Ben Funk
Recent posts
Mining cryptocurrency is just one small part of the problem that plagues the semiconductor industry related to chip shortages, with the increased demand for GPU compute power. However, NVIDIA has been catering to this market in hopes of...
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Last year's Overwatch League was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and that temporarily pumped the brakes on some interesting AI projects, as well. At the time, Blizzard and IBM were set to announce that Big Blue was about to become...
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The 20-year span between 1985 and 2005 saw the release of literally hundreds of classic game titles that were -- and are still -- beloved by millions of people around the world. From Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda, to modern...
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After a lengthy technical preview, Parallels has officially released Parallels Desktop version 16.5 which includes official support for Apple's latest Macs. That includes support for the 2020 Mac mini, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro which...
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In 1984, Hasbro and Takara-Tomy released The Transformers upon an unsuspecting world, and this six-year-old was hooked. Led by Optimus Prime, a red and blue cabover Peterbilt semi truck that turned into a friendly alien robot, the Autobots...
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Whether it's playing Duck Hunt on the NES with a Zapper or pumping quarters into Area 51 or Time Crisis in arcades, just about everyone is familiar with light gun games. The simplicity of these games is born from their "on-rails" design...
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The Microsoft Store Spring Sale is on, and it's running through April 15. Just about everything is on sale, from PC and Xbox Series X (and One) games to Surface PCs. Microsoft even has some really nice prices on other manufacturers' PCs...
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From the beginning of the Pixel program, Google's phones have always run on Qualcomm Snapdragon mobile platform silicon. In fact, you'd have to go all the way back to 2011's Galaxy Nexus, which ran on a Texas Instruments OMAP 4460 to find...
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When it comes to high-end content creation, time is money. Businesses with employees that are stuck sitting around waiting for compute-intensive tasks to finish, simply can't get as much accomplished as those with speedy hardware that can...
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Don't blindly click that link or assume the notification about a system update that you received is real. Zero-day exploits in popular server applications like Solarwinds and Exchange may grab headlines, but the biggest problems most users...
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Graphics cards are in short supply at retail prices everywhere, but it hasn't stopped AMD and NVIDIA from pushing their latest tech further down the price ladder. We've heard in recent weeks about a lower-end Navi 23 GPU from AMD, and it...
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Sometimes, a work of art hits our culture at just the right time, when it can transcend its medium and become something greater. Such events are exceedingly rare in video games, but we old folks remember Pac-Man Fever and Fred Savage in...
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It feels like forever ago, but it's only been a few months since Apple kicked Fortnite out of the App Store and suspended Epic's developer account. Of course, you know how the rest of this story goes: Epic filed a lawsuit against the...
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In case you missed it, the OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro smartphones are coming on March 23. That announcement seemed inevitable, since smartphones tend to launch on a roughly a production schedule. While the price of OnePlus smartphones has crept...
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Last year, the COVID-19 pandemic ended the NCAA college basketball season early, but this year, Selection Sunday is tomorrow afternoon. And of course there's still plenty of time to upgrade the living room TV prior to the play-in game on...
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Whether you're streaming, video podcasting, or working from home to join meetings on Zoom or Microsoft Teams, visual fidelity is important. Video calls are hard to handle when we can't understand each other and body language is important...
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After months of rumors and speculation, and then an accidental slip-up by AMD itself, the company finally announced the Radeon RX 6700 XT on Wednesday. The new GPU comes with a cut-down version of Big Navi, dubbed Navi 22 (not-so Big...
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The never-ending parade of security vulnerabilities continues. Just as quickly as software vendors can tackle and resolve one set of exploitable issues -- i.e. the troubles at SolarWinds -- attackers find other vectors to break into...
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Using a graphics processor or GPU for tasks beyond just rendering 3D graphics is how NVIDIA has made billions in the datacenter space. Of course, NVIDIA's proprietary CUDA language and API have been exclusive to the company's GPUs since...
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Apple's latest M1 Macs -- and many Intel-based ones, for that matter -- all use the company's T2 security chip, which encrypts the system's built-in storage. The issue with highly-integrated motherboards with onboard storage is that if the...
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If you're currently using the microphone built into your webcam, it might be time to up your audio game. Whether you're streaming for fun or working from home, the mics including with USB cameras aren't the best around. While many laptops...
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Back in September, the World of Warcraft team asked players what they would want as their next mount. The options players had to choose from were pretty varied, including a spider-like Nerubian Swarmer and a Soaring Spelltome -- an actual...
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