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At the Optical Fiber Communications Conference (OFC) 2024, Intel gave us a particularly interesting glimpse at what could be the future of chip and interconnect design. The Optical Compute Interconnect (OCI) chiplet integrates a Photonics Integrated Circuit (PIC) with an electrical IC. The chiplet was packaged with an Intel CPU and shown running live data.

Intel believes this technology is a game changer as it meets increasing demand for higher bandwidth across greater distances, while using less power. Of course, the initial applications will be used for AI infrastructure and HPC environments, where scalability concerns across racks and clusters are becoming increasingly apparent in large scale deployments.

Intel’s press release included the following statement: “As an analogy, replacing electrical I/O with optical I/O in CPUs and GPUs to transfer data is like going from using horse-drawn carriages to distribute goods, limited in capacity and range, to using cars and trucks that can deliver much larger quantities of goods over much longer distances. This level of improved performance and energy cost is what optical I/O solutions like Intel’s OCI chiplet emergi…

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Minecraft is turning 15 years old in a couple of days, and apart from making me reckon with the relentless passage of time, it seems like there are a lot of fun celebrations to be packed into the next two weeks.

The announcement was made in a short YouTube video on the official Minecraft channel, and basically serves as a small teaser of what is to come. There’s dancing skeletons, angry pillagers, and Jens Bergensten on a boat (I’m not really sure what that’s about). 

“15 days of exclusive items and daily specials, each one attributed to 15 years of building, exploring, crafting, mining, and adventuring,” declares the video’s narrator. “It’s going to be a block-tacular celebration. Every day has something to see, download, or play, so buckle up for 15 days of Minecraft-mania.” The celebrations will likely begin on May 17 (Minecraft’s anniversary), so it’s best to just keep an eye out for announcements on Minecraft’s news blog. 

As part of the celebrations, it would be nice to see some appreciation for the most intricate and impressive worlds created by block aficionados, whether that be a Minecraft remake of Fallout: New Vegas’ world map or a recreati…

As part of another adventure in numbers incomprehensible to the human mind, Microsoft has gained the upper hand in its rivalry with Apple, attaining a market value of $2.87 trillion and becoming the most valuable company on the planet. 

As reported by the Financial Times, Microsoft nosed ahead of Apple earlier today, on the back of a 1% increase in its share value. Apple’s, meanwhile, dropped 1%, leaving Steve Jobs’ baby with a market cap fully $4 billion lower than Microsoft’s. Apple’s market cap stood at $2.871 trillion, Microsoft’s at $2.875 trillion.

A pittance! Apple will, no doubt, regain its lead at some point in the weeks, days, or hours to come. The two companies have already swapped spots several times today. What’s interesting here, though, is the reason for Redmond’s sudden lead. You guessed it, folks, it’s AI.

Apple has largely kept its beak out of the ongoing AI gold rush—although it’s certainly paying attention and doubtless has big plans—while Microsoft is a massive investor in OpenAI and seems determined to cram the tech into everything from Bing to your actual, physical keyboard. 

Investors rather like that…

As you probably know by now, the PC version of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor has not launched in the best of conditions, with many players reporting choppy performance in Respawn’s latest Star Wars adventure. Publisher EA has already issued a sort-of apology for the problems, and has promised more patches coming in the next few weeks.

One of those patches had landed today, which apparently provides “performance improvements for non-raytraced rendering.” That’s literally all the patchnotes say, though. There’s no specific information about what’s been fixed, or what’s been causing all the problems in the first place. But this is the second update EA has released in the space of a few days, and Morgan reported that the first patch alleviated some of the issues he experienced while reviewing it, so let’s hope this second patch further smooths things out.

The announcement also addresses a bunch of bugfixes coming to consoles tomorrow, but as EA point out, the PC has already had those. It doesn’t make any mention of other issues with the PC version that have been raised, such as the terrible implementation of AMD FSR 2.0 upscaling, and whether there’s any chance of getting som…