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CNBC
an hour ago
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Beijing's tussle with Brussels: China retaliates on EU medical devices
CNBC's Chery Kang and Elaine Yu discuss what China's move to impose reciprocal tariffs on the import of medical devices from the European Union could mean for an upcoming EU-China summit later this month.
Black America Web
2 hours ago
- Black America Web
Microsoft Laying Off Up To 9,000 Employees, Xbox Cancels ‘Perfect Dark', Gamers React
Source: picture alliance / Getty / Microsoft / Xbox / Phil Spencer Wednesday was a rough one for Microsoft and Team Xbox. The Seattle Times reports that Microsoft is giving about 9,100, or about 4 percent, of its workforce pink slips. According to the report, the Xbox division, aka Microsoft Gaming, will be hit the hardest as a result of these layoffs, but the exact number remains unknown. In a message to the team, Xbox head Phil Spencer said to the team, 'To position Gaming for enduring success and allow us to focus on strategic growth areas, we will end or decrease work in certain areas of the business and follow Microsoft's lead in removing layers of management to increase agility and effectiveness.' The sad news also means that these layoffs will impact games. According to Bloomberg , the Microsoft-owned King division, the maker of the wildly popular Candy Crush mobile game franchise, is laying off 10 percent of its employees, or approximately 200 people. Zenimax also confirmed it was laying off employees. Turn 10, the studio behind the Forza Motorsport franchise, is laying off more than 70 employees . The long-talked-about Perfect Dark game from the now-shuttered studio The Initiative and Crystal Dynamics, along with Everwild , has been canceled. Perfect Dark was just revealed during the Xbox Games Showcase in 2024, so that means there's a possibility that more games shown during that event could be put on ice by Microsoft. This latest round of layoffs follows Microsoft's layoffs of more than 6,000 employees less than two months ago, which were subsequently supplemented by an additional 305 reductions in early June. Phil Spencer's entire memo to the team, speaking about the recent round of layoffs, reads: Today we are sharing decisions that will impact colleagues across our organization. To position Gaming for enduring success and allow us to focus on strategic growth areas, we will end or decrease work in certain areas of the business and follow Microsoft's lead in removing layers of management to increase agility and effectiveness. Out of respect for those impacted today, the specifics of today's notifications and any organizational shifts will be shared by your team leaders in the coming days. I recognize that these changes come at a time when we have more players, games, and gaming hours than ever before. Our platform, hardware, and game roadmap have never looked stronger. The success we're seeing currently is based on tough decisions we've made previously. We must make choices now for continued success in future years and a key part of that strategy is the discipline to prioritize the strongest opportunities. We will protect what is thriving and concentrate effort on areas with the greatest potential, while delivering on the expectations the company has for our business. This focused approach means we can deliver exceptional games and experiences for players for generations to come. Prioritizing our opportunities is essential, but that does not lessen the significance of this moment. Simply put, we would not be where we are today without the time, energy, and creativity of those whose roles are impacted. These decisions are not a reflection of the talent, creativity, and dedication of the people involved. Our momentum is not accidental—it is the result of years of dedicated effort from our teams. HR is working directly with impacted employees to provide severance plan benefits (aligned with local laws), including pay, healthcare coverage, and job placement resources to support their transition. Employees whose roles were eliminated are encouraged to explore open positions across Microsoft Gaming, where their applications will be given priority review. Thank you to everyone who has shaped our culture, our products, and our community. We will move forward with deep appreciation and respect for all who have contributed to this journey. Phil You can see reactions to the announcement of the unfortunate layoffs in the gallery below, spoiler alert, Phil Spencer might want to stay off social media for a while. Microsoft Laying Off Up To 9,000 Employees, Xbox Cancels 'Perfect Dark', Gamers React was originally published on
Forbes
6 hours ago
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The Blackwell Successor: What Nvidia's Rubin Means For Your Phone
23 February 2024, USA, Santa Clara: The logo of the chip company Nvidia can be seen at its ... More headquarters in Silicon Valley. The company's market capitalization exceeded the two trillion dollar mark for the first time at the close of trading on Friday. Photo: Andrej Sokolow/dpa (Photo by Andrej Sokolow/picture alliance via Getty Images) It doesn't take too much digging to see that the hardware world is heating up. One company remains dominant in some key ways. Nvidia, led by Jensen Huang, is a big new star in the tech world, and recently became the largest company by market cap on the U.S. stock market, eclipsing both Apple and Microsoft. How did this happen? Nvidia has become adept at setting the trends when it comes to hardware. Its GPUs are in the biggest data centers, like XAI's Colossus and other projects operating at enormous scales, as when Musk kept capriciously adding 100,000 more GPUs to the aforementioned project. Nvidia has also garnered a large share of the foundry operations of TSMC, the Taiwanese company that primarily manufacturers chips, providing a wide range of top clients with processing power. Bold New Architectures Along with its track record in production and market dominance, Nvidia has also been announcing a lot of new models for its processors. It wasn't too long ago we were talking about Nvidia Blackwell, named after David Blackwell, and the Grace Blackwell superchip, that had groundbreaking capacity and a customer base around the world. At a recent tech event in 2024, though, Huang announced the company's intention to start offering a new kind of microarchitecture called 'Rubin,' named after physicist Vera Rubin. It would have a GPU called Rubin and a CPU called Vera, for a powerful one-two punch in terms of clock speed. In addition, there will be an alternative called Rubin Ultra developed after that, and a hardware model called Feynman (after physicist Richard Feynman) in 2028. As for memory bandwidth, Rubin is expected to have around 900 GB per second, with Rubin Ultra operating around 1200 GB per second. Feynman is expected to operate around 1000 GB per second, being optimized for certain kinds of data handling and precise mathematical operations. There's also a Rubin AI platform, the company's ecosystem, set up with Rubin chips. This will have ultra fast HBM4 memory, with NV Link 6 switches, to deliver up to 3600 GB per second in bandwidth. It's all made for data centers; it's made for AI. Putting LLMs on Devices Now, let's talk about the market effect of Nvidia's Rubin. Experts point out that it's not necessarily that you'll get an entire model working entirely off-line – but the architectures themselves will drive more edge computing models for robust systems. That means the AI entities that you do have on your local devices will become more competent, more capable, and able to reason at a more profound depth. So we are likely to soon see the effect of these hardware revolutions in the consumer world with our wearables and mobile device devices. Everything from fitness and education to retail, medicine and law is getting re-Imagined with powerful LLMs that are portable and decentralized from big data centers. 'These devices encompass a wide range, from powerful edge servers to resource-constrained IoT sensors, and include familiar examples like smartphones, smart home appliances, autonomous vehicles, and even industrial robots,' writes Bhavishya Pandit at Datacamp, explaining some of the values of edge computing and its potential effects on our tech world. Presumably, there's still important work going on in those big data centers, but increasingly, it will be relegated to research and esoteric IT, while we'll continue to see more implementation at the user device level. We'll probably see more impact on the average user, too. That may come in the form of higher user adoption for applications, or more respect for the powers that AI has, or both. How do you see the future of AI when everyone's carrying powerful artificial intelligence engines in their pockets? Let's keep an eye on this throughout the rest of 2025 and in 2026 as Rubin first comes to the hardware market.
