Activision Blizzard doing very well as a company that lays hundreds of staff off routinely during its best-ever year. This includes laying off staff who were directly involved with making their games better for the players while lying to the people by calling them “non-development staff”.
After laying off more than 1000 people, the company declared that they are willing to hire a new 2000 staff. The report says that more layoffs have been seen recently, giving laid-off staff a $200 Battle.net gift card while CEO Bobby Kotick has been paid $200 million in cash.
According to a source in a piece on GamesIndustry.biz, Activision Blizzard will enter yet another round of layoffs. It looks like the company is willing to run its European operations from a hub in the UK, with layoffs impacting staff in Germany, Sweden, Spain, two offices in the Netherlands, and staff within the UK.
Activision Blizzard replied when asked about this information:
“Players are increasingly choosing to connect with our games digitally. We have shared plans with our teams in Europe to evolve as an organization, adapting to this change to serve our players and best position the region for future growth. We will be taking extensive steps to support all employees and ease the transition for those of our colleagues who these proposed changes might impact.”
Activision Blizzard wants to make people understand that these layoffs will not affect localization and customer support teams. These proposed layoffs will be the fourth round in just six months, with the previous layoffs affecting key developer roles and ones that will need to be brought back post-COVID. These layoffs also come when the CEO of Activision, Bobby Kotick, is set to get a cash bonus of $200m.
Previously when we got our hands on the specs of the Samsung Galaxy Book Pro and Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 360, there was no concrete information about what the devices would look like. But, now, thanks to press renders shared by noted leaker Evan Blass, we now know how the Galaxy Book Pro notebooks look like.
According to sources, both laptops come with Full HD AMOLED screens, while the Pro 360 convertible also has a stylus for enhanced touchscreen operation. The regular Galaxy Book Pro has either silver or denim blue, and the Galaxy Book Pro 360 comes in navy blue and gold color.
Both the laptops will come in 13-inch, and 15-inch variants, with 11th Gen Intel chips (i3/i5/i7) powering them, and the Intel Iris Xe iGPU will deal with graphics in most cases. We also know that there will be a discrete-GPU option for the larger 15-inch SKUs in the form of the Nvidia GeForce MX450 graphics unit.
It is a great thing that for its Samsung Galaxy Book, the OEM is also offering a Thunderbolt 4 port and optional LTE connectivity. The AMOLED screens are bordered by a rather thick “chin” bezel, but the side and top bezels are very slender.
We don’t have any details about the price of the Samsung Galaxy Book Pro and Pro 360. But, another tipster has revealed that it may launch in May.
As the second wave of terrible coronavirus has risen day by day, it is better to watch movies at home so that the OTT platforms have tried their best to launch incredible movies to the audiences. In the top list of OTT platforms, Netflix is the most renowned OTT platform for movies.
Netflix has a lot of fantastic and incredible movies to watch on it. It has consisted of all kinds of cinematic stuff; it may be action, thriller, or adventure; you can find all of this on these OTT platforms.
Here is a list of the top 10 Movies with 4K titles:
10. A Champion Heart
IMDb rating: 5.2
The story of this film is based on a troubled girl who has found her faith, hope, and also healing through a beautiful relationship with the wounded house.
9. A Bad Moms Christmas
IMDb rating: 5.6
The story of this film is about the three moms from the first movie as they are dealing with their own mothers has visited during the Christmas holiday, as they had dropped them unexpectedly.
8.Earthquake Bird
IMDb rating: 5.9
In this film death has followed Lucy Fly of Earthquake Bird, an incredible and polished movie that has landed on November 15 on Netflix, here Lucy tells herself, the fact that her current friend, Lily Bridges has certainly vanished after adding the conviction to Lucy that she is cursed.
7.All Day and a Night
IMDb rating: 6.0
The story is based on a man named Jahkor Lincoln who has ended up serving a life sentenced for murder and turned back to the days preceding his arrest and all his surroundings of his childhood to search in the clues on his way in front of his life.
6. 6 Underground
IMDb rating: 6.1
The story is based on a man who has invented the vibration that anyone feels when they get a text or call and has faked his own death to visit underground and lead a crew of similar mercenaries.
5.Angel Has Fallen
IMDb rating: 6.4
It is an American action thriller movie. The story is based on the United States Secret Service agent Mike Banning as who has raced against the time to tell his name after being framed by a drone attack o the president of the United States.
4.Extraction
IMDb rating: 6.7
It is an incredible action film that tells the story of Tyler Brake who is a fearless black market mercenary. He has embarked on the deadliest extraction of his entire career after enlisting of rescuing the kidnapped son of an international lord of crime.
3.Knock Down The House
IMDb rating: 6.9
The story is based on four female Democrats who have decided to run for congress in the United States Elections of 2018. The four females are Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New York, Amy Vilela of Nevada, Cori Bush from Missouri, and Paula Jean Swearengin of West Virginia.
2.Dolemite is My Name
IMDb rating: 7.3
It is portrayed by Eddie Murphy, a real-life legend Rudy Ray Moore who is a famous comedy and rap pioneer and also proved naysayers wrong at the time of hilarious, obscene, kung-fu fighting, and Dolemite has become a Blaxploitation phenomenon in the 1970s.
1.Klaus
IMDb rating: 8.2
The story of this movie is based on a postman who has been stationed on an island to the far North and becomes friends with a reclusive toymaker who is Klaus. The story of Santa Claus but is independent of the historical i9mage of Saint Nicholas of Myra.
Intel’s Tiger Lake-H CPUs have made quite several appearances on the internet, and we have seen them recently alongside the Intel NUC 11 Extreme and a rugged workstation. But they aren’t due to arrive until Q2 of this year.
We now have a good idea about what they could have in store for us, thanks to Twitter user @9550pro. According to the leaker’s information, the top-of-the-line Intel Core i9-11980HK is an 8C/16T CPU with a base clock of 2.6GHz and a boost clock of up to 5.0GHz on a single-core and has a cTDP (up) of 65W.
According to the leaked information, we can find that the base and boost clocks are lower compared to the previous-generation Intel Core i9-10980HK (5.3GHz). There are several improvements, across the board, such as a higher L3 cache (24MB vs. 16MB), better GPU, faster RAM, and a newer 10nm process node.
In terms of the Intel Core i9-11900H, the base and boost clocks are 2.5GHz and 4.4GHz, respectively. Its single and dual-core boost clocks max out at 4.9GHz. Its 35W cTDP (down) is understandable, given the significantly lower 2.1GHz clock speed.
The Intel Core i7-11800H has an eight-core and sixteen-thread configuration but has a reduced base (2.4GHz) and boost (4.2GHz) clocks. It also does not come with Intel’s Turbo Boost Max 3.0 technology, thereby reducing its maximum single and dual-core boost values to 4.6GHz. It has a cTDP of 35W (down) with a rated clock speed of 2.0GHz.
Finally, coming to the Intel Core i5-11400H, a six-core and twelve-thread processor clocked at a depth of 2.7GHz (base) and a 4.1GHz (all-core boost). The processor supports up to 2,933MHz DDR4 RAM.
We can expect even more Tiger Lake-H CPUs to hit the market soon but, it still might be a good option to wait for a while and see the power of Alder Lake’s hybrid CPU architecture in action.
Earlier, Nvidia announced that it is taking a stand against crypto-mining, stating that its new hash rate limiter in its new GPUs, such as the RTX 3060, will stop the miner from exploiting the cards for mining.
However, the recent blunder by Nvidia has revealed that in RTX 3060 GPU miners can use the card for crypto mining by simply bypassing the card’s hash rate limiter simply by using the software.
And according to the latest sources, miners have found additional ways to bypass the GPU / Driver hand-shake to break the hash rate limiter on Ampere GPUs. It all started when NVIDIA accidentally published its GeForce 470.05 driver on its developer webpage that allowed users to bypass the hash rate limiter but later removed it.
But, the damage was done, as soon as the driver was highlighted to enable the full cryptocurrency mining rate of Ampere GPUs, it spread like wildfire and is currently available to download everywhere in public domains.
However, Andreas Schilling of Hardwareluxx has confirmed through his testing that the driver can still restrict the hash rate on the GeForce RTX 3060 when running multiple GPUs. To demonstrate the fact, the GeForce RTX 3060 was run alongside a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. The hash rate limiter kicks in pretty soon, forcing the ETH rate down to 21-22 MH/s instead of up to 50 MH/s which this card delivers.
One can assume that it is a way of Nvidia blocking cryptocurrency mining when running multiple GPUs. It detects which GPU is being used as a display adapter while simultaneously checking if multiple GPUs are running alongside it. Also, it checks that if mining algorithms are being run on the GPUs.
But this doesn’t mean that miners have not found a way even to bypass this feature. According to Andrea, all you have to do is get dummy HDMI connectors which can trick the driver into thinking that the other cards are also being run for display adapters and allow for full mining rate. So, use the latest trick to get the cards at their full cryptocurrency mining hash rate.
The upcoming card from Nvidia is the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, but if modders can bypass the RTX 3060, it’s sad to say that the limit will also be bypass on the RTX 3080 Ti too.
AMD stunned every one of us with the launch of their Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs last year; we already saw how capable AMD’s Radeon RX 6800 series GPUs are. Well, now it’s time to talk about the flagship AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT that shreds apart the competition even though it costs less than the RTX 3090.
We got the chance to review the flagship RX 6900 XT reference GPU, obviously, as getting a normal one in the market is close to impossible. AMD is struggling with NVIDIA in terms of ray tracing; in terms of raw graphics performance, AMD has come a long way ahead with RDNA 2.
The RX 6900 XT is the best GPU from AMD, and it can give a handsome 4K gaming experience without sacrificing quality. This article will tell you which GPU is the best and why AMD Radeon RX 6900XT is a worthy competitor to NVIDIA in all respects.
AMD has always been the number one choice for creators and professionals; that’s why Apple still prefers it. So, with 16GB VRAM across all the new GPUs, we knew AMD would have a slight advantage over NVIDIA, and that’s the case in all of the productivity benchmarks:
As you see in these productivity benchmarks, AMD takes the lead over all the new GPUs and comfortably defeats RTX 3080 and the RX 6800XT. However, there’s no huge difference between the RX 6900XT and the RX 6800XT in synthetic benchmarks.
AMD has a clear lead over NVIDIA’s flagship RTX 3080, showing how these new RX 6000 series GPUs are good for content creation. However, one area AMD still lacks by some margin is in ray tracing, as you see in the Port Royal test, NVIDIA is ahead of AMD.
In 3D Mark’s DirectX Raytracing feature test you get only 28 fps and this shows AMD’s weakness in Raytracing.
In the V-Ray GPU test, the AMD Radeon RX 6900XT gets a healthy score of 87. Overall, if you go by raw graphics performance, the flagship GPU by AMD is the best you could opt for with 16GB VRAM. For productivity, much like the RX 6800 series, the Radeon RX 6900 XT is a great option.
Gaming
It’s no denial of the fact that AMD has come a long way in terms of GPU horsepower and with RDNA 2 they have done things that we never have seen before. Surpassing NVIDIA or competing at the highest quality is in itself a big achievement for AMD.
We have already seen the Radeon RX 6800 series GPU gives stiff competition to AMD and now with Radeon RX 6900XT, AMD enjoys the be one of the best 4K gaming cards available in the market. Here are some gaming benchmarks across a wide range of modern gaming titles:
As you see, the RX 6900 XT is way ahead of NVIDIA’s RTX 3080 and its RX 6800 XT as well, but in comparison to the RX 6800 XT, the Radeon RX 6900 XT is a bit less convincing as there’s not a huge performance gain in gaming. Even though both the 6900 XT and the 6800 XT have the same TDP, the premium GPU draws more power and gets a bit hotter.
It is quite efficient in HPC workloads but sometimes end up drawing more power and causing power spikes, so at least use a 1000W TDP PSU to keep your PC safe.
While during prolonged gaming sessions, the AMD reference GPU did end up getting hotter, which is a bit of concern but in terms of performance, you can’t even complain. So, try to get a good custom Radeon RX 6900 XT to get the best out of the AMD Navi chip inside.
Verdict
Obviously, the RX 6900 XT is the absolute best but is a bit expensive and hard to find GPU; however, the RX 6800 XT, which is a bit less costly, is a better value in my frank opinion. We have seen many times that a well thermal design can unlock the full potential of these AMD GPUs, so a custom GPU by Sapphire, ASUS, Gigabyte, or any OEM might be more effective.
The AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT at Rs. 79,990, plus 18% GST for the reference GPU might give you some extra frames and more if you overclock or use a custom GPU, but the RX 6800 XT is AMD’s best value-for-money GPU at Rs. 64,990, plus 18% GST.
However, getting your hands-on with these AMD cards in the midst of a GPU shortage is unrealistic but do note that whichever AMD GPU you might end up buying in the premium segment, you won’t regret it. Hopefully, AMD improves its ray tracing performance in the coming days and brings the DLSS alternative to challenge NVIDIA’s exclusive benefits.
Whatsapp has been in the news almost daily due to some or other news. On 19th March 2021, that is just two days back, we saw Whatsapp, Instagram, and Facebook down for a few minutes. But here, we are not talking about that. According to the reports, Whatsapp is busy creating new features for its users.
Amidst all the controversy surrounding the new privacy policy floated by Whatsapp, the social media platform is working really hard to offer the best services to the users. The recent report suggests that Whatsapp is thinking for users to operate the Whatsapp Web without their phones connected to an internet connection.
This will be a huge breakthrough for the social media company. We often see people complaining that they are not able to use Whatsapp web because their handset is not connected to an internet connection. Sometimes, the mobile is not able to connect to the internet. This stops the users from using their Whatsapp Web as well. Thus, leaving them with no Whatsapp.
@WhatsApp will offer a WhatsApp Web Beta program for iOS and Android beta users, in order to use WhatsApp Web without having to keep your phone connected to the Internet! Follow @WABetaInfo to discover when WhatsApp will open the beta program!
We have already talked that how Whatsapp has been working on multi-device support for some time now. Earlier, apart from your handset, Whatsapp Web could be used from just another device. But now, if you are using the Whatsapp beta program, then you can link up to four desktop devices with your smartphone.
The messaging giant is thinking of using the same method to try out the feature we were talking about earlier. They are preparing a beta testing program that will allow users to test the possibility of using WhatsApp Web without keeping their phones connected to the internet. This might soon be available to Android and iOS users running beta versions of WhatsApp.
Reportedly Reliance Jio might be launching 5G-ready Android smartphone in the second quarter. According to reports, over 300 million featured phone users in India have switched to its telecom arm with Reliance Jio.
All the people who are very familiar with the fact said that RIL is working on the timeline of May-June to finish the R&D of the device, which is being manufactured with the tech giant Google. They had confirmed that the launch of the device is most likely in the second quarter of FY21. It also might arrange the annual general meeting which was held in August-September, at the time when RIL has made all its past announcements about its feature phones and also fiber, among the others.
On the AGM, RIL also has declared its plan of launching a laptop called JioBook which is manufactured by aiming the education sector. ET had also told about the manufacturing of a Qualcomm chipset-powered laptop. As in the middle of 2020, the users of Reliance Jio became slowed down and rival Bharti Airtel has rapidly added more users than Jio, so Jio has planned to propose a smartphone e that adds steam to the company’s effort.
Jio recently has announced its new tariff plans targeted at holding the 100 million users into its 4G smartphone, Jio mobile has able to attract 2G users from the rivals. The latest smartphone from RIL is a section of a two-long alliance with Google, at the first time, Google has picked up a 7.73% stake in the platforms of Jio, which is the percent of Reliance Jio for Rs. 33,737 crores in the last June. RIL also was done a commercial agreement with Google to develop an entry-level, 4G smartphone that can also support 5G in the future.
It has informed that the development of the smartphone is on the way, the specifications had been finalized. Now they are discussing the operating system that needs deep integration of Jio services.
From the various resources, it has been known that the company is developing JioOS which is a fork or the custom version of Google’s Android operating system, for the extreme performance of Jio applications. All the companies are now discussing the version of which to be used as the feature on the smartphones, it has been fixed that the phone also going to be featured with an Android Go operating system with the entry-level specifications.
ET has understood that Jio is avoiding with its electronic manufacturing partners only for the local production of Jio-Google smartphone.
For Mukesh Ambani’s JIo company, it has ensured that it will own some 100 million JioPhone subscribers transition quickly from the 4G featured smartphone. It also will try to fetch 300 million feature phone users recently on the networks of Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Idea, and state-run Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd.
Due to the slowing pace of their user addition, recently Jio has dropped the usage costs of its featured phone by 25% with the two offers.
Jio has decided to enter into the product ecosystem with a 5G smartphone and laptop. Some evidence has got that in the JioBook where the unit test of the company was searched using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 665 chipset with 4G LTE support.
OnePlus Nord 5G has been one of the best 5G smartphones launched last year. It has been a hit among the upper mid-tier smartphones. The new mid-range smartphone from OnePlus is one of the best selling smartphones in its category.
The smartphone manufacturer has now pushed a new update to the OnePlus Nord Oxygen OS. The new updated OS version is Oxygen OS 11.1.1.1.AC01DA. The update is just 100 MB in size.
In this update the following things have been improved or changed:
System
Update to Android 11 version
The brand new UI design brings you a more comfortable experience with various optimizations of details
Optimized the stability of some third-party apps and improved user experience
Optimized power consumption to increase battery life
Improved system stability
Fixed the known issues
Ambient Display
Newly added Insight clock style, a joint creation with Parsons School of Design. It will change according to the phone usage data (Go to: Settings > Customization > Clock on ambient display)
Newly added the Canvas always-on display, which can extract the subject’s outline from any photo and display it on your lock screen (Go to: Settings – Customization • Wallpaper – Canvas – Choose photo preview and it can be generated automatically)
Dark Mode
Added the shortcut key for Dark Mode, pull down the quick setting to enable
Now supporting automatically turn on feature & customize time range (Go to: Settings – Display – Dark Mode – Turn on automatically – Automatically enable from sunset to sunrise / Custom time range)
Shelf
Brand new shelf UI
Newly added a weather widget with smarter animation effect
Gallery
Newly added the Story feature, which can automatically create the weekly stories by using your local photos and videos
Optimized the loading speed to improve the image preview experience
IFFHS (International Federation of Football History & Statistics) has ranked the best European clubs of the last decade 2011-2020.
The UEFA Club of the Decade 2011-2020 has been crowned to Spanish club Barcelona just like the previous decade 2001-2010. This time they are just 95 points higher than their great rivals Real Madrid. However, the most surprising omission from the top 10 is that of Premier League club, Liverpool.
The yearly points scored by the clubs in the Club World Ranking by IFFHS have been added from 2011 to 2020 to determine the UEFA Club of the Decade 2011-2020.
So, here’s the top 10 best European clubs of the Decade 2011-2020:
10. Arsenal
Points: 2016 points League: Premier League Location: London, England Home ground: Emirates Stadium
Major trophies won in the last decade:
FA Cup: 2013–14, 2014–15, 2016–17, 2019–20
FA Community Shield: 2014, 2015, 2017, 2020
9. Manchester United
Points: 2,020 points League: Premier League Location: Manchester, England Home ground: Old Trafford
Major trophies won in the last decade:
Premier League: 2010–11, 2012–13
FA Cup: 2015–16
EFL Cup: 2016–17
FA Community Shield: 2011, 2013, 2016
UEFA Europa League: 2016–17
8. Manchester City
Points: 2,113 points League: Premier League Location: Manchester, England Home ground: Etihad Stadium
Major trophies won in the last decade:
Premier League: 2011–12, 2013–14, 2017–18, 2018–19
FA Cup: 2010–11, 2018–19
FA Community Shield: 2012, 2018, 2019
8. Chelsea
Points: 2,113 points League: Premier League Location: London, England Home ground: Stamford Bridge
Major trophies won in the last decade:
Premier League: 2014–15, 2016–17
FA Cup: 2011–12, 2017–18
EFL Cup: 2014–15
UEFA Champions League: 2011–12
UEFA Europa League: 2012–13, 2018–19
6. Juventus
Points: 2,272 points League: Serie A Location: Turin, Italy Home ground: Allianz Stadium
