plans to develop, test, and deploy high-altitude systems that can jam enemy communications from up on high.

Read More at The Byte

Tesla Dojo – Unique Packaging and Chip Design Allow An Order Magnitude Advantage Over Competing AI Hardware

Tesla hosted their AI Day and revealed the innerworkings of their software and hardware infrastructure. Part of this reveal was the previously teased Dojo AI training chip. Tesla claims their D1 Dojo chip has a GPU level compute, CPU level flexibility, with networking switch IO. A few weeks ago, we speculated on the packaging of this system being a TSMC Integrated Fan Out System on Wafer (InFO_SoW). We explained the benefits of this type of packaging alongside the cooling and power consumption involved with this huge scale up training chip. Additionally, we estimated that this package would outperform Nvidia systems in performance. All of this seemed to be valid speculation based on the reveal. Today we will dive more into the semiconductor specifics of the reveal.

Read More at Semianalysis

Moderna’s mRNA Vaccine for HIV Is Starting Human Trials This Week

Before 2020, many of us had never heard of mRNA. With the development of Covid-19 vaccines dependent on this molecule, though, mention of it was all over the news. In early August, the US reached the milestone of 70 percent of adults having received at least one dose of the vaccine. Covid was the first disease mRNA therapeutics tackled, and given the success of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines at preventing severe cases of the virus, it won’t be the last.

New candidates are lining up, with scientists saying mRNA could make it possible to develop vaccines against all kinds of diseases that, until now, haven’t had a solution in sight. One of these is HIV; Moderna (whose name, by the way, comes from “modified RNA”) started trials of its experimental mRNA-based HIV vaccine, called mRNA-1644, this week.

Read More at Singularity hub