The annual sales report from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) reveals that CD sales in the US rose from 31.6 million in 2020 to 46.6 million in 2021, with revenue jumping from $483.2 million to $584.2 million, marking the first year-on-year growth for the format since 2004. Those figures are still a long way from the near-billion CD album sales and $13.2 billion in revenue during compact discs’ peak in 2000, but any increase is still significant....

“Most of the movement is timed with the rhythm of the music,” says Katun24, who holds the world record for a blindfolded speedrun of Super Mario World, of the 2D platformer game genre. “Music usually plays a very big role for timing movement accurately.” This is especially true of Mario games, because of how their music was crafted. Koji Kondo, the man who composed the music for the classic Mario games, designs his tunes to do more than just get stuck in your head....

ITHome discovered marketing slides for the latest ROG Strix Scar laptops that Asus is set to unveil at its Boundless event tomorrow (May 17). It seems the devices will be configurable with both the Alder Lake-H series and the new Alder Lake-HX line of CPUs. The flagship laptop in the lineup, the awkwardly named ROG Strix Scar 6 Plus Ultra, features a Core i9-12900HX CPU packing 16 cores and 24 threads....

Samsung unveiled its slew of new monitors ahead of CES 2023, which kicks off this week. The highlight is the successor to its $2,499, 49-inch Odyssey Neo G9, a mini-LED display we awarded 95 in our review. The all-new Odyssey Neo G9 ups the screen size to an incredible 57 inches. Samsung teased the new Neo G9 back in November when it appeared as part of AMD’s Together We Advance_Gaming livestream that unveiled team red’s RNDA 3-powered graphics cards....

When enabled, Smart App Control uses AI and Microsoft’s cloud knowledge base to check every app that runs, blocking anything unsigned, unfamiliar, or known to be malicious. There is no whitelist, so blocked apps will only get through if their developers sign them. Not all Windows Insiders can currently activate Smart App Control. Users running Windows 11 insider build 22567 or later can find the feature in Windows Security under App & Browser Control, where it is disabled by default....

The rumor mill is replete with hints that the next generation of GPUs from AMD and Nvidia are going to be power-hungry and offer a huge leap in performance over the current crop. Some Nvidia offerings might even require 900 watts in certain workloads, and AMD is expected to once again divide their graphics silicon into chiplets. There’s a lot we still don’t know about these upcoming GPUs, but industry watchers have been doing some diligent digging that surfaced a few interesting new details....

While the Snapdragon 410 is still in the sampling stage, it seems odd that Nokia would continue to use the year-old MSM8227 over a Snapdragon 400. The choice makes the Lumia 525’s hardware immediately outdated at launch, and comparatively weak up against competitors’ offerings. The Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 MSM8227 SoC is built on a 28nm LP process and features a 1.0 GHz dual-core Krait CPU, 1 MB of L2 cache, an Adreno 305 GPU, a Hexagon QDSP6 DSP at 500 MHz, a single-channel LPDDR2 memory controller, plus Bluetooth 4....

Putting it bluntly, the hardware in this handset is outdated. The MSM8225 is the lowest-end chip from Qualcomm’s previous generation, superseded by the Snapdragon 200 towards the end of last year. This means the Nokia X, a new device released in 2014, comes with a two-year-old SoC, which is unacceptable for a class of smartphone that needs all the power it can get. Even worse is the fact that the MSM8225 is a step lower than the MSM8227 that we saw in Nokia’s highly-popular Lumia 520 from early last year....

Nothing launched its first smartphone, the Phone (1), back in July but only in Asia, the Middle East and Europe. Other major markets like Canada and the US were not included in the launch. According to CNBC, Nothing has shipped 500,000 smartphones and 600,000 pairs of its Ear (1) earbuds to date. Pei told the publication they didn’t launch their first smartphone in the US due to all of the additional technical support needed, like adding unique carrier customizations on top of Android....

The GeForce GTS 450 is a great option for gamers looking to spend just over $100 on a new graphics card. It’s not just the price that makes it a sensible choice, but we found it to be very efficient, using less power than the Radeon HD 5770 under full load and less than the 5750 at idle. The operating temperatures of the Palit version that we tested were also very low and at no point the graphics card made its presence apparent thanks to its low operating volume....

As we found when testing with Crysis Warhead, a single Radeon HD 5870 is inadequate to take on Metro 2033 at this extreme resolution with 4xMSAA/16xAF enabled and DX11 features such as Tessellation also turned on. Adding a second Radeon HD 5870 graphics card saw the Crossfire configuration deliver a mere 11fps on average making it 2fps slower than a single GeForce GTX 480. While the GeForce GTX 480 was considerably faster and the SLI setup delivered 77% more performance, at 23fps on average the end result was far from playable....

The upgraded Gigabyte cooler worked really well as the GeForce GTX 560 Ti’s idle temperature was just 31 degrees, while the card never got hotter than 76 degrees under full load.

The GeForce GTX 980 was impressive in Crysis 3 delivering 41fps at 2560x1600 making it 12% faster than the GTX 780 Ti and Radeon R9 290X. The GTX 970 also performed well matching the old behemoth that is the GeForce GTX Titan. The GTX 970 was 8% faster than the Radeon R9 290 and 42% faster than the R9 280X. It also outscored the GTX 770 and 780 by 25% and 13% faster, respectively....

Huang answered questions at a press Q&A session yesterday (via Tom’s Hardware) and was asked about Intel’s Foundry Services (IFS) initiative. “We are very open-minded to considering Intel, and I’m delighted by the efforts that they’re making,” he said. Intel and Nvidia compete in the CPU And GPU markets so the revelation may seem a little strange, but Haung explained that “Our strategy is to expand our supply base with diversity and redundancy at every single layer....

Launched just a few months ago, the SX8200 series packs the latest Silicon Motion SM2262 controller, supporting 8 NAND channels, an ARM Cortex-R5 quad-core, NVMe 1.3, LDPC ECC, RAID, and more. Connected to the controller are four 64-layer 3D TLC NAND memory chips from Micron as well as two Nanya DDR3 DRAM chips which act as a high-speed buffer. Like most NVMe SSDs, the SX8200 family uses the M.2 2280 form-factor and for maximum performance takes advantage of the PCIe 3....

We’d say that the drive missed a few opportunities. Despite being the latest TLC-based SSD series to hit the market, the Trion 150 series doesn’t set a new record for cost per gigabyte – in fact, Crucial’s questionably slow BX200 series still holds that title. Likewise, the Trion 150 series doesn’t set a new bar for affordable SSD performance as it was considerably slower than the Samsung SSD 850 Evo series in almost every test....

Unless, of course, you’re OnePlus, whose bread and butter is the affordable flagship. The company’s debut smartphone from last year, the OnePlus One, was a very commendable first effort, packing high-end hardware like a Snapdragon 801 SoC and a 13-megapixel camera into a $300 package. There were a few issues with the One’s software, including bugs at release and a slow update to Android 5.0, but it was a compromise many were willing to make in favour of a cheap device with solid hardware....

Counterpoint Research published its list of the best-selling smartphones of 2021, and it’s good news for Apple. iPhones take up seven of the ten spots on the list, with the iPhone 12 sitting in the number one position, accounting for 2.9% of global sales. Only two Android makers made it onto the list—Samsung and Xiaomi. The highest non-Apple device was the Samsung Galaxy A12 (2%), an entry-level handset that boasts a 5,000 mAh battery and Infinity-V display....

Japan’s digital minister tweeted that floppies, CDs, and even mini-disks are still required for around 1,900 government procedures in which business communities submit applications and other forms. The country’s digital agency is going to bring these procedures into the modern era (or the 21st century) by allowing them to be performed online. “We will be reviewing these practices swiftly,” Kono said in a press conference Tuesday (via Bloomberg). He added that Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has offered his full support....

Lenovo led the way in Q4, shipping 15.5 million PCs followed by HP with 13.2 million units. Dell placed third with 10.8 million systems shipped during the holiday quarter while Apple moved 7.5 million Macs over the same period. All experienced negative growth compared to Q4 2021. With 292.3 million units shipped for the full year, the market is well above pre-pandemic levels. Still, there’s reason for concern as IDC points out that many users have relatively new PCs and the global economy isn’t in great shape....