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Starlink Struggles in Testing

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We are now two years on from the launch of the first satellite in the Starlink system, and reviews for the beta test are rolling in. As with anything Musk has a hand in, there’s been a lot of talk about what Starlink can accomplish. Some are firm believers that the service will live up to its hype, while others insist Starlink is another case of Musk’s overpromising and underdelivering. As the latest reports have shown, Starlink could be shaping up for the latter rather than the former.

The Starlink Potential

The basic idea behind Starlink is that it will act as a faster and more reliable satellite internet service than any that came before. Directly, Starlink could be seen as a successor to systems like Anik F2, a high-throughput satellite that launched in 2004. Offering speeds up to 30 times faster than dial-up, at up to 1.5Mbps, these early incarnations held promise.

The only real issue with these early systems is that to achieve geostationary orbit they had to be placed around 36,000 km high. Even in perfect conditions, this distance would incur a latency (or round trip wait time) of approximately 550 milliseconds. While this could be useful for general browsing duty, more fast-paced and active uses such as movie streaming or online gaming were rendered unplayable with such delay.

To avoid this issue, Starlink has instead gone with an enormous net of satellites in three tiers, with the closest placed at 500km above the earth’s surface. To maintain orbit, these need to move extremely quickly, which is why Starlink is aiming to launch tens of thousands of satellites. The more added, the better the coverage. The outcome of this difference is a supposed eventual goal of 300Mbps bandwidth and a latency of 20 milliseconds.

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Source: Pixabay

Testing Results

In the beta tests, Starlink in action is far from living up to the dream. The major problems to arise have been found in two related areas; unreliable connections and the difficulty of dish placement. In simple terms, Starlink can only operate at peak effectiveness when it’s given a completely free field of view to the sky. Any surrounding trees, houses, or geography will diminish the dish’s ability to track satellites. Add shoddy reliability even in perfect circumstances, and the dream isn’t as great as many hoped.

Speeds in beta tests have tended to hover around a 90Mbps download speed, which isn’t too terrible, and latency still usually played under the all-important 100 milliseconds mark. However, without reliable connections, such speeds are practically moot. Speeds can vary wildly over a day, and with so many satellites constantly needing new connections, downtime can occur regularly and often. Dealing with a couple of hours of downtime a day might be acceptable if it can be planned around, but when it happens seemingly at random it becomes far less permissible.

 

Real-Life Uses

As for what Starlink could be used for today, that much relies on luck. Consider two common uses, streaming movies online and playing online casino games. In streaming movies, quality could be fine for large chunks of a film, with constant interruptions where the movie has to pause, buffer, or drop to lower quality to ensure consistency. This is frustrating and could be a deal-breaker for some.

In accessing and playing on something like the best online Canada casinos, demands tend to be much lower than with systems like movie streaming. This applies to all facets of the experience, from browsing comparison websites to find bonuses and features to collecting deposit matches, and playing the games themselves. Each step here requires very little bandwidth, but each could also be broken by the low connection reliability. Safety features of these casinos mean a constant connection needs to apply at all times when playing games, where Starlink’s drops could render even small titles unplayable.

Source: Pixabay

Future Perfect?

Proponents of Starlink are quick to point out that the growing net of satellites will improve coverage reliability, and this much is true to some degree. That said, the major benefits will only ever apply to those with completely unobstructed lines of sight to the sky. This is an unlikely scenario for most people, though in the right place at the right time, the potential is there.

Ultimately, the most profound benefits afforded by Starlink could apply not to general internet connections in developed nations, but rather as specialized systems for remote and developing areas. Having a satellite dish for high-speed internet in such places could introduce massive benefits in terms of education and communication opportunities. The results of such systems are untold improvements to ways of life, and in this, we have to have faith in what Starlink could accomplish.

With rollout increasing all the time, and a goal for integration into larger vehicles like ships and RVs stated somewhere down the line, we’re yet to see the peak of what Starlink can accomplish. Should it fail to measure up, however, its government subsidies could be cut, and the project could utterly fail. Though, should this occur, the lessons learned from Starlink are immense and might prove indispensable for satellite communications technology in the future. Either way, the Starlink experiment seems to have been worth the effort.

 

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PlayStation 5 Pro rumored to beef up GPU and ray tracing, bring AI acceleration

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The PlayStation 5 launched in late 2020, though it feels like it arrived later due to supply issues. A Pro model will reportedly arrive four years later with a much improved GPU, AI acceleration and other enhancements.

The GPU will be the biggest upgrade on the PS5 Pro. Rumors claim up to 45% higher rasterization performance and 33.5 TFLOPs of compute power. Future SDK versions will support resolutions up to 8K and higher frame rates with 4K @ 120fps and 8K @ 60fps being possible.

Ray tracing performance is set to include 2-3 times, even 4 times on some occasions. This is thanks to a massive increase from 18 BVH4 work groups to 30 BVH8. The so-called “Bounding Volume Hierarchies” help speed up ray intersection calculations (i.e. does this ray of light hit this object or not?). We will skip the technical details, but the digit after BVH means that each individual work group will be able to do more work.

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The Pro will also feature the PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution upscaling and antialiasing technology (PSSR for short). This will be especially helpful for ray tracing, which sees computation demands explode as resolution goes up.

The PlayStation 5 Pro will also bring a custom machine learning architecture. An AI Accelerator will offer up to 300 TOPS of 8-bit and 67 TFLOPS of 16-bit floating point computation. This might be the most interesting part as modern generative models can create realistic textures and speech, write out text based on a prompt and so on – what can developers do with this?

The console will also come with a modest boost to the CPU, which will have a “High CPU Frequency Mode” that goes up to 3.85GHz (from 3.5GHz), a 10% increase. By the sound of it, the PS5 Pro is very close to thermal limits, so this mode will drop GPU frequency by 1.5% (resulting in 1% performance loss).

The Pro model will have faster RAM that does 18 gigatransfers per second, a 28% increase from 448GB/s to 576GB/s. This is needed to feed the beefier GPU.

The audio subsystem will also get a boost with 35% more performance that can be spent on higher quality sound effects.

The PlayStation 5 Pro is expected to have 1TB onboard storage and a detachable Blu-ray drive similar to the slim models. Sony might release the Pro model in Fall 2024, but there has been no official acknowledgment of the console.

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Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 is for lower-tier high-end phones – MobileSyrup

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Qualcomm has a new Snapdragon 8-series chip aimed at devices that aren’t quite flagships but are not quite mid-range either.

The new chip offers manufacturers more options but also further contributes the Qualcomm’s increasingly weird and confusing product lineup. The new 8s Gen 3 is like the opposite of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8+ chips, which typically offer a little more than the company’s annual flagship product.

The 8s Gen 3 matches most of what Qualcomm’s current Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 flagship offers, but with just a little less. For example, the chips have a similar GPU, but the 8s Gen 3’s version has one less performance core and runs at a lower frequency. Additionally, the 8s Gen 3 uses the previous generation Snapdraogn X70 5G modem with Wi-Fi 7 support, compared to the X75 modem in the 8 Gen 3.

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Since AI capabilities were one of the major highlights of the 8 Gen 3, the 8s Gen 3, unsurprisingly, also sports similar (but not quite as good) AI chops. The 8s Gen 3 can support generative AI on-device and is capable of running large language models (LLMs) of up to 10 billion parameters. That includes LLMs like Llama 2 and Gemini Nano.

While that’s all well and good, it’ll be interesting to see how manufacturers use the 8s Gen 3, and how consumers respond to the new chip. Flagships will likely keep going for the flagship Qualcomm chips, like the 8 Gen 3 or inevitable 8+ Gen 3, whenever it arrives. But Qualcomm also offers the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3, just a hair below the new 8s Gen 3. Will the 8s Gen3 offer enough to make it a worthwhile choice over the 7 Gen 3? If you’re already looking at the 8s Gen 3, does it make sense to just go for the 8 Gen 3? Only time will tell.

Qualcomm expects the 8s Gen 3 to land in devices from Honor, iQOO, Realme, Redmi and Xiaomi in the coming months, though notably, none of those brands sell phones in Canada.

Header image credit: Qualcomm

Source: Qualcomm Via: The Verge 

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Google partnership 'missing piece' in Apple AI strategy – analysts – Proactive Investors USA

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News of Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL, ETR:APC) and Google’s discussions over the rollout of the latter’s Gemini AI chatbot on iPhones sent shares higher and prompted positive feedback from analysts on Monday.

Apple climbed 1.4% on the reports that it would license Gemini to power new features in its latest iPhone software, while Google owner Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) jumped 4.6%.

As per Wedbush, such an agreement is the “missing piece” in Apple’s artificial intelligence strategy, due to materialise with the release of IOS 18 software for its products this year.

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Such plans could involve the introduction of an AI App Store, as per Wedbush, alongside the incorporation of new features into the iPhone 16, expected in September.

These may well be among features unveiled by Apple at its Worldwide Developers Conference in June, such as homegrown large language models.

“This is a major win for Google to get onto the Apple ecosystem and have access to the golden installed base of Cupertino,” analysts said in a note.

Indeed, some 2 billion-plus Apple devices are said to currently be in circulation globally, with Wedbush also highlighting a likely “major license fee” attached to the deal.

“For Apple, this will give them the foundation and technology blueprint to double down on AI features currently being developed,” the bank continued.

This should help “make sure that iPhone 16 will be a potential game changer iPhone release around AI functionality”.

Though details of the deal, reported by Bloomberg, are slim, Wedbush said more could be expected before June’s conference, while reiterating an ‘outperform’ rating for Apple.

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