As a longtime Android user, I’ve spent the better part of a decade on the sidelines of an entire product category, awaiting a wearable that could rival the Apple Watch. From startups to traditional watchmakers, many companies have promised a worthy alternative, only to release smartwatches with crippling compromises.…
One of the top executives of a gargantuan texting contractor has been accused of running a secret surveillance business, the likes of which sold access to the company’s partner networks so that governments could spy on various users.
If you visited the Ocearch marine animal tracker in the last week, your eyes might have been drawn to the eastern seaboard of North America, where a bombardment of blue dots made it look like the coastline was being assaulted by white sharks.
James Cameron’s Spider-Man. It’s a phrase film fans have heard and thought about for years. The idea of one of the greatest blockbuster filmmakers in history tackling one of the most popular, cinematic superheroes ever is incredibly enticing. And, in the mid-1990s, it almost happened. Cameron was aggressively trying…
A room used by the jury in the Giles County Courthouse in Pulaski, Tennessee, featured Confederate flags and framed portraits of Confederate officials.
<img width=”1280″ height=”720″ src=”https://cdn.slashgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/microsoft-office_365-monthly-price-increase-1280×720.jpg” class=”webfeedsFeaturedVisual wp-post-image” alt=”Microsoft office icons” style=”margin: auto;margin-bottom: 5px;max-width: 100%” data-attachment-id=”701384″ data-permalink=”https://www.slashgear.com/microsoft-365-monthly-price-hike-pushes-customers-to-annual-plans-06701382/microsoft-office_365-monthly-price-increase/” data-orig-file=”https://cdn.slashgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/microsoft-office_365-monthly-price-increase.jpg” data-orig-size=”1440,810″ data-comments-opened=”0″ data-image-meta=”{“aperture”:”0″,”credit”:””,”camera”:””,”caption”:””,”created_timestamp”:”0″,”copyright”:””,”focal_length”:”0″,”iso”:”0″,”shutter_speed”:”0″,”title”:””,”orientation”:”0″}” data-image-title=”microsoft-office_365-monthly-price-increase” data-image-description=”” data-image-caption=”
The US Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating Tesla following a whistleblower complaint alleging the company failed to disclose a variety of safety risks associated with rooftop solar panels from its SolarCity division. Per Reuters, the agency acknowledged the probe in a Freedom of Information Act request made by Steven Henkes (pictured above), a former Tesla employee.
He contacted the SEC in 2019 after the automaker allegedly ignored his pleas to notify consumers and regulators about the safety issues with its solar panels. One of those involved defective electrical connectors that could cause fires.
In 2020, Henkes later sued Tesla, alleging the company had dismissed him in retaliation for his actions. “The top lawyer cautioned any communication of this issue to the public as a detriment to the Tesla reputation,” Henkes said in his complaint. According to the lawsuit, more than 60,000 residential customers were affected by the issues Henkes documented in his complaint.
The investigation follows several years of reports of safety concerns with Tesla’s solar panels. In 2019, Walmart sued the company after its solar panels led to seven store fires. While the two companies eventually settled, Walmart claimed at the time Tesla regularly sent inspectors who “lacked basic solar training and knowledge.” It also asserted the company’s panels were plagued by visible defects. That same year, the Tesla solar panels at an Amazon warehouse in California reportedly caught fire as well.
The world dumps some 17.6 billion pounds (8 billion kilograms) of plastic into the ocean every year—and now, you can check out how all that trash moves around. NASA released an animation showing shifting plastic concentrations in the world’s oceans over an 18-month period, the first research of its kind to map…
While we sometimes mistakenly think of old Hollywood as being a relatively chaste place (compared to the modern film industry), where the Hays Code forced studios to self-censor sexuality and anything that bucked American social norms, that’s not at all the case.
Photo Credit: Eliane Fiolet
On the final day of the Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii, we spent some time with the Snapdragon G3x Handheld Gaming Developer Kit (gaming device), the first device running on the Snapdragon G3x Gen 1 platform. The developer kit was launched in partnership with Razer, which has a thriving developer community.
Let’s talk about the G3x Gen 1 platform. It is a new gaming hardware platform architecturally close to today’s smartphones. It aims to leverage the best connectivity Qualcomm has (5G, WiFi 6E, etc.) with potentially significant differences in how the technology is physically packaged and how I think it can scale in the future.
The physical device differences between the Developer Kit and smartphones are based on specific game ergonomics like advanced haptics and, more importantly, system cooling potential.
Micah Knapp, Sr Director Product Management at Qualcomm. Photo Credit: Eliane Fiolet
Photo Credit: Eliane Fiolet
Photo Credit: Eliane Fiolet
Fundamentally, smartphones absolutely need to be thin & light at the expense of cooling capabilities and sustained performance. Essentially, you’re not maximizing the silicon potential because of thermal throttling and power limitations.
All phone designs stack three heat-generating components onto each other: the display, the processor, and the battery. There’s very little space left for heat-dissipation hardware such as heatsinks, let alone fans.
On the contrary, a gaming handheld like this developer kit allows much more freedom on all fronts, and it’s large enough to have a very potent cooling, larger batteries, and space between components. OEMs don’t have to follow the G3 design, so we expect to see many variants.
From a software point of view, the G3x platform runs on Android. The existing software is compatible, and most game developers have nothing to do as their games should run out of the box.
There are opportunities to push sustained performance higher, and game developers might add higher graphics options or better support for physical controls. Today, touch controls can be remapped to physical controls automatically or quickly, so G3x would come out of the gate with a huge game library.
The handset can game stream from PCs, consoles, or cloud gaming services, just like phones and other client devices. That’s where advanced connectivity makes a big difference in terms of latency, for example.
The question is, “who wants this?” For now, it’s for gamers who want to play “on the go” without compromise. We don’t yet know how many units this could represent because it’s a new market. It’s fair to speculate that the gaming market size should allow for a nascent niche market like G3x to exist.
Every year, 1.4 Billion mobiles are sold (2020 numbers), and looking back, it took ten years for Sony to sell 102 Million PS1 consoles, which was considered a smashing business success.
The Nintendo DS sold 20M units over its lifetime and is considered a legendary success. More recently, Nintendo has sold 93M Nintendo Switch thus far. A platform like G3x could be highly successful even though very small compared to the overall phone market. Note that console makers don’t make money on the hardware but the games’ distribution, but that’s another analysis.
The G3x Gen 1 Developer Kit’s internal specs remained undisclosed. Eyeballing the game demos’ frame rates, it doesn’t seem to run the highest-end smartphone CPU/GPU combo, perhaps a Snapdragon 7xx equivalent. That’s how it feels. It doesn’t matter, as this prototype is meant for developers to gauge the ergonomics and potential of the system. Qualcomm and Razer say that the feedback has been extremely positive thus far.
Photo Credit: Eliane Fiolet
Photo Credit: Eliane Fiolet
Following the Snapdragon naming convention, we can imagine that a G8x platform will someday be powered by a dedicated “gaming” chip much more potent than high-end smartphones. The G3x naming could indicate that we’re looking at entry-level performance in the Snapdragon G platform.
Technically, Qualcomm could scale CPU and GPU cores to match peculiar gaming workloads. Every game console is designed that way, as game execution is typically overweight on GPU and bandwidth. The CPU acts as an orchestrator, and co-processors like Hexagon or even the ISP could offer huge game benefits if accessible to developers.
Any performance comparison with current smartphones is irrelevant until G3x consumer devices are near launching. We’re still at the proof-of-concept phase here.
Many will see the Snapdragon G3 device as a Nintendo Switch competitor, but looking at the horizon shows a much broader picture. If you agree with the premise that Snapdragon G chips could (and I predict, will) scale CPU/GPU differently from smartphones to match gaming workloads, so Snapdragon G is not even limited to “handheld gaming.”
Photo Credit: Eliane Fiolet
Photo Credit: Eliane Fiolet
There’s no reason why Qualcomm couldn’t build an Android-powered PS/Xbox competitor in the future, perhaps backed by Google, Samsung, and many other OEMs. From a computational point of view, look at how Apple’s M1 scaled to the M1 Max very quickly.
The Snapdragon C8x’s (now on its 3rd generation) evolution is a pertinent example of how the Snapdragon phone architecture is adapted to productivity laptops’ needs and workloads with increasing success.
Snapdragon G could help Android succeed as a “box” where Android TV had mixed results. It’s too early to foresee how Qualcomm’s entry into the “dedicated gaming hardware” business will turn out. For now, there’s a clear opening in no-compromise mobile gaming from which Qualcomm can enter, establish a foothold, and expand.
Broader success depends on the synergy between hardware, game development, and game distribution, requiring many iterations and adaptation. A sizeable number of today’s AAA games are created by console makers such as Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, and they will leverage these sticky titles to retain customers. Others like Epic will embrace a multi-platform approach.
Finally, the price of Snapdragon G devices will play a huge role in adoption. We’ll have to wait for the first consumer devices before assigning a value metric.
To conclude, I don’t expect a substantial short-term impact on the gaming market in the next couple of years, but we might be looking back to this day as an inflection point in gaming hardware over the next decade. The introduction of the Snapdragon G3x Gen 1 may someday be compared to Sony’s, then Microsoft’s entry in the console business at their respective times.
There’s no consumer product for now, but developers can apply for units via developer.razer.com
Snapdragon G3x Gen 1 Gaming Platform: An Inflexion Point
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