Tech News Digest Week 22: Top Biggest Tech News

The top tech news for week 22 will cover AMD’s partnership with Samsung, Graphene finds its atomic cousin, some Apple TV news, a tech break-up and some exciting news from the world of gaming and some more.

Not Graphene!

Researchers at the University of Marburg in Germany and Aalto University in Finland have discovered a new carbon network, which is atomically thin like graphene, but is made up of squares, hexagons, and octagons forming an ordered lattice. For example graphene, with a thickness of just one atomic layer, is the thinnest known material, and its unusual properties make it an extremely exciting candidate for applications like future electronics and high-tech engineering. In graphene, each carbon atom is linked to three neighbors, forming hexagons arranged in a honeycomb network. Researchers confirmed the unique structure of the new carbon network using high-resolution scanning probe microscopy and interestingly found that its electronic properties are very different from those of graphene. In contrast to graphene and other forms of carbon, the new Biphenylene network — as the new material is named — has metallic properties. This means that this newly discovered carbon network could be used to make wires for carbon-based circuits in the future, and could also serve as a superior anode material in lithium-ion batteries, with a larger lithium storage capacity compared to that of the current graphene-based materials

RDNA2 comes to phone

Mobile gaming is about to get exciting as AMD is planning to bring the RDNA 2 graphics architecture — used in high-end consoles such as the Xbox X and the PlayStation 5 — to phones. RDNA in this context stands for Radeon DNA - it is the codename for a GPU microarchitecture and accompanying instruction set architecture developed by AMD. AMD is partnering with Samsung to provide RDNA 2 graphics technology for Samsung’s Exynos processor, potentially giving a boost to GPU performance. There aren’t many details on the chip or which products it’ll be used in, but AMD indicated that the GPU will use its RDNA 2 architecture, enabling features like ray tracing and variable rate shading capabilities. It is estimated that the new technology would make its way to Samsung’s flagship mobile devices in 2022.

Crysis Remastered Trilogy

There is more exciting news in the world of gaming, the Crysis games are some of the most significant and influential shooters of the modern era. Infamous for their technical prowess, these games served as the benchmark for so many high end PCs in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Now, the series is being thrust back into the spotlight with Crysis Remastered Trilogy. After a delay last year, Crytek has announced that Crysis Remastered Trilogy is coming to PC and consoles this fall. You'll be able to pick up the reworked versions of all three games separately. Crytek says that the games will run "even smoother" on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.

Apple TV on Android

Apple has announced that its Apple TV app is now available for Android TV OS, bringing Apple TV+ content to more devices. The announcement was made on Apple TV's Twitter account, which gave no further details. The new listing in the Google Play Store states that the only requirement is for devices to be running Android 8, also known as Android Oreo, or later. It’s almost as if Apple realized that doing things the Apple way wasn’t going to be a successful model for competing in the streaming wars and that it needed to play nice with other device makers if it wanted to grow Apple TV Plus subscriptions in any meaningful way.

eBay no longer pals with Paypal

It looks like the nearly two-decade-long relationship between eBay and PayPal has quietly come to a close. This week, eBay quietly updated its terms of service to let sellers know that pretty soon, any funds they rake in will no longer be credited to their PayPal account. If sellers want to keep getting paid, any funds will need to be deposited directly into their bank account. eBay have not explicitly mentioned that these revised managed payment comes with a brand new processing fee, plus a certain fraction of whatever price an item is ultimately sold for. Having said that, the company’s promising sellers that whatever cut eBay ultimately takes will usually be lower than the roughly 13% they’re currently forking over to both eBay and PayPal combined.

Google Photos limited to 15 GB

Like it or not, the moment is nearly here: Google Photos is ending its free unlimited storage on June 1st. From then on, any photo you upload (including compressed "storage saver" pics) counts toward your Google Drive storage limit unless it comes from a Pixel phone or if you have backed up your photos before the due date. If you need more space, you'll have to pay for Google One plans that start at $2 per month for 100GB of Drive space and scale to 2TB for $10 per month. Google explained the move last November as a necessary step to "keep pace" with the demand for storage. It didn't expect 80 percent of Photos users to hit the cap for another three years, although it's more of an issue for people whose free Drive space was already loaded with other content.

Thanks for reading, see you next week with more news from the world of technology.