Hardware

The price hike may prompt other manufacturers to follow suit

Is saving $60 on the right tool for the job worth the nerves?

Acer's Predator X32 X2 features a 31.5-inch 4K panel, while the X27U X1 comes with a 26.5-inch WQHD panel

No shaking required.

In March 2001, Nintendo introduced an advanced portable model to the gaming market with the release of the Game Boy Advance (GBA, codenamed Advanced Game Boy or AGB). Equipped with a modernized 32-bit ARM CPU running at twice the speed of the Game Boy Color (GBC), this small device was more than capable of playing SNES-like games—still at the price of only two AA batteries.

A Chinese firm has started to mass produce a 31.2-inch color e-paper display. Local media reports (machine translation) that Guangzhou Aoyi Electronic Technology Co Ltd worked with Shenzhen Jin Yatai Technology Co Ltd to meld display, image processing, and FPGA technologies to realize this new screen which is capable of "smooth video playback" at 18 frames per second.

For years the adoption of e-paper displays has been held back by devices with low refresh rates and slow response times. The new 31.2-inch display purportedly manages to overcome these undesirable traits by implementing a handful of technical tricks. "Its core innovation lies in the unified control of split-screen, optimized image processing algorithms and local display functions," explains Hong Kong News. This means that the monitor can "dynamically refresh only local areas of the picture and control the synchronous display of large-screen split-screen, significantly improving the response speed and refresh efficiency."

Since the US imposition of sanctions prohibiting the sale of high-performance GPUs to China, indigenous manufacturers have taken it upon themselves to mitigate these limitations by modifying existing solutions. One of the results of these modding endeavors is an RTX 4090 with 48GB of GDDR6X memory, which is now becoming commonplace among local circles. Russian YouTuber Мой Компьютер (My Computer) obtained a blower-style edition RTX 4090 48GB, later taking it apart to examine the PCB among other design features.

Advances in materials and architecture could lead to silicon-free chip manufacturing thanks to a new type of transistor.

A stunning display.