Retailers are offering a number of PS5 bundle deals to coincide with today’s Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 release.
24.10.2023 - 19:09 / pcmag.com
MAUI—Qualcomm says its newest Snapdragon Sound technology will bring premium audio experiences to the next generation of mobile headphones.
Its S7 and S7 Pro Gen 1 Sound platforms, announced today at Qualcomm's annual Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii, target a wide range of activities, including lossless music, gaming, multi-point connectivity, and extended-range listening so you can wander further away from your phone or PC without dropping the connection.
Qualcomm relied on its latest State of Sound Report to generate the feature list for the S7 and S7 Pro. Its research, which polled 7,000 people across seven countries, suggests that 79% of people want whole-home audio when listening. In other words, four out of five people would like to be able to connect headphones to their phone or PC and then be able to wander throughout their home without disconnecting from the source. That's a challenge given that the range of many Bluetooth headphones is limited to about 30 feet. Qualcomm also found that 73% of respondents want higher-quality music and that 68% of people would like to use the same set of headphones for multiple activities, such as music or gaming. The S7 and S7 Pro hope to help device makers ease these pain points.
To start, the S7 Pro packs a combination of radio enhancements that should give people more room to roam. The chip supports Bluetooth 5.4 with Bluetooth LE Audio and Auracast Broadcast Audio. Qualcomm is combining this with micro-power Wi-Fi connectivity to create an Extended Personal Area Network, or XPAN. This mode relies on your phone's and router's Wi-Fi radios to maintain music streaming wherever the two can provide coverage with up to 24-bit 192kHz lossless with spatial audio.
Qualcomm didn't say exactly how much distance this adds, but you can bet it'll be better than what's available to today's devices. And that boost in streaming quality is notable. The standard S7 platform doesn't include the additional connectivity component for XPAN.
Further, the chips have a new compute module that's able to provide 6x the processing power and support 3x the memory of the previous-generation chips. That means 3x the digital signal processing and 100x more on-device AI. The module has a dedicated AI core that works harder but draws less power for machine learning applications. It also has dedicated cores for audio curation, which handles the ANC, hearing loss compensation, noise management, and transparency. Qualcomm says this equates to ANC that is better able to respond to environmental stimuli and adjust accordingly. Qualcomm calls it 4th Gen Qualcomm ANC and says it can transition seamlessly between quiet and loud spaces.
The S7 and S7 Pro platforms make big strides in battery
Retailers are offering a number of PS5 bundle deals to coincide with today’s Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 release.
Union Commerce and Industries Minister Piyush Goyal is scheduled to visit the US from November 13-17 to attend the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) ministerial meeting and has been invited to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit in San Francisco.
The commotion was really loud in the artificial intelligence world today, November 9, as a new technology sparked several controversies. In the first incident, reports have highlighted that Nvidia is soon going to release three AI chips for China. This comes weeks after the US government restricted trade of advanced semiconductors with China, forcing Nvidia to not sell its top-of-the-line A800 and H800 series chipsets to China. In other news, rapper Bad Bunny wrote a post on his WhatsApp Channel asking fans to leave if they choose to listen to the viral song on TikTok that has been generated using AI and mimics his voice. This and more in today's AI roundup. Let us take a closer look.
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Like all good software companies these days, Microsoft is busy shoehorning AI systems into its products and services, all in the aid of making your life easier and better. However, get a little too greedy in how much you use its generative AI services and you could find yourself on the receiving end of a spot of throttling.
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MAUI, Hawaii—Let's start with a great big caveat: This is not your conventional benchmark testing story, at least as PCMag usually does them. We attended Qualcomm's 2023 Snapdragon Summit last week, and were regaled with session after session detailing advances in on-device AI, Qualcomm's ubiquitous Snapdragon smartphone chips, news around new cross-device info sharing and synchronicity. But most of all there is "Oryon": the company’s next-generation CPU core silicon that will scale from laptops (where it will make its first appearance in the company’s Snapdragon X Elite processor next year) eventually to smartphones, automotive applications, and more.
MAUI, Hawaii—At Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit 2023, PCMag sat down with two of the company’s senior leaders for a conversation around the star attraction of the first day’s keynote: Snapdragon X Elite, the first PC-compute iteration of the company’s new Snapdragon X family of mobile processors. Qualcomm has made some bold performance and efficiency claims around X Elite. They stand in stark contrast to the relative paucity of Snapdragon laptop-processor design wins to date (compared with Qualcomm's commanding position in smartphone chips). Many of the initial claims throw down the gauntlet to today’s big-three laptop chip makers (AMD, Apple, and Intel).
Developer Red Barrels has announced that the newest update for The Outlast Trials, themed after Halloween, is out now. The update brings with it a host of new content, including the new Court level part of the Trial Program 4: Truth and Justice.