Samsung may be making a radical change regarding the manufacturing of Exynos chips. The company produces its own SoCs at Samsung Foundry factories. However, it has not been up to the task of efficiently manufacturing 3nm chips. According to reports, it has been working to try to resolve the situation. Now, a reliable tipster claims that Samsung is considering outsourcing Exynos chip manufacturing to TSMC.

TSMC is currently the largest contract chip manufacturer in the world. Big Samsung customers have moved to TSMC in recent years due to problems at the South Korean giant’s factories. However, Samsung’s potential decision to switch to TSMC for Exynos chip production is still striking.

Samsung reportedly considering turning to TSMC to manufacture Exynos chips

Tipster Jukanlosreve posted on X the news about Samsung considering turning to TSMC factories. The source doesn’t offer any further details on this, but the recent background regarding Samsung Foundry explains the potential move. Industry insiders claim that the Galaxy S25 series will use the Snapdragon 8 Elite chip worldwide. Apparently, solving the low yield issues of the company’s 3nm GAA wafers will take longer than it has available.

Samsung considering using external factories to produce its Exynos chips is quite normal. This doesn’t mean that it will happen with total certainty, however. Big brands always need contingency plans in place for any incidents or problems that may arise during a project. What’s surprising is the company turning to its main rival in the chip production segment.

In recent weeks, tipsters revealed that Samsung even explored the possibility of using the Dimensity 9400 chip in the vanilla and Plus models. The company also tested the Exynos 2500 until the last minute, hoping to resolve Foundry’s issues. However, it seems that Samsung will have to turn to Qualcomm for the hardware that will power its next flagship mobile devices. Therefore, switching to TSMC could serve as a backup plan in the event that problems persist with Samsung Foundry wafers.

Samsung’s move to a 3nm process has been problematic

In the recent past, chips manufactured by Samsung have presented issues related to temperature management, throttling, and modem performance. The company seemed to have solved these problems with the 4nm Exynos 2400 chip, which performs admirably. However, the difficulties returned when Samsung tried to migrate to the more advanced 3nm process.

Black Friday is set to soak the world in glorious deals, but why wait until later in the month? Some of these deals are already live. For instance, the M2 MacBook Air . The regular price is $1,000, so this is a discount of 25 percent. It even boasts 16GB of RAM.

This model easily made , even with the presence of the . Here are the takeaways. This laptop, obviously, includes Apple’s proprietary M2 8-core CPU, which is more than fast enough for basic tasks and fine for even many advanced tasks, like music-making. We called it “Apple’s near-perfect Mac” in our official review.

Apple

This is not the bare-bones standard model, as it comes with 16GB of RAM. Most versions ship with 8GB of RAM. The multitasking bona-fides are strong with this one. The M2 MacBook Air also ships with a 13.6-inch Liquid Retina display with 500 nits of brightness and support for the P3 wide color gamut.

It’s thin and light. It’s a MacBook Air. This thing weighs around 2.7 pounds. The battery life is solid, at around 18 hours of use per charge. The four-speaker sound system can get surprisingly loud, so headphones are not a requirement when watching random YouTube videos or listening to music.

So what’s the downside? There isn’t one. Not really. This isn’t the M3 MacBook Air, so those looking for the latest and greatest model may be let down. The model does only ship with a 256GB solid state drive, but it’s easy enough to plug in an external.

Check out all of the latest Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals here.

When you board a plane, the pilot already knows the weather on the flight path and can steer clear, or at least warn you it’s coming. The same can’t be said of “space weather” from solar events, which can seriously affect satellites and even passenger planes.

Mission Space is about to launch a constellation provide near-real-time monitoring of this increasingly important phenomenon.

Space weather is a general term for the radiation in the near-Earth environment; outside the planet’s protective aura, satellites and spacecraft feel the full brunt of the sun’s rays, and a solar storm can interfere with or disable them. The type and intensity of this radiation shifts and flows just like atmospheric weather, but being invisible and moving at the speed of light, it’s considerably more difficult to observe and predict.

There are numerous satellites and deep-space missions that monitor solar radiation, but they are necessarily limited; imagine trying to predict the path of a storm using only a handful of wind and rain sensors scattered across the ocean. And while historically this has been sufficient, the growth of the new space economy has transformed space weather from an occasional inconvenience to a constant and quantifiable threat.

“More and more companies are putting space weather on their agenda,” said Alex Po, CEO and founder of Mission Space. “We have 7,000 satellites in space, but in ten years it’ll be 50,000; that means space weather events will be the same as now, but they will have ten times the impact.”

A serious solar storm is not dangerous not only to electronics, but also to unprepared astronauts. If someone happens to be doing a spacewalk, they could get a face full of radiation — and if we want to establish a permanent presence on the Moon, where there’s similarly little protection, we’ll want to know exactly when it’s safe to go outside.

Nearer the surface, airlines are concerned about passengers getting large doses of radiation during a long flight over the poles, and some have even canceled flights because of it. And there are numerous secondary effects on services that rely on satellites, including precision agriculture.

Po’s startup, originally founded in Europe but now based in Israel and the U.S., is about to launch the first two of a planned 24-satellite constellation that will monitor space weather and provide reports and predictions in near real time.

It’s not intended to replace the scientific instruments currently in space, but augment their data (much of which is public) with a voluminous, proprietary stream that enables more precise, timely monitoring.

Po explained that while many companies and governments are increasingly aware of the need for better space weather prediction, the satellites are aging and the data is difficult to share.

“The infrastructure for space weather monitoring was developed in the late 90s, and many of the scientific models were developed 50 years ago,” Po said. Information sharing agreements between organizations like NASA, NOAA, and ESA are complex, and the data itself is not trivial to integrate and harmonize.

“There are no people in the companies who need this data who can understand it. What’s needed is, say, alerts for different alert levels for launch, or for airlines. Everyone uses weather data but no one thinks about how it is generated: you just want to know if it’s going to rain or not. It’s the same here,” he continued.

Mission Space currently uses public sources, doing the work of normalizing it to create something of a unified data stream. But they are launching the first two of their own satellites in the first quarter of 2025, with more planned for later that year. Po said they could probably launch faster, but that it’s more beneficial to learn from the first set and improve as they go. “Engineers…” he said, “There are always more changes.”

The satellites themselves (named Zohar) are specialized but not exotic, he noted, leading to a lower cost for a constellation of 24 than you might expect. The important part is that they still collect 15 parameters a thousand times a second.

“Space weather is a data monopoly game: the first to launch the constellation and build the infrastructure will win,” he predicted. “Even with half a constellation, in two years we will generate a thousand times more space weather data than humans have generated in the last 60. And the real-time data will let us develop machine learning models based on it.”

They are not in competition with governments and scientific organizations, he claimed, or really even startups looking to serve those customers — collaboration is a necessity for a number of reasons.

Their customers are “aerospace in general; satellite operators and space tourism companies; anyone doing private space stations. They’re all very aware of the problem,” said Po. “It was common knowledge in the aviation industry but now the companies are actually paying attention to solutions. And of course for defense, they’ve been developing the domain, and you must be sure you will not have issues in critical space operations. With the current level of precision, that’s hard for them.”

While the real-time readings and predictions will have to wait for the full constellation, the pair going up in a few months should offer a marked improvement over the existing offerings. No exact date is set for launch.

• Earlier this week, researchers discover a 9.2 flaw affecting multiple NAS models
• D-Link says it won’t patch them since they reached end-of-life status
• Crooks are now targeting them with available exploit code

Cybercriminals have begun targeting D-Link NAS devices, recently found to have a critical vulnerability, but which will not be patched due to being at their end of life.

Threat monitoring service Shadowserver recently sounded the alarm in a brief thread posted on X.

Light normally makes other objects cast shadows – but with a little help from a ruby, a beam of laser light can cast a shadow of its own.

When two laser beams interact, they don’t clash together like lightsabers in Star Wars, says Raphael Abrahao at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. In real life, they will simply pass through each other. Abrahao and his colleagues, however, found a way for one laser beam to block another – and make its shadow appear.

The crucial ingredient was a ruby cube. The researchers hit this cube with a beam of green laser light while illuminating it with a blue laser from the side. As the green light passed through the ruby atoms, it changed their properties in a peculiar way that then affected how they reacted to the blue light.

Instead of letting the blue laser pass through them, the atoms affected by the green light now blocked the blue light, which created a shadow shaped exactly like the green laser beam. Remarkably, the researchers could project the blue light on a screen and see this “shadow of a laser” with the naked eye.

Abrahao says he and his colleagues had a long discussion of whether what they created really qualified as a shadow. Because it moved when they moved the green laser beam, they could see it without any special equipment and they managed to project it onto commonplace objects, like a marker, they ultimately decided in the affirmative.

Historically, understanding shadows has been crucial for understanding what light can do and how we can use it, he says, and this experiment adds an unexpected technique into scientists’ light-manipulation toolbox.

Tomás Chlouba at the University of Erlangen–Nuremberg in Germany says the experiment uses known processes to create a striking visual demonstration of how materials can help control light. The ruby’s interactions with the laser, for instance, are similar to those of materials used in laser eye surgeries, which must be able to respond to laser light by blocking it if it gets dangerously intense.