Microsoft has held a Build 2020 conference for developers from all over the world, and they live-streamed it online. Among some of the announcements, Microsoft has announced a new supercomputer dedicated to the OpenAI company, which works on building Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The new supercomputer is a part of Microsoft's Azure cloud infrastructure and it will allow OpenAI developers to train very large scale machine learning models in the cloud. The supercomputer is said to be the fifth most powerful supercomputer in the world with specifications of "more than 285,000 CPU cores, 10,000 GPUs and 400 gigabits per second of network connectivity for each GPU server."

Specific information wasn't announced and we don't know what CPUs and GPUs go into this machine, but we can speculate that the latest Nvidia A100 "Ampere" GPU could be used. The company hasn't yet submitted its entry to the Top500 website, so we can't keep track of the FLOPs count and see what power it holds.

In a recent Microsoft blog post, Mojang Studios announced that Minecraft has sold over 200 million copies to date, with 126 million active monthly players. This achievement comes 11 years after the game was originally released in May 2009 as a Java applet on an online forum. To this day Minecraft has remained as one of the world's most popular games from being the most-watched game on YouTube in 2019 to getting released on almost every device imaginable and still actively receiving updates.

Microsoft PowerToys is an open-source suite of utilities for Windows 10 power users to customize their Windows experience, inspired by the original Windows 95 project of the same name. The latest v0.18.0 release brings two new utilities to the suite; PowerTools Run a modernized quick search launcher and Keyboard manager a new quick and easy tool to remap keys and shortcuts.

The PowerTools Run launcher is designed to be fast and offer more features for power users without sacrificing on performance. The code for the launcher is completely open-source so anyone can improve or develop modules for the launcher. The launcher can be accessed via Alt+Space and will be updated over time to receive new features much like Apple's Spotlight search.

Windows 10 2004 May update is set to bring a heap of new features to the OS, along with performance improvements in the form of a fixed search indexer. According to the latest report form Windows Latest, we have information that the update version 2004 will reintroduce Bluetooth A2DP sink, a feature from Windows 7 era. The Bluetooth A2DP sink allows users to stream audio from their phones to PC speakers, using Bluetooth technologies. This is a useful feature is you want to play music via your phone on louder speakers connected to your PC, and we are sure users are going to appreciate this. The Bluetooth A2DP sink feature was present in Windows 7 OS, however, Microsoft has later disabled that in Windows 8 OS and it hasn't been available since. The Windows 10 May update is expected to roll out between May 26th and May 28th.

Today the Hot Chips program committee officially announced the August conference line-up, posted to hotchips.org. For this first-ever live-streamed Hot Chips Symposium, the program is better than ever!

In a session on deep learning training for data centers, we have a mix of talks from the internet giant Google showcasing their TPUv2 and TPUv3, and a talk from startup Cerebras on their 2nd gen wafer-scale AI solution, as well as ETH Zurich's 4096-core RISC-V based AI chip. And in deep learning inference, we have talks from several of China's biggest AI infrastructure companies: Baidu, Alibaba, and SenseTime. We also have some new startups that will showcase their interesting solutions—LightMatter talking about its optical computing solution, and TensTorrent giving a first-look at its new architecture for AI.

With the recent surge in remote work, more people than ever are building out their work from home setups in order to remain productive while sheltering in place. We're happy to be able to now bring you the newly available Zone Wired headset, a wired version of the existing Zone Wireless headset that is also certified for Google Meet and Google Voice, in addition to Microsoft Teams certification.

"Remote work can be challenging, especially right now since people are setting up makeshift offices in shared spaces with loved ones," says Martin Ruddle, Director of Personal Solutions, Logitech Video Collaboration division. "With the Zone Wired headset's noise-cancellation features and dual-mic technology, you'll be able to take calls comfortably, without distraction, no matter who else is in your office, kitchen or living room."

It seems Microsoft has begun the long process of phasing out 32-bit support for Windows 10 beginning with version 2004, all new OEM Windows 10 systems will be required to use 64-bit builds and Microsoft will no longer release 32-bit builds for OEM distribution. This will not affect those of you running 32-bit versions of Windows 10 who will continue to receive updates and Microsoft plans to continue to sell 32-bit versions of Windows 10 through retail channels for the foreseeable future. This is likely just the first step in what will probably be a multi-year project to gradually phase out 32-bit support as more consumers and businesses switch to 64-bit systems.

Microsoft Game Studios and 343 Industries have released halo 2: Anniversary for the PC platform. Being distributed as a package via The Master Chief Collection (which already includes Halo: Reach and Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary), the game takes you through the second installment in the Master Chief's saga to protect humanity from the Covenant. The game has been fully optimized for the PC platform, as have previous releases.

The second installment in the sage features dual-wielding, as well as a dual-character campaign where you'll swap between the POV of the Master Chief and the Arbiter, a Sangheili commander fallen from grace in the wake of the events of Halo: Combat Evolved. The new Anniversary remaster of Halo 2 is a remaster in more than graphics, but in spirit as well, featuring added prologue and epilogue cutscenes, in-game terminals for you to bask in the glorious lore of the Halo universe, and reinterpreted cutscenes made by none-other than the amazing Blur Studios. The game and its contained updates for the Master Chief Collection will come in at 41.5 GB. Halo 2: Anniversary is available stand-alone for €9.99, or as part of The Master Chief Collection, which for €39.99, also includes Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST, and the storytelling masterpiece that is Halo 4.

Microsoft's next-generation Xbox Series X entertainment system has some pretty serious hardware specs, to support its lofty design goals of 4K UHD gaming at 60 Hz, with ray-tracing, and yet have 8K capability. It turns out that Microsoft isn't holding game developers to that 60 FPS number at 4K UHD, and that the minimum frame-rate is still 30 FPS. At lower resolutions such as Full HD, the console could offer high refresh-rate gaming. Apparently, the console natively displays 4K UHD at 60 Hz, and uses VESA adaptive-sync on TVs and monitors that support it; but game developers are free to cram in enough eye-candy to drive performance down to 30 FPS. This came to light when Ubisoft confirmed that "Assassin's Creed Valhalla" will run at 30 FPS on the Xbox Series X. "Developers always have flexibility in how they use the power, so a standard or common 60 FPS is not a mandate," said Aaron Greenberg, Xbox marketing head, in a Tweet Tuesday night.

The videogame that transformed the skateboarding world is back! The original birdman Tony Hawk, and Vicarious Visions, the studio that reinvigorated Crash with the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, have teamed up to bring fans remastered versions of the first two badass games in the critically acclaimed Tony Hawk franchise -- Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 and 2. To provide players with breathtaking gameplay experiences, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 and 2 will blend all the original levels, pro-skaters, old-school tricks and more that gamers remember from the '90s and '2000s with new, beautifully recreated levels. This faithful remaster will also include blockbuster songs from the original franchise. Dropping in on September 4, 2020, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 and 2 will return remastered in one awesome package for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 4 Pro, the family of Xbox One devices from Microsoft, including the Xbox One X, and on PC through the Epic platform.

"The original Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series is a big factor in the evolution of modern skateboarding tricks and inspiring many of the pro skaters you know and love today," said Tony Hawk. "I'm excited to help inspire a new generation of skateboarders and gamers - and existing fans - to grow the sport even further."

Yakuza: Like a Dragon was one of last week's game reveals via Microsoft's Xbox 20/20 program, which aims to provide monthly digital events leading up to the Xbox Series X's release in "Holiday 2020". Up to now, the new console release was expected somewhere around November. However, a retail listing of Yakuza: Like a Dragon has set an October 23rd release date for the title. And since it was announced as being an Xbox Series X day one title, that places the new Xbox console's launch right alongside it. The Yakuza: Like a Dragon listing has been posted by a small Finnish retailer, who apparently only posts release dates when they have been all but confirmed.

Previous rumors had already put forth a PS5 release in October, due to a job listing for one of its collaborators mentioning that month as the release window. However, Sony has already come public saying that the expected October release date is not an official stance on the matter, thus killing our aspirations. However and whenever these consoles launch, it's bound to be an interesting back-and-forth between the two companies as they jockey for position amongst consumers' wallets - both with their respective release dates and launch pricing. Look after the break for the official trailer for Yakuza: Like a Dragon.

In the latest episode of Inside Xbox, Microsoft showed off trailers for several new games including Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Yakuza: Like a Dragon, and Dirt 5. Alongside the new game trailers, Microsoft also published a list of over 140 publishers and studios all working on games for the new console. Big names such as 2K Games, Activision, Bethesda, Bungie, Electronic Arts, SEGA, Square Enix, and Ubisoft are all present along with countless smaller publishers and studios. The full list of publishers and studios can be found below.

Microsoft has recently announced all the game arrivals and departures coming to Xbox Game Pass for PC & Xbox this month. PC gamers are receiving Halo 2 Anniversary, Final Fantasy IX, Streets of Rage 4, and Endless Legend while console gamers are getting Red Dead Redemption 2, DayZ, Final Fantasy IX, Streets of Rage 4, and Fractured Minds.

The over 10 million subscribers' strong service will also lose several games this May 15th for both PC and Xbox. PC users will lose Imperator: Rome, Rise of the Tomb Raider, The Banner Saga, West of Loathing and Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus while console users will lose Grand Theft Auto V, Black Desert, Doom, Lego Ninjago Movie Video Game, Mega Man Legacy Collection 2, Metal Gear Survive, The Banner Saga, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus.

The way we work, connect and learn continues to change right in front of us. Our devices have become our window to the world - our office, our school and our social space. To help navigate the current environment people are turning to Windows PCs more than ever. In fact, over 4 trillion minutes are being spent on Windows 10 a month, a 75% increase year on year. It's not just the pull of the larger screen and better keyboard, but the versatility of a device that runs the software we need and games and entertainment we love, with cameras and mics built in to connect us to the people who matter most. This is what Windows PCs were built to do. This is what we design Surface for.

The new Surface Go 2, Surface Book 3, Surface Headphones 2, Surface Earbuds and accessories are designed to help you do what you need, from anywhere - a concept that has taken on new weight since we first started working on these products. Instead of planes, coffee shops and offices, we're moving from home office to kitchen table to couch, but our need for devices that keep us productive and connected has never been greater.

Microsoft's Windows 10 operating system has historically been rising in market share thanks to the slow depreciation of Windows 7 OS, and Microsoft's efforts to push it as only Windows OS available for desktop users. However, according to the information by NetMarketShare, a company providing statistics about the market share of Internet Technologies (browsers and OSes), Windows 10 has seen a decrease in market share. This news is a surprising discovery, given that the OS is expected to be gaining new market share slowly, given that Windows 7 has reached the end of life in January.

From 57.37% of market share in February, Windows 10 got down to 57.34% in March and 56.08% in April. While this may seem just like a few percentage decrease, given the massive amount of PCs available, it can be counted in thousands. What could be the reason behind this is the current COVID-19 related pandemic and slower demand for office PCs, as everyone is working from home now. This was a big growth sector for Windows 10 as the previous version of Windows, the 7, was very popular in office space before its EoL. Of course, this is just a speculation which you should take with a big grain of salt. Some of the interesting things to point out is that Ubuntu, a Linux kernel based operating system, has massively increased its market share from 0.27% in March to 1.89% in April.

Microsoft has reportedly delayed launch of its Surface Neo launch. The dual-screen foldable PC/tablet convertible was originally slated for Holiday 2020 at its October 2019 announcement, but the company feels it's not ready with it. It could now launch at an appropriate date, either in 2021 or later. Microsoft's ambitious new Windows 10X operating system, originally designed for dual-screen devices such as the Surface Neo, will now debut with single-screen devices that have a touchscreen (such as 2-in-1 notebooks in conventional 360° clamshell form-factors), confirmed Panos Panay, Windows client- and devices head, in a blog post dated Monday (4/5). From the looks of it, the company is focused on getting Windows 10 May 2020 Update (2004) out as smoothly as possible.

Both Sony and Microsoft are expected to soon launch their next-generation consoles, which are highly anticipated among console gamers as they will bring some of the latest advancements in graphics, like ray tracing. The current situation in the world is that everything is slowed down due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Companies across the world have mostly slowed down their production lines due to the less demand, however, AMD has done exactly the opposite for their custom SoC customers. In wake of expected high demand, AMD has ramped up its production lines so it can supply Sony and Microsoft for their next-generation consoles—PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. This is an encouraging sign that the demand is going to be strong - and that AMD is up to the task of delivering.

During Microsoft's Q3 2020FY Earnings call, it was confirmed that Xbox Live was seeing record levels of engagement with over 90 million monthly users. On top of this, Microsoft announced that Xbox Game Pass had surpassed 10 million subscribers for the video game subscription service. Xbox Game Pass is available for Xbox One and PC giving users access to a library with hundreds of games including many large recent games such as Gears Tactics, Halo Master Chief Collection, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. This makes Xbox Game Pass the largest game subscription service far outnumbering EA Access and Origin Access. Microsoft also noted that interest in Project xCloud the experimental game streaming service was high with "hundreds of thousands" of active users.

Microsoft has just announced that we will finally get a glimpse (here's hoping it's more than just a glimpse) at their next-generation Xbox Series X gameplay. The event, scheduled for May 7th at 11 am ET / 8 am PT. To be transmitted on YouTube, the Inside Xbox event will be essentially a "global partner event", which means that we should see gameplay for a variety of franchises from AAA developers and publishers. And looking at today's announcement of Assassin's Creed Valhalla, which featured Xbox marketing prominently, I'll wager that's just one of the games we'll get to see more of at the event.

Microsoft's general manager of Xbox games marketing Aaron Greenberg also said that "Xbox Games Studios teams are hard at work on some big summer plans". It remains to be seen whether that means another event will be taking place at a later date, focused solely on Microsoft's first-party studios, but I'd wager we'll be seeing most of the presentation focusing on Xbox's own development studios. Finally, we'll be getting a look at what "gaming revolution" next-gen consoles will really bring - and set a standard for future games development.

The demand for Microsoft Teams has skyrocketed in recent months because of the COVID-19 pandemic and the shift to working/learning from home. In Microsoft's recent Q3 FY2020 earnings report, they revealed that Microsoft Teams had reached over 75 million daily users up 70% from the 44 million active daily users in mid-March. Total subscribers for Microsoft's Office 365 business plans which include access to Teams hit 258 million paying users. Microsoft expects demand for its Office 365 products to remain strong through Q4 FY2020 as remote working and learning continues.

According to the latest report by Windows Latest, Microsoft's Windows 10 2004 May update will bring a much-needed disk performance update. The underlying reason behind this improvement is the terrible performance of the Windows Search indexer, which in previous versions of Windows 10 had high disk usage and resulted in a slowdown of the system. However, Microsoft decided to improve that and found a way to optimize its performance. This improvement will be of much need to everyone who owns and runs Windows 10 on a Hard Drive.

In Windows 10 update 1909, Microsoft has decided to separate Cortana from the Windows Search and thus brought disk usage a bit lower. However, Microsoft's engineers have been fine-tuning the Search Indexer, and now the performance is significantly better while having a lot less disk usage. Previously, the Search Indexer was very aggressive and spared no resources for its process, so this is a welcome addition. This improvement will leave disk usage capacity to other processes and will result in a noticeably snappier system, which Hard Drive users will appreciate the most.

Microsoft's flight simulator, an upcoming game designed to bring real-life scenarios of flying an airplane, just got a list of system requirements needed to run a game. To play with Flight Simulator, you would at least need to have a quad-core CPU like AMD Ryzen 3 1200 or Intel Core i5-4460 equipped system, along with 8 GB of RAM. For graphics, you would need a GPU with at least 2 GB of VRAM, where the requirement is either AMD Radeon RX 570 or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 GPU. Another interesting observation is the requirement of 150 GB of drive space, meaning that this game will be pretty big. Internet connection needs to be 5 Mbps at minimum, and as you up the resolution and graphics, you would need a faster connection. You can check out the entire table below.

The need for incrementally faster connection comes out of one reason - adaptive streaming. The game looks stunning, and if you wish to play at the highest quality, parts of the game will be rendered in the cloud. Microsoft is using its Azure infrastructure to help and render parts of the game and stream it down to your PC. This ensures that your PC is capable of playing the game and Microsoft is showing how they can tap the power of cloud for uses like this.

NVIDIA's GeForce Now game streaming service has been a bit of a hit and miss lately, with some of the bigger publishers like Activision-Blizzard, Bethesda, and 2K games revoking availability of their digital game libraries on NVIDIA's service. Possible reasons for those events were unknown and the platform did suffer from it. Some speculations were that the publishers were going to switch their preferred online streaming service platform or build their own. So far it is still a mystery. However, it seems like there is no end to the pain, as some very big publishers decided to revoke their digital libraries as well.

Big names like Microsoft Xbox Game Studios, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, Codemasters, and Klei Entertainment have all decided to stop offering their games on the GeForce Now game streaming platform. This is very much a major disappointment and another big setback to the platform, as now you can not play any of the titles from these publishers. Titles from the games series like Halo, Gears of War, Forza, Dirt Rally, Batman and many more, are now not available. It remains to be seen if these publishers announce a move to another streaming service, so we have to wait.

Microsoft has today announced that they will delay the scheduled end of service date for Windows 10 October 2018 Update, version 1809 from May 12, 2020 to November 10, 2020. This is in response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is a bid to lessen the burden on consumers and enterprise. The following is Microsoft's statement on the matter:

"We have been evaluating the public health situation and understand the impact this is having on many of our customers. To help ease some of the burdens customers are facing, we are going to delay the scheduled end of service date for the Home, Pro, Pro Education, Pro for Workstations, and IoT Core editions of Windows 10, version 1809 to November 10, 2020. This means devices will receive monthly security updates only from June to November. The final security update for these editions of Windows 10, version 1809 will be released on November 10, 2020 instead of May 12, 2020."

Millions of Minecraft gamers across the globe will get to experience their self-created worlds more vividly than ever before when Minecraft with RTX moves to open beta on Windows 10 this week and introduces realistic shadows, lighting and vibrant colors to the best-selling videogame of all time.

"We teamed up with Mojang Studios to bring next-generation ray tracing and AI to Minecraft and the results are truly amazing," said Jeff Fisher, senior vice president of gaming at NVIDIA. "There is a ton of excitement from the community for Minecraft with RTX, and we can't wait to see what they create."