
Search results for 'General' - Page: 8
| PC World - 9 Jan (PC World)Ten years ago PC gamers were eagerly awaiting Steam Machines, console-style Linux boxes built from the ground up to play PC games. They flopped, due in no small part to Steam operator Valve’s lack of experience working with hardware partners. But in 2025, both Valve and its home-built gaming operating system are different beasts. And Microsoft should be afraid of them.
Further reading: How to use Steam Deck as a desktop PC
The Steam Deck dominates PC gaming
The big story in PC gaming for the last three years has been the Steam Deck. This low-power, portable, relatively inexpensive machine is clearly something the market has been waiting for, exciting gamers and energizing PC makers to pump out imitators, like the Asus ROG Ally and the Lenovo Legion Go.
But all of these machines lack a crucial component, despite copying the Steam Deck’s hardware to a greater or lesser degree. They rely on Windows, as do almost all consumer PCs not made by Apple. And Windows just isn’t a good experience in this form factor.
That’s why Lenovo turned to Valve for its second-gen Legion Go S. Or perhaps more precisely, the Legion Go S Powered By SteamOS (its full and cumbersome title). It’s the first handheld PC officially powered by Valve’s Linux-based operating system, but probably not the last.
Lenovo is also making new Windows-based versions of the same hardware, but we’ve already heard that Asus is working on a similar Steam-powered handheld, and Valve itself will let you download and install builds of SteamOS later in 2025. Some tech heads aren’t even waiting, and are already building their own quasi-SteamOS-powered PCs.
Lenovo/Valve
Despite fumbling its initial debut on console-style Steam Machines, SteamOS has quietly and steadily improved over the last decade, benefitting both from the Linux market’s maturity and Valve’s endless investment into the Steam store and community as a quasi-platform of its own.
The X factor in the Steam Deck’s explosive popularity is the Proton compatibility layer, which allows games made only for Windows to run on the low-powered AMD hardware with minimal fuss. It can’t run everything — non-Steam games like Fortnite and the latest AAA polygon-pushers can’t run optimally on the Steam Deck. But it’s good enough for the vast majority of PC games and on a device that starts at $400, you get a lot of grace from gamers who also need to pay for rent and groceries.
Contrast this with Windows, the current de facto standard for PC gaming. Yes, Linux fans, I know you’ve been playing some of the same games as Windows users for years, ditto for Mac. But when you think “gaming PC,” you think of a Windows-powered desktop or laptop. Or do you? It’s possible — though hard to pin down, since Valve hasn’t released any numbers — that in terms of single-device volume, the Steam Deck is now the most popular gaming PC in the world.
Windows wobbles from 10 to 11
But I digress. Windows is the home of PC gaming, at least for now and the foreseeable future, but it’s not a happy home. As I said previously, handheld gaming PCs that ape the Steam Deck’s hardware but run Windows 11 often find that last point is the biggest pain point for users.
They complain of inefficient use of the limited hardware, to say nothing of how Windows just isn’t easy to use on those smaller screens. And companies like Asus, Lenovo, MSI, et cetera don’t have the software chops to make an effective go-between layer for users, even if these devices could spare the performance overhead (they can’t).
Michael Crider/Foundry
Windows isn’t looking so hot in general, in fact. The transition from Windows 10 to Windows 11 hasn’t quite been the disaster that the initial Windows 7 to 8 transition was. But it hasn’t been great, either.
Those big yearly updates seem to reliably bork at least some portion of the userbase’s machines, disproportionately affecting gamers and Microsoft is still struggling to get people to give up Windows 10. Even with a well-publicized end of support coming in under a year, Windows 11 is struggling — and sometimes flat-out failing — to gain market share over its previous incarnation.
Microsoft’s has larger general woes in the gaming market, watching the Xbox platform and brand apparently drown even as its Game Pass subscription grows. Game Pass is pretty clearly the company’s attempt at a cross-platform rebirth, the culmination of hundreds of billions invested in buying up developers and publishers to own games as diverse as Minecraft, Call of Duty, and WoW.
But you can’t spend-money-to-make-money forever, and gaming isn’t Microsoft’s only business. It’s also desperate to sell Windows machines (2025 is “The year of the Windows 11 PC refresh,” allegedly), Office subscriptions, and AI services to the enterprise. There might be too many cooks in the kitchen and too many mouths to feed, all at once, in one of the tech industry’s oldest and most reliable megacorps.
SteamOS reminds me of Android
So look at a wobbling Windows platform on one hand, and an ascendant and suddenly spreading SteamOS on the other. Valve has committed to offering SteamOS to manufacturing partners via the “Powered by SteamOS” branding initiative.
With the open source Linux as a foundation and relative hardware agnosticism, it’s starting to look a lot like the relationship that Google developed with smartphone makers to proliferate Android across the mobile market. It’s not a complete one-to-one comparison, but Valve told us in an interview that it’s not charging for SteamOS. Huh.
Microsoft tried to compete with Android. It failed, miserably, and the company essentially had to abandon the mobile space entirely and settle for providing backend services through apps. Even when Microsoft tried to get an early foothold in the folding device segment with the Surface Duo (also failing), it did so using Android as a basis.
My colleague Adam Patrick Murray waxed philosophical about SteamOS powering gaming laptops when he spoke with a Valve engineer at CES. And I think that’s a definite possibility, even if it isn’t Valve’s immediate focus with SteamOS as it moves to conquer the handheld form factor first.
But we’re talking about a “free” operating system (those quotes are because you’ll need to partner with Valve in some capacity to get the branding), built from the ground up for PC gaming, and flexible enough to run on some of the lowest-power hardware on the market or potentially the most cutting-edge gaming devices.
The parallels to Android are hard to ignore, at least for me, a journalist who cut my teeth on the smartphone boom. But the prospects don’t stop at gaming. With Chromebooks and ChromeOS, Google has proven that regular consumers and even some bigger customers like education aren’t as committed to Windows as they were back in the 90s.
Marek Sowa / Shutterstock
ChromeOS is still seen as a “budget” laptop solution (much to Google’s chagrin). But a year or two from now, you could see Chrome-powered budget laptops next to mid-range and high-end SteamOS-powered gaming laptops, all sitting next to Windows 11 machines on a Best Buy shelf. And that’ll be after Microsoft has forced an upgrade upon lots of people who didn’t want to give up Windows 10.
Consumers are ready for a future beyond Windows
Let me be clear: The odds of a massive, immediate shift away from Windows PCs aren’t great. This isn’t a “year of the Linux desktop” rallying cry. But if there is a Linux desktop that exists today, it’s the Steam Deck. And that makes SteamOS a bellwether for greater proliferation of non-Windows devices (if not necessarily “Linux” specifically) in a huge range of form factors.
At the start of 2025, Microsoft still has its comfortable stranglehold on the consumer side of the PC market. It weathered “the death of the desktop” predicted during the smartphone and tablet boom — people aren’t getting rid of their personal machines. But Windows’ never-ending dominance as the de facto PC operating system is, if not in doubt, then certainly in question.
Microsoft’s attempts to ameliorate the issues that Windows-powered handheld PCs, lacking as they are, shows that the company is aware of the problem it has in that form factor. I wonder what it’ll do if it sees SteamOS jump to gaming laptops…or desktops. SteamOS isn’t necessarily a harbinger of doom for Windows. But it could be. And that should make Microsoft very, very frightened. Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | PC World - 9 Jan (PC World)Launched way back in April 2004, Gmail has now been around for over 20 years — and it boasts lots of great features that many users, for whatever reason, still aren’t taking advantage of.
While Gmail is fundamentally built for the sending and receiving of email, its various features can make that entire process work better for you. If you aren’t using the following Gmail features, consider starting today. You might be surprised by how helpful they can be.
Smart compose
Smart Compose is designed to help you write emails faster by writing your emails for you, saving you the hassle of wasting time or brainpower. The feature uses machine learning to predict what you intend to type, with Gmail offering real-time suggestions as you compose an email.
Dave Parrack / IDG
Smart Compose is turned on by default unless you’ve opted out of smart features and personalization. However, it’s easy to toggle Smart Compose by navigating to Settings > See all settings, then scrolling down the General tab until you see Smart Compose.
The standard Smart Compose feature offers predictive writing suggestions as you type, but you can also enable Smart Compose Personalization to have these real-time suggestions personalized to your own writing style based on all the emails in your Gmail account.
Schedule send
Are you the type to write your emails ahead of time? If so, you probably draft them up then let them sit in Drafts until you’re ready to send. But this can be risky because you might forget about it… and is there anything more frustrating than thinking you sent someone that email only to hear back that you never did? Ugh!
Dave Parrack / IDG
That’s why you need to be using Gmail’s Schedule Send feature. When your email is typed up and ready to go, you don’t have to send it right away — you can instead set a date and time for the send. To do this, instead of clicking Send like usual, click the drop-down arrow next to Send and then click Schedule Send.
By default, you can opt for “tomorrow morning,” “tomorrow afternoon,” or “Monday morning” (which is great if you’re typing up a work-related email on the weekend). But you can also Pick date & time to select any specific date and time for sending it out. Never forget again!
Undo send
Gmail’s Undo Send feature is pretty self-explanatory. It gives you a grace period after sending an email to change your mind, allowing you to cancel the send so you can make further changes, or postpone sending to a later time, or just withhold sending altogether.
Undo Send is really useful when you accidentally send in the middle of composing the email, or if you forgot to attach those files, or if you spot a typo after the fact, or you mistakenly CC’d instead of BCC’d, etc.
Dave Parrack / IDG
Undo Send is enabled by default, but you can change the duration of the grace period for undoing the sending of an email.
Navigate to Settings > See all settings, then scroll down the General tab until you find Undo Send. You can then set the timer to anywhere from 5 seconds to 30 seconds. I recommend setting it to 30 seconds because there’s really zero downside to having that extra time.
To undo an email after sending it, look for the Message Sent notification in the bottom-left of your screen and click Undo. If you’re quick enough, the email will revert back to Draft status without ever actually having been sent to the recipient’s inbox.
Search operators
While the basic search function in Gmail is as easy as typing what you’re looking for into the search box, the results aren’t always that great.
If you’re tired of irrelevant or excessive results when searching through your entire Gmail archive, start using Gmail’s search operators to better filter the results. This is especially useful if you have tons of emails filling up your inbox and it feels like searching for a needle in a haystack any time you have to rummage through for a particular email.
Dave Parrack / IDG
There are too many Gmail search operators to list them all here, but some of my most used ones include from: (used to filter emails to only those that were send from a specific person) and subject: (used to filter the search by email subject lines and ignore body content).
I recommend checking out our article on essential Gmail search operators worth knowing. To go even further, you can see a full list of all Gmail search operators on this Gmail support page.
Snooze emails
Snoozing an email is a bit like snoozing your alarm clock in the morning — Gmail temporarily removes the snoozed email from your inbox for however long you decide to snooze it.
By default, you can snooze an email until “tomorrow,” “this weekend,” or “next week.” But you can also pick and choose whatever date and time you want, allowing you to procrastinate to your heart’s content. When the snooze expires, the email pops right back into your inbox.
Dave Parrack / IDG
To snooze an email in Gmail, hover over the email in question and click the Snooze icon on the right-hand side of the options. You’ll see a bunch of default time periods you can snooze the email for, but if none quite work for you, click Pick date & time to set your own. You can also snooze multiple emails at once by selecting them all and doing the same.
After snoozing emails, you can then view all of your snoozed emails under Snoozed in the left panel, and you can unsnooze any emails early if you want to deal with them ahead of schedule.
Email templates
If you find yourself sending the same email over and over — or at least similar emails that contain very similar structure and content — then you should absolute utilize Gmail’s Email Templates feature.
As the name suggests, Email Templates allow you to create and save different templates, which you can then use in the future to instantly start with a baseline email that you can edit, instead of having to draft your emails from scratch every single time.
Dave Parrack / IDG
To use templates, navigate to Settings > See all settings, then scroll across to the Advanced tab and find Templates. Click Enable, then Save Changes. Once Gmail has reloaded, you can create a template.
To create a template in Gmail, compose an email as normal, but instead of sending it, click the three-dot menu > Templates > Save draft as template. Then, the next time you want to send a similar email, just click the three-dot menu > Templates > Insert template.
Spelling and grammar suggestions
Correct spelling and grammar in emails is important at all times, but it’s especially important when you’re emailing someone in a professional capacity. Whether to your boss or a client, you want them to have the best impression of you with every email you send.
Thankfully, Gmail offers autocorrect for both, as well as real-time spelling and grammar suggestions that come in handy when autocorrect seems too much and you want to remain in control of your writing.
Dave Parrack / IDG
To have Gmail check your spelling and grammar as you write, navigate to Settings > See all settings. Scroll down the General tab until you see the option to toggle grammar suggestions, spelling suggestions, and autocorrect. Experiment and find what combination works for you.
Inbox categories, labels, and filters
If you send and receive a lot of emails, Gmail’s basic organization isn’t enough to keep you sorted and tidy — at least not without a lot of manual effort on your part. Fortunately, Gmail has advanced organization features that can help automate a lot of that and keep you straight.
For starters, Gmail’s inbox categories exist to automatically sort your email by intent. These inbox categories include Social, Promotions, and Spam, and Gmail automatically processes incoming emails and sorts them into these categories for your convenience.
Beyond those categories, you also have labels. A label is like a custom tag that lets you manually categorize emails however you want. Each label is like a folder, except you can mark an email with as many different labels as you want. Labels are navigable in the left-side panel, and labeling makes it easy to browse and find emails by type. For example, you might have labels for receipts, bills, work projects, different hobbies, etc.
Dave Parrack / IDG
One step further, you have filters. A filter is a custom rule you can create, which automatically does things to emails as they enter your inbox. To create a filter, click Show search options to the right of the search box, enter your search criteria, and then click Create filter.
For example, you might create a filter that automatically applies a certain label to all emails with a certain word in the subject line, or you can automatically forward emails to a different inbox if they come from a specific domain address.
Confidential mode
Did you know Gmail has a confidential mode? It’s one of the best ways to make Gmail more secure, designed to protect your sensitive information by limiting what recipients can do with your email.
When an email is sent via confidential mode, you can set it to have an expiration date and whether it should require an SMS passcode to open. Confidential emails can’t be forwarded, copied, printed, or downloaded by recipients. You can also revoke access to the email later.
Dave Parrack / IDG
To send a confidential email, when composing a message, click the Lock icon to toggle confidential mode. You’ll then be able to set the above mentioned features for that email. Safe!
Keyboard shortcuts
While Gmail is, by default, extremely user-friendly, you can end up wasting a lot of time if you only navigate using your mouse cursor. The more time you spend reading, writing, and organizing your email, the more you can benefit from the use of keyboard shortcuts.
You have to enable keyboard shortcuts in Gmail, but once you’ve done so — and after you’ve learned the useful ones enough that they become second nature — Gmail will become so much easier to use and you’ll end up saving a lot more time than you thought possible.
Dave Parrack / IDG
To enable keyboard shortcuts in Gmail, navigate to Settings > See all settings, then scroll down the General tab until you see the option to toggle Keyboard Shortcuts.
Gmail offers a large number of keyboard shortcuts out of the box, and it may take some time to wrap your head around all of them. Once keyboard shortcuts are enabled, you can always see a full list of them by typing ? while Gmail is open.
If you aren’t happy with the keyboard shortcuts as is, you can customize them however you want. Navigate to Settings > See all settings, then scroll down the Advanced tab and enable Custom Keyboard Shortcuts. After that, you should see a Keyboard Shortcuts tab where you can customize Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts to your heart’s content.
Further reading: The Gmail settings I always use (and a few I don’t) Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | Stuff.co.nz - 8 Jan (Stuff.co.nz) Local are divided on whether general waste moving from weekly to fortnightly collection is a good idea or whether it will mean less rubbish goes to landfill. Read...Newslink ©2025 to Stuff.co.nz |  |
|  | | PC World - 8 Jan (PC World)CES is kind of huge this year. We’ve got big new announcements from almost every major PC company, including new GPUs from both Nvidia and (to an admittedly lesser extent) AMD. And their OEM partners are showing off their stuff on the floor, too. MSI has Nvidia cards, Gigabyte has both of them, and Adam Patrick Murray got to check them all out.
First up we’ve got MSI’s incoming lineup of RTX 50 series cards, including the Gaming Trio, Vanguard, and Suprim variants. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
Gigabyte is also showing off new Nvidia cards, including a few that confirm to the SFF (small form factor) standard revealed last year. Considering how huge GPUs are getting in general, I’m sure a lot of home builders will appreciate it. There’s also a waterblock for the liquid-cooled version of the 5090.
Gigabyte is one of the few vendors that have early samples of AMD’s next-gen Radeon cards, which top out at the RX 9070 XT. There’s an Elite version of the high-end card Gaming OC version of the RX 9070.
So that’s a look at what the new cards will, well, look like. For more technical breakdowns of the latest graphics cards, check out our writeups of the RTX 50 series and Radeon 9000 series. For more glimpses at the CES show floor, be sure to subscribe to PCWorld on YouTube. Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | RadioNZ - 8 Jan (RadioNZ) Rotorua Lakes Council will introduce weekly food and green waste kerbside collection from July 2026, while its general rubbish collection will reduce to one fortnightly pick-up. Read...Newslink ©2025 to RadioNZ |  |
|  | | PC World - 8 Jan (PC World)Why didn’t AMD talk about their upcoming GPUs in their CES 2025 keynote? Or their new Z-series processors for handheld PCs? What is the Ryzen AI Max? And when can I actually buy a Ryzen 9000X3D chip?
AMD executives only had 45 minutes for their CES 2025 keynote. Fortunately, they also tacked on an additional half-hour or so to field burning questions from a small handful of chip journalists, who crowded around David McAfee, AMD’s corporate vice president and general manager of its Client Channel Business, and Frank Azor, the chief architect of gaming solutions and gaming marketing at AMD.
Fire away, we were told — and we did.
Below, we’ve included a transcript of the conversation, edited for clarity where necessary. Though I don’t identify each reporter by name, they included Paul Alcorn of Tom’s Hardware, Ryan Shrout of Signal65, Marco Chiappetta of Hot Hardware, and myself.
Editor’s Note: The opening of the conversation included “prepared remarks” by the AMD executives, basically explaining that they only had 45 minutes for their keynote and that the company passed over remarks on their RX 9070 graphics cards and RDNA 4 architecture to give a fuller, more comprehensive explanation at a later date.
David McAfee: From a timeline standpoint, it’ll be a little bit later this quarter that we actually begin to roll out RDNA 4 graphics cards. But you know, our focus as we get into this generation is to deliver a really, really compelling value to the end user, with great price-performance.
Lean into all aspects of design efficiency, which is about making it simpler, more cost-effective, more power-effective, to really optimize from silicon all the way through board design so that we can hit the key features that those gamers who are playing enthusiast-class games care about at a price point that they’re going to be really excited to see.
And so I think that we believed, as we built this press conference with the strict time limits, spending five minutes on RDNA 4 was not going to be enough to do it justice. We’ll move it to a separate set of content that comes a little bit later this quarter. Frank, anything to add?
AMD
Frank Azor: We covered everything… There were certain things that we adopted in the press release and we didn’t put into the press conference, like the Z2 [handheld gaming] processor, for example. We tried to include RDNA 4, we really did.
It was going to feed the narrative that we didn’t care about graphics, because we had 45 minutes and we had to rush through. You have to introduce the architecture, all the deltas, all the ray tracing performance, or machine learning performance. Do the positioning of the cards, do FSR [FidelityFX Super Resolution]. Give you a whole overview around FSR, the ISP partners, what’s different about FSR. Show you how FSR works normally. We’d spend 45 minutes to an hour doing that… We started with all this content, and then you’re like, getting it down to the five-minute budget that we had for this.
Journalist: Are you sure it wasn’t because Intel showed half their hand, the Nvidia stuff leaked. You didn’t see some of the competitive offerings and think, maybe it’s not time to talk about this yet?
Azor: All of the above. It isn’t any one thing… It’s not like, oh, we’re just gonna delay because of this. David’s not kidding when he says all the content was in the deck, and part of it is we weren’t doing it justice.
And then you’re like, okay, we’re not gonna do it justice, so the audience is gonna be disappointed. Okay, then you have your competitors making their announcements. Then you have other factors weighing in on this. Okay, so you start looking at all these things, and you put it together, and you say, is it smart or not to include this? It wasn’t smart.
When I say, when we say, later in [the first quarter] we’re going to give you more details, just keep in mind what we just said. We had all the content ready to go. It’s not going to be like March 31.
AMD
McAfee: I’ll also say that I think we also wanted to make sure that our partners at least had enough air cover from us to talk about their products. I think for our board partners, you know this, this is an incredibly important show for them to be able to talk about what they’re doing next gen. And I think they’re all super excited about what’s coming as well.
Journalist: Are you guys cool with partner leaks? Everyone’s going to know the specs just by seeing the cards.
McAfee: I think you’ll see static demos of cards. Everybody loves a good wall of boards. And I think you’ll see that from all of our partners in their spaces. I don’t think you’ll see any live demos, or you better not see any demos from partners — I’ll put it that way. But, you know, power connectors, things like that, TDPs, I think you’ll see a lot of that stuff out there.
Azor: By the way, if you do see demos out there, just know that they don’t have the production [software] driver.
McAfee: All these performance leaks, well, it is accurate for the way the driver performs on the card right now. It is nowhere near where the card will actually perform once we release the full performance driver.
Journalist: Did that also factor into your decision?
Azor: It’s not a readiness issue.
McAfee: We have in house the full performance driver. We intentionally chose to enable partners with a driver which exercises all of the, let’s call it, thermal-mechanical aspects of the card, without really running that risk of leaking performance on critical aspects of the of the product. That’s pretty standard practice.
Journalist: In the past, you’ve emphasized dedicated graphics units on those cards. Now it seems like you’re adopting AI, which is the approach that your competitors are taking. Can you explain that? Why now and what’s shifted in your thinking?
McAfee: I’ll start with that. I think both ray tracing and AI are great examples of that shift. Look a couple of years ago, when the first RTX cards came into the market, there were one or two ray tracing titles and the performance was pretty crummy.
It was more of a technology showcase than it was a real gaming experience. And I think you’ve seen ray tracing change dramatically over the past couple of years. It really has become a much more integral part of so many games today.
Nvidia
I think that ML super resolution is ramping up that same curve pretty quickly as well, where, you know, it’s not for everybody. The purists want every pixel, you know, just brute-force rendered and are not going to be excited about that technology. But it’s also what a lot of gamers are adopting, and I think that especially for those higher resolution gamers that are looking for the combination of high-res gameplay and high frame rates, there’s almost no other way to get there. And I think a lot of gamers are accepting that.
Journalist: And that’s the same approach you’re taking with FSR4?
McAfee: Maybe to talk a little bit about FSR specifically — FSR4 is ML super resolution, and it is built for… as we bring it to market, it will be built for our RDNA 4 architecture. RDNA 4 will bring a pretty massive increase in terms of ML [operations] and compute capability in the shader unit itself. So it is kind of fine-tuned for RDNA 4.
Bringing that to other product families is certainly a possibility for the future, but not something we’re talking about right now, nor committing to a timeline of when that will be available. But as we launch it, it’ll be RDNA 4-focused.
Journalist: My question is on the continuing shortages of 9800X3D parts. This is becoming crazy, and nobody can find these processors pretty much anywhere.
McAfee: What I can say is that we have been ramping our manufacturing capacity — the monthly, quarterly output of X3D parts. That’s 7000X3D as well as 9000X3D. It’s crazy how much we have increased over what we were planning. I will say that the demand that we have seen from 9800X3D and 7800X3D has been unprecedented.
Adam Patrick Murray / Foundry
Azor: Put it this way, we knew we built a great part. We didn’t know the competitor had built such a horrible one. So the demand has been a little bit higher than we had originally forecasted.
McAfee: I think the thing you have to keep in mind is, unlike, you know, building a traditional semiconductor product, it’s basically, you know, 12 to 13 weeks from when you start a wafer to when you get a product out the other end of the machine, and the stacking process adds time to that.
And so it’s longer than a quarter to really ramp, you know, the output of those products, and so we’re working very, very hard to catch up with demand. I think as we go through the first half of this year, you’ll see us continue to increase output of X3D. You know there’s no secret, X3D has become a far more important part of our CPU portfolio than I think we, any of us, would have predicted a year ago.
And I think that trend will continue into the future, and we are ramping capacity to ensure we catch up with that demand as long as consumers want those X3D parts.
Journalist: Is there a gating issue? The silicon or the cache?
McAfee: It is really none of the above. It’s the problem of, you’ve got that lead time to build individually, the CCD wafer, the cache wafer, and then the stacking process that follows adds considerable amount of time as well. It’s a non-trivial timeline when you’re talking about building X3D products.
Journalist: Does the expansion into a broader number of desktop X3D products help or the mobile Fire Range X3D products help? Does it exacerbate the problem or spread the demand around?
McAfee: If I look historically at our 7000X3D products, the 7800X3D was dramatically the highest volume part in that product stack. I think that those 12- and 16-core parts, there are certain types of customers that buy those.
But, you know, I think the reality is, if you are truly a creator, you probably still buy the 9950X. The X3D doesn’t add much at all for creator workloads like, I think, in the data we’ve seen, and you guys will see it as well when you get the chance to review it — it’s like a percent of incremental performance by having the X3D there.
AMD
Because the truth is, X3D is great for games, because it’s all about improving effective memory latency. When it comes to creator apps, it’s about memory capacity or memory bandwidth. The X3D really doesn’t affect either of those parameters in a significant way. So my belief is, in the 9000 series, those higher core count products, there’ll be some demand there, but it’ll still be ten-to-one or more on the eight-core X3D parts because they’re just such a great gaming part. For a pure gamer, there’s nothing else like it.
Journalist: With your APUs, you traditionally have brought them over to a desktop socket eventually. What about the Ryzen AI Max?
McAfee: It would be a different socket, first and foremost. I guess we haven’t released all the details about Ryzen AI Max, so I better be careful what I say. It will not fit in an AM5 socket. I don’t think mechanically it fits in an AM5 socket.
Azor: But you will see one desktop, as we announced.
McAfee: Yeah, there’ll be small-form-factor desktops that are, you know, BGA, soldered-down versions of that product, socketed desktop. I think that’s a much harder problem to solve because there simply isn’t an infrastructure that it drops into. And I think as we disclose more about that product to you guys, you’ll kind of see why, but it’s a little bit tricky from that perspective.
Journalist: I’m getting a lot of questions about what type of memory it takes to support 256GB/s. Is that DDR5X?
McAfee: I’m going to stretch here a little bit. It is certainly an LP5, LPDDR5X product. What I can’t recall is whether that also supports other memory types. And I’m just kind of drawing [a blank], I think it’s the only one. I think it’s only an LP memory interface.
[PR person]: When you think of Strix [Point], it has the bank of 128 right on one side. Strix Halo has two of those banks. That’s one on each side, and that gives you the 256. So I think it’s 4-by-8 or 4-by-16 or however they do the DDR5 part, but it’s two banks now instead of one.
AMD
Journalist: I’d like to hear a bit more about the origins of the Strix Halo (AI Max) part. It seems a bit like Threadripper, where you just went for it with a massive core count, massive threads. Strix Halo seems to pull together the best parts of the CPU, GPU, and NPU in a part that’s optimized for AI.
McAfee: I think with Strix Halo, one of the things that we saw is the way that notebook products with discrete GPUs are built today is really suboptimized. And when you look at that from a performance-power curve across the entire spectrum versus a fully integrated APU design, the discrete design leaves a lot on the table. You’ve got two separate memory subsystems to maintain, just a lot of complexities, power management, all of those things.
Azor: Where’s the cost? Because you’re paying for two memories that don’t get along with one another.
McAfee: So now, by unifying that, it provides the opportunity to deliver a dramatically different notebook experience that scales into what a gaming notebook is capable of doing.
Like that proof point… That was Llama (LLM) performance versus a [GeForce] 4090. It’s a testament to the massive memory footprint that you can put close to the product. To effectively use a 96 MB frame buffer for a GPU is kind of groundbreaking. It opens up a lot of opportunity for our notebook partners and desktop partners, small-form-factor desktop partners, to innovate in ways that they haven’t been able to do in the past with a traditional APU plus dGPU.
In our minds, when it comes to building a great gaming notebook or mobile workstation or small-form-factor desktop — all that power management tech, all that power scalability — I think it points to what a great gaming notebook of the future could be.
I think that this is, this is AMD, kind of creating a category of product here that hasn’t existed in this way in the past. And we think it’s really a unique way to solve that problem that has a lot of benefits.
Journalist: So this is not a one off [one-time product]?
Azor: We are not ready to announce any product, so we are not ready to talk about the future.
Journalist: It would seem like having different GPUs and not needing a discrete GPU would free you from needing to worry about aggressive business practices from others in that space.
McAfee: What I would say about Strix Halo is, I would not expect Strix Halo to be a dominant volume product for us in 2025.
I think this will be a year where we see, you know, some of the initial designs from HP. We see other partners bring additional platforms on board later in in the year. Honestly, the world has been used to APUs plus dGPUs for a really long time. And changing that mindset, educating the consumer, getting the market adoption is going to take time. I don’t know that it changes anything in a massive way in the short term.
You’re totally right though, that by integrating the two together, it goes beyond, I think, even some of the original goals.
Journalist: I have a question out of left field. Nvidia’s GeForce 4090 is so powerful it’s banned from export to China. You guys haven’t put up performance specifications, but do you think it’s powerful enough to be banned from export to China, too?
Azor: I’m not going to address that. But keep in mind with the 4090 — it has 24 GB of memory, right? And you need the entire LLM loaded into memory. The advantage is the memory architecture.
Thiago Trevisan / IDG
McAfee: It has nothing to do with compute.
What I will say, though, is, I am not the expert on, you know, the regulations with the 4090, and its export control laws. I think that the truth, though, is Ryan’s point is right on that, you know. It is about total compute that drives a lot of those regulations, and this product does not match up, from a total compute standpoint, to what a 4090 can do.
Journalist: Do you have a sense in mind of, like, up to what class of GPU you think this displaces?
Azor: So there’s a pretty broad range, if you notice, it was 55 to 120 watts. So there’s a range. Do we? Are we ready to communicate that? … Sure? I don’t know if we’re ready.
[Edited for space.]
Azor: We’re going to scale better with the shared memory than others. It’s really hard to give you a blanket [statement like] “This is going to perform like this from Nvidia” because you’re going to see a lot of differences that you haven’t seen in the past. It’s not a discrete GPU and it’s not a dGPU one-to-one replacement. It’s a different beast, a different animal. So, yeah, it will perform like discrete graphics, but you’re going to see a broad range.
Journalist: So should an enthusiast say that “this crazy amount of memory is going to give me great performance in games?”
Azor: For some games, yeah, some games have large textures, and they load them into memory, and they’ll get a lot of advantage of that size and that speed. You know, it’s not one size fits all. Sports games are probably not going to scale that much.
Journalist: So you’ve put X3D in the gaming class category. You’ve put the AI Max in the gaming class category. Any characterization about which one would be better suited for gaming?
McAfee: I would say that if you are a pure gamer, the… Fire Range 9955HX3D is like that, without a doubt, going to give you the best gaming performance across the board, because of two reasons. Number one, it is a desktop product in a mobile platform, and you’re likely pairing that with a very, very high-end discrete GPU. The AI Max, Max Plus…
Journalist: What’s the difference between the AI Max and AI Max Plus?
McAfee: The Plus makes it better.
Journalist: I walked into that one.
McAfee: What I would say is that the [AI Max] product does not cover the full scale of gaming notebooks, right there. Gaming notebooks that today are built with desktop products in a mobile package with like a 4090, mobile dGPU, that is not the target of the AI Max family. The AI Max family is more mainstream gaming notebooks, mobile workstations. That class of product is the sweet spot that it’s really built for.
Azor: Today, you have to make a sacrifice: If you want a gaming laptop and you want to experiment with Copilot+ and get all the latest features you really don’t have, you get a Strix Halo plus a discrete GPU. What’s unique about Strix Halo is you get everything.
Mark Hachman / IDG
You get an NPU if you want to mess around with that, either as a developer or as a consumer. You get discrete graphics-level performance in an integrated package. And you get an amazing CPU. So it’s kind of like the best of everything, if you want to be at the cutting edge of everything. You don’t know how big that market is. We’ll see in time.
Journalist: Can you say anything about your price targets there?
Azor: That’s really for our OEMs to share. What I’ll say is, you’re going to have ultra small-form-factor desktops like the one that we announced that will probably be at more compelling price points relative to what their dGPU counterparts are going to be, and they’ll offer some unique value propositions like efficiency and size and weight that they can’t compare to on the laptop side.
This is not a value part. This is not a low-end part. This is an ultra-premium part, cutting edge, the most advanced x86 processor arguably out there. They’re not putting it in cheap notebooks. They’re putting them in their best, most premium laptops. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s driven by the part itself. It’s the whole decision that they’re making.
McAfee: I think you will see some application of this in a gaming notebook. I think you will see an equal amount in products that are positioned more as mobile workstation products, because it is really a killer part for that.
Journalist: The HX3D last time was very hard to obtain. If I’m right, there was an exclusivity agreement. Are you guys opening it up to a broader range of partners this time around?
McAfee: What I will say is, I don’t know anything about commercial agreements with that product and customers. It is similar to the prior generation in that it is drop in, pin-compatible, platform-compatible. So any system manufacturer today that’s building with the prior generation, the Zen 4 generation, has a really easy path to upgrade to a Zen 5-based notebook solution.
You know, it’s a pretty small segment of the market, but I don’t know of any reason that there’s any constraints around that particular product.
Journalist: How do you see GPU development moving forward at AMD? Do you see an equal amount of effort put into traditional raster versus AI? Do you see the AI and generated pixels being more important than rasterization for the future? What’s going to be your philosophy in terms of evolving AMD graphics?
McAfee: I think that there’s a pretty fundamental shift that’s happening in the graphics industry right now.
AMD
Moore’s Law is probably a bad analogy to use, but the amount of brute-force rasterization performance improvements that I think we see, and the competition as well, is a fairly muted curve, right? You’re reaching some of these boundaries around rasterization performance that require massive increases in silicon to provide meaningful uplift there.
And I think that you’re also seeing areas where using AI-generated pixels, or AI-enhanced or whatever you want to call it, provides much, much more rapid gains in terms of improving quality and frame rates and generational leaps in performance. I think the way we think about it is in the future, you know, yes, I think it’s absolutely true that you’re going to see more generated pixels, both from us as well as everybody that’s that’s in the graphic space, because it is the path forward in driving more performance and more immersion and better experiences for end users.
We haven’t talked about this a lot, but you know, the journey that we’re on at this moment with RDNA 4 is kind of a new starting point for us, right? Building a reputation for Radeon, just like we had for Ryzen in the early years, where it’s focused on delivering better value for the end user, giving consumers more for their money than what the other guys are delivering, focusing on the features and capabilities that gamers care about most, and being sort of responsive and focused on delivering for the community of enthusiasts that’s out there, is really what we believe we have to build with Radeon. And that’s kind of the focus of the roadmap going forward.
I think as you look beyond this generation, we want to continue to advance that. I think advancing that on all fronts for graphics is going to require — and be driven by — more inclusion of generated pixels to drive a better experience.
Azor: One of the hardest things that our product management teams have to do when it comes to defining our graphics cards is timing the hardware to the ISV ecosystem, and to what consumers are going to be demanding in that time frame in which the cards are going be coming out.
Had we been the first to lean into ray tracing even more than our competition, we would have been going out and asking a bunch of customers to spend a significant amount of money on a technology that they probably weren’t going to be able to capitalize on until two-to-three generations later. And just keep in mind, we’re not the dominant market share provider in the industry. The dominant market share provider in the industry did that, and you really didn’t start to see meaningful gain of ray-tracing games until this last generation, three generations after they first introduced it, and they’re the market share leaders.
So we have to be very careful on why. You see, sometimes people say, “Why are you always trailing?” Well, we’re trailing because we’re following the [Total Available Market] of where the market is, and we’re letting them create some of this market because they are the only ones that really can when you have the kind of position that they have in the industry. We have to time it.
We either have to give you less, somewhere else — so, compromises — or we’d have to raise the price points, which is something they are already doing. So why have two people do exactly the same thing, trying to build these leadership products out there? Which is part of what is different about our graphic strategy moving forward than maybe what we’ve tried to do in RDNA 2 and RDNA 3.
And what you’ll see with RDNA 4 is, it’s much more of a gamer-first design, all about efficiency, all about giving them the feature set for what’s going to matter in this next generation of games.
Can I tell you that in the future, every pixel is going to be ML [machine learning]-generated? Yes, absolutely. It will be in the future. But when that future is? And should we charge a gamer for that technology today so that they can be the seed for that in the future? Those are all the tough decisions we have to face.
Right now, we believe, is the right time for more prevalent ray tracing and to make that investment. And because FSR4 is looking as good as it does, and it is a very efficient way to generate a pixel that is arguably as good as a native pixel, we made the hardware investment to be able to enable that in RDNA 4.
Journalist: When you say you are targeting the sweet spot, not going after the ultra high end, what are we talking? Sub-$1,000? Sub-$700?
Azor: Sub-$1,000 for sure.
McAfee: Significantly below $2,000.
Azor: That’s the focus on RDNA 4. Focus on what gamers actually care about.
Journalist: So do you have one message that you want people coming out of this room to take away about RDNA 4 and Radeon and why it wasn’t in the keynote?
McAfee: I think the biggest thing that I would say is, graphics products and graphics launches are complicated, and there’s a lot that has to be explained to really do it justice. And we wanted to make sure as we launch our RDNA 4, we do it justice, and we cover the hardware improvements, the technology, the software, the FSR, the driver enhancements, like all of that needs to be covered to really satisfy what gaming enthusiasts care about.
Azor: There was a no-win scenario that, at the end of the day, we debated all these different options that our customers, the gamers, the market were going to walk away from today. Had we included it in there for four or five or eight minutes, would they be like, “Wow, that was amazing. I was blown away by it”? No. So why do that?
Let’s give it its proper time. Let’s give it time and let’s win. Let’s put together a recipe it’s going to win — positioning, performance, pricing, the time that it deserves — and show people that we actually do care about gaming and not feed the narrative that “Here’s five minutes in an AI PC keynote. They don’t care about gaming.” Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | PC World - 8 Jan (PC World)At a glanceExpert`s Rating
Pros
Imaging, file backup, sync, and disaster recovery
Super-friendly interface
Disaster recovery media even with the free version
1TB of online storage for $40
Cons
A bit on the pricey side
Telemetry
Doesn’t support third-party cloud storage natively
A couple of minor non-fatal errors
Our Verdict
Slicker than ever, super capable, and super easy to use, ToDo Backup 2025 has become one of our favorite backup suites.
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Though it’s a slow burn with enhancements, Easeus ToDo Backup has gradually developed into one of the most capable backup suites on the market. It also features the most efficient workflow we’ve seen and is supremely fast. There’s even a surprisingly competent free version. A short-lister for sure, though I ran into a couple of non-fatal operational issues.
What are EaseUS ToDo Backup Home 2025’s features?
As mentioned, ToDo Backup is a suite featuring whole drive and partition imaging, file and folder backup, as well as one-way and two-way sync. It also offers the ability to clone disks, a pre-OS recovery environment (recover the system without a boot disc), and a secure (hidden) partition for safely storing backups.
Further reading: See our roundup of the best Windows backup software to learn about competing products.
EaseUS ToDo Backup 2025 offers a number of handy features including a hidden secure recovery partition.
There’s also a WinPE recovery disc featuring a full version of the program for restoring files, or even making new backups. You can even log on to your EaseUS account if you’re using the company’s online storage.
The ability to back up from the recovery disc can be handy if you’re looking to safeguard the data on a failing machine that you aren’t sure has been backed up recently. When I help friends recover data, I always create a full image of the drive in question before diving in with other recovery and repair utilities.
ToDo Backup 2025 running from the recovery disc.Foundry
ToDo Backup also sports one of the latest en vogue features — backup protection. As ToDo Backup (like others) features an agent running in the background, it monitors your backup files and warns you if there’s any attempt to delete them. This includes by you. My only issue with this feature is that when you select the drives to protect, the dialog doesn’t show you the name of the drives.
ToDo Backup allows you to protect your backups from accidental deletion.
Other features include granular scheduling, full support for network locations (read/write), compression, encryption, task priority, splitting of images, as well as pre-run and post-run commands. There’s also an offsite copy option, which allows you to create a second copy of any backup on an FTP site. Why this doesn’t extend to the cloud, or SMB, or even another local storage location I can’t say. That would be super handy.
Generally speaking, I found the ToDo Backup 2025 interface a joy. While all the options for backups are on the same page, there’s a list of general categories on the left that when chosen, scrolls quickly to the related options.
In particular I really enjoyed the way ToDo Backup 2025 handles the restore chore. If you’re using a full partition backup, you can of course restore it wholesale, overwriting the existing partition. However, there’s also a file mode button. If you hit that, the window morphs into an individual file and folder restore dialog.
While I love the ToDo Backup 2025 interface in general, I’d prefer not to be asked to “please wait patiently” while a backup is proceeding. “In progress” would do just fine. Also, not overwriting an existing file during a restore isn’t a “fail,” it’s merely skipping a file that doesn’t need to be restored.
Generally speaking, I found the ToDo Backup 2025 interface a joy.
The online cloud storage interface. I hadn’t tested it at this time.
Though I find the integrated EaseUS Cloud handy, and $40 for 1TB of capacity is an exceptional deal (OneDrive is $70, though it includes the full version of Office), it would still be nice if EaseUS supported some third-party repositories. That said, you can leverage those with any backup software by employing a cloud manager.
How much is EaseUS ToDo 2025 Backup?
ToDo Backup is available either by subscription or with a perpetual license, and there are some hefty (40%) educational discounts.
As noted, if you’re looking for cloud storage, $40 a year for 1TB is one of the better deals out there, even forgetting the included software. $60 gets you a perpetual ToDo Backup license, and an additional $20 gets you said perpetual license plus lifetime upgrades.
If you’re looking for cloud storage, $40 a year for 1TB is one of the better deals out there. And you get a highly competent backup suite as well.
You can save a bit of coin on ToDo Backup if you’re a student — 1TB of online storage for only $24 is a steal.
You can save a bit of coin on ToDo Backup if you’re a student, and 1TB of online storage for only $24 is a steal.
EaseUS hadn’t confirmed it, but generally speaking when a subscription runs out, you’ll have 30 days to retrieve your data from the cloud, and restore functionality remains intact. It’s unlikely the company could disable backup on the boot disc (especially without an internet connection), so this likely remains functional as well.
How does ToDo Backup 2025 perform?
In general, ToDo Backup worked very well, and exceptionally quickly. However, there were a couple of non-fatal oddities.
Both a two-way and a one-way sync of My Documents continually complained about the My Pictures, My Videos, and My Music folders not syncing when they’re not actually included in the original folder or mirror. See below.
The offending folders didn’t exist at either end of this two-way sync. Mystery errors.
Also, even though I added nearly a terabyte to my D: drive, subsequent imaging runs didn’t copy the additional data. A brand-new imaging job on the same drive failed similarly. The issue turned out to be that much of the data I copied there was an existing ToDo Backup image that the program decided to skip. Go figure. Other large files that I used copied off fine.
On the other hand, as mentioned, speed was exceptional and then some. It took the program only around 13 minutes to create a 700GB image file using the fast compression algorithm to a second internal NVMe SSD. It took R-Drive Image over a half hour to accomplish the same task.
ToDo Backup 2025 offers three clone modes, though the first two are essentially the same thing.
Cloning the 700GB system drive took a breezy 26 minutes, and ToDo Backup didn’t mind that I was cloning a 2TB SSD to a 1TB SSD. It simply resized the partitions without complaint or my instructions.
Restoring the full image was almost as fast as creating it; however, a complete restore of individual files and folders was estimated for 16 hours for the 600GB. Ahem. I bailed on that and highly recommend using File Mode only for small sets of files. Something it’s eminently handy for.
You can easily switch between full image and file/folder restore on the same page
One of the reasons I might favor ToDo Backup over, say, Acronis True Image, is that there’s only one process running in the background compared to True Image’s 12, although Acronis is doing a lot of malware checking. That said, neither program affected system response subjectively.
Something I consider a peccadillo is calling continuous backup “real time,” as does ToDo Backup. It’s very granular continuous backup, but the new files I created took a minute or two to propagate to the sync destination. Good enough for most scenarios, but not real time, which is immediate.
This entry in ToDo Backup 2025’s extensive logs show how fast it cloned a system disk.
In general, I was pleased with ToDo Backup’s performance, but as I’ve said many times: A low tolerance for failure is required when reviewing backup programs. This is users’ data we’re talking about and I don’t want to cause tears.
While neither of the issues I experienced was fatal, they diminished my trust in the programmers and EaseUS quality control. I’m assuming the errors will be fixed in short order, but they cost the program half a star.
Should you buy ToDo Backup 2025?
I must admit, ToDo Backup 2025 gives our favorite — R-Drive Image — more than a run for its money in terms of features and ease of use. Additionally, ToDo Backup 2025’s interface will be a better fit for many users.
So the answer is — yes, qualified by my not-quite-complete faith in all the operations. But 1TB of online storage for $40/$24 a year is appealing and then some. Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | PC World - 7 Jan (PC World)AMD has launched what one executive called “the most advanced mobile X86 processor ever created” at CES 2025: The Ryzen AI Max and AI Max+, with absolutely massive capabilities to run graphics and AI workloads.
AMD is positioning this “Strix Halo” chip as a sort of hybrid for graphics and AI workstations, comparing it to Nvidia’s existing GeForce 4090 GPU in terms of running AI LLMs at up to 70 billion parameters. But the Ryzen AI Max offers more than just that.
It’s an APU with graphics capabilities that push into discrete GPU territory — in the 3DMark Steel Nomad benchmark, for example, the chip offers 258 percent the graphics performance of Intel’s Core Ultra 9 288V (Arrow Lake) CPU. It also offers excellent AI performance, both with or without the NPU.
The subtext behind this announcement hearkens back to our report early last year that the NPU doesn’t matter for AI capabilities as much as AMD, Intel, or Qualcomm originally hyped.
The NPU is the most efficient AI core on modern CPUs. But for raw horsepower, the GPU, especially a discrete GPU, far outperforms either the NPU or the GPU by its lonesome. What the AI Max appears to do is combine some of the NPU and GPU’s best features, alongside an already powerful AMD Zen 5 CPU.
AMD will offer the Ryzen AI Max in both consumer and “Pro” versions, which the company will sell to businesses. At CES, AMD is touting three design wins, including the HP ZBook Ultra G1a and Z2 Mini G1a mini workstations, plus the Asus ROG Flow Z13 tablet.
AMD is offering this benchmark slide (based on its own tests) as a pretty stunning endorsement of the Ryzen Max AI and its Strix Halo architecture.AMD
“This is something very, very special,” said Rahul Tikoo, the senior vice president and general manager of AMD’s client computing business said in a recorded briefing for reporters.
“It’s just so unique and powerful. It enables incredible performance and reshaping what customers can experience from the power of workstation and thin-and-light laptops to incredibly small and powerful micro desktops. This is simply the most advanced mobile x86 processor ever created.”
AMD’s Ryzen AI Max and its features
Interestingly, AMD is offering four of the AI Max chips as commercial products — the Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 395, the Ryzen AI Max Pro 390, the Ryzen AI Max Pro 385, and the Ryzen AI Max Pro 380. However, the first three are being offered in consumer-friendly non-Pro versions.
Ryzen AI Max+ 395: 16 cores/32 threads, 5.1GHz turbo, 80MB cache; 40 graphics cores; 50 peak TOPS, 45-120W cTDP
Ryzen AI Max 390: 12 cores/24 threads, 5.0GHz turbo, 76MB cache; 32 graphics cores; 50 peak TOPS; 45-120W cTDP
Ryzen AI Max 385: 8 cores/16 threads, 5.0GHz, 40MB cache; 32 graphics cores; 50 peak TOPS; 45-120W cTDP
The fourth chip, the Ryzen AI Max Pro, is a 6 core/12-thread part with 22MB of cache and running at 4.9GHz. All of these will be available in either the first or second quarter of 2025, AMD said.
Additional benchmarks from AMD, including Blender, that show how the Ryzen AI Max compares to Intel’s Arrow Lake.AMD
What’s interesting about the AI Max parts is they’re really not differentiated by clock speed. Instead, CPU cores count, the number of graphics CUs and especially the cache size separate the three chips. (It’s not quite clear what AMD means by ay the AI Max+ versus the more generic AI Max.)
What this chip doesn’t appear to have is the stacked V-Cache that differentiates AMD’s Ryzen X3D chips — just a lot of what appears to be ordinary level 3 cache.
In graphics, AMD has only launched two RDNA 3.5 GPUs, the Radeon 880M and 890M, which are part of the “Strix Point” CPU architecture that makes up the Radeon AI 300. Those chips boast 12 CUs and 16 CUs, respectively, far less than what the new Ryzen AI Max chips include.
Alternatively. the Radeon 7000 series includes both the Radeon 7600XT as well as the Radeon 7700XT, which boast 32 CUs and 54 CUs. Both of those GPUs use the older RDNA 3.0 architecture. (Read our Radeon 7600 review as well as our Radeon 7700XT review for more details.)
AMD even showed off the Ryzen AI Max performs against the MacBook Pro with an M4 chip inside.AMD
AMD executives said that the Ryzen AI Max series is designed with an 256GB/s coherent memory interface of unknown width that can address up to 96GB of graphics memory. Nevertheless, that’s close to the RX7600’s memory bandwidth of 288GB/s — not so critical for graphics, but for the Large Language Models (LLMs) that depend on high memory bandwidth to run.
AMD is claiming that the Ryzen AI Max is the world’s first Copilot+ processor to run an undisclosed 70 billion parameter LLM about 2.2 times as fast as the Nvidia RTX 4090 24GB, at 87 percent less power.
AMD is currently positioning the Ryzen AI Max at artists, developers, and creators. But with such a powerful integrated GPU, can gamers be that far behind? Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | PC World - 7 Jan (PC World)AMD has typically pushed the envelope in performance, but at CES 2025, the company is also expanding in another direction, with cheaper, lower-performance Ryzen AI 300 and even a Ryzen 200 family that the company is encouraging both consumers and commercial customers to buy.
In June, AMD launched the Ryzen AI 300 family, which combined 50 TOPS of AI power with a ton of conventional performance in our Ryzen AI 300 review, including in gaming performance as well. In October, it extended the Ryzen AI 300 to business customers, too.
However, AMD built out its high-end Ryzen AI 300 series first, with the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 (12 cores/24 threads) and the Ryzen AI 9 365 (10 cores/20 threads). Today, it does the opposite, with the launch of four new Ryzen AI 300 series chips — two each for consumers and business customers — as well as seven new Ryzen 200 chips to provide slower, less expensive alternatives.
As the name suggests, the Ryzen AI 300 series is built for AI, with 50 TOPS of NPU AI power, enough for Copilot+ status. AMD’s earlier Ryzen AI 300 processors include Zen 5 CPU cores as well as Radeon 3.5 graphics, which AMD at the time identified as the Radon 890M and Radeon 880M. An AMD representative confirmed that these new processors include Zen 5 and Radeon 3.5 graphics as well, though AMD isn’t spelling out any of the details at the launch
Meanwhile, the Ryzen 200 series appears to combine some of AMD’s older CPU architectures, leaving the “high-end” Ryzen 200 chips with just 16 peak NPU TOPS. These Zen 4 cores include integrated graphics, too, specifically RDNA 3 that AMD debuted in 2022.
AMD believes that the Ryzen AI 300 series chips will outperform the competition while preserving long battery life.AMD
AMD’s new Ryzen AI 300 CPUs offer slightly slower clock speeds and a lower core count, but offer the long (24 hours or so) battery life that AMD’s other Ryzen AI 300 chips offer.
AMD Ryzen AI 7 350: 8 cores/16 threads, 5.0 GHz (turbo), 24MB cache, 50 peak TOPS, 15-54W cTDP
AMD Ryzen AI 5 340: 6 cores/12 threads, 4.8 GHz (turbo), 22MB cache, 50 peak TOPS, 15-54W cTDP
AMD will offer Ryzen Pro versions of both of these chips for corporate customers. The consumer versions will ship in the first quarter of 2025, AMD said, while the Pro versions will be available to customers in the second quarter.
With 50 TOPs of NPU AI power under the hood, AMD is clearly aiming for mobile AI performance.AMD
“These new models allow us to make our leading Ryzen AI 300 series processors available to many more users, and bring AMD next gen AI experiences to everyone,” Rahul Tikoo, the senior vice president and general manager of AMD’s client computing business said in a recorded briefing for reporters. Tikoo previously led the client product group at Dell as general manager.
AMD’s Ryzen 200 series also offers commercial options for the Ryzen 250, 230, 220, and 210. Otherwise these chips offer lower core counts and lower thread counts, with what AMD calls “great price points for the mainstream.” AMD does not typically release prices for mobile chips, however.
Here are AMD’s new Ryzen 200 processors:
AMD Ryzen 9 270: 8 cores/16 threads, 5.2 GHz turbo, 24MB cache; 16 peak TOPS, 35-54W cTDP
AMD Ryzen 9 260: 8 cores/16 threads, 5.1 GHz turbo, 24MB cache; 16 peak TOPS, 35-54W cTDP
AMD Ryzen 7 250: 8 cores/16 threads, 5.1 GHz turbo, 24MB cache; 16 peak TOPS, 15-30W cTDP
AMD Ryzen 5 240: 6 cores/12 threads, 5.0 GHz turbo, 22MB cache; 16 peak TOPS, 35-54W cTDP
AMD Ryzen 5 230: 6 cores/12 threads, 4.9 GHz turbo, 22MB cache; 16 peak TOPS, 15-30W cTDP
AMD Ryzen 5 220: 6 cores/12 threads, 4.9 GHz turbo, 22MB cache; N/A TOPS, 15-30W cTDP
AMD Ryzen 3 210: 4 cores/8 threads, 4.7 GHz turbo, 12MB cache; N/A TOPS, 15-30W cTDP Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | PC World - 7 Jan (PC World)Google is bringing its Gemini AI assistant to smart TVs in a bigger way this year, with the ultimate goal of getting people to pay for it in some way.
Several television makers plan to announce new Google TV sets with Gemini built in at CES this week. The smart TVs include far-field microphones that respond to “Hey Google” voice commands, and they’ll use proximity sensors to detect how far you’re standing from the TV, showing artwork from far away and an informational dashboard up-close.
Meanwhile, Gemini will begin handling some voice commands on TVs. This will allow for more nuanced movie and TV show requests, such as “suggest a movie like Jurassic Park, but suitable for young children.” It’ll also provide longer answers for certain types of knowledge queries, with suggested YouTube videos to match.
None of these features will cost extra when they start rolling out later this year, but Shalini Govil-Pai, Google’s GM & VP of TV, said the long-term plan is turn Gemini into something that merits a subscription, even on TVs.
“For us, our biggest goal is to create enough value that yes, you would be willing to pay for it,” she said.
Always-on TVs
Part of Google’s plan involves transforming the TV into an information hub.
The TVs shipping this year with proximity sensors will have a separate mode that turns on when you’re standing nearby. This informational mode will show the weather, top news stories, recent photos, and upcoming calendar events, akin to what you’d see on Google’s Nest Hub smart displays.
Jared Newman / Foundry
As you move further from the TV, it’ll switch to an art mode, similar to the existing Ambient mode on today’s Google TV devices. If you get far enough away, the TV will turn off entirely. TVs with these capabilities will start shipping toward the end of this year.
Google’s working on an AI-powered news briefing feature on TVs as well. When you say “Hey Google, play my news briefing,” Gemini will generate summaries of top stories, with a set of YouTube clips for each one.
“We believe TV is going to fundamentally change how information is consumed in the home,” Govil-Pai said.
Gemini on TV
Meanwhile, Google hopes that its Gemini AI will be more conducive to hands-free voice interaction.
If you’re looking for something to watch, for instance, Gemini will be able to handle more complex queries, such as “Bollywood movies that are similar to Mission Impossible.” It’s similar to the generative AI search feature that Amazon launched on Fire TV devices last year.
Jared Newman / Foundry
Gemini will also respond to certain general knowledge questions, like “explain the solar system to a third-grader.” Along with text and audio responses, Gemini will supply a list of YouTube videos to explore. Govil-Pai argued that putting these kinds of features on TVs will let people look up information in a more communal way.
“You don’t need to have a keyboard or a touchscreen in front of you anymore,” Govil-Pai says. “You can actually ask for things just using a natural paradigm that humans are used to.”
Jared Newman / Foundry
Putting it all together
While these features alone probably won’t warrant a paid subscription, they’re part of a larger ecosystem that Google is trying to build around Gemini, some elements of which already have subscriptions attached.
Last year, for instance, Google started bringing Gemini to its Nest smart speakers in a limited preview, but only for Nest Aware subscribers. It allows Nest camera users to look up camera motion events with natural queries, such as “what happened to the cookies on the counter,” and it also supports more complex information queries, such as “What’s the name of the song from Wicked where they’re dancing through the library?” Google won’t say whether it’ll open up Gemini to non-paying users on Nest speakers in the future.
Google’s working on bringing some Nest interactions to the TV as well. At CES, the company showed how the TV can turn on and show video when a Nest Doorbell camera detects motion. Users can then send a response to the door using “Hey Google” voice commands. Looking ahead, it’s not hard to imagine some kind of home Gemini subscription that ties all of these things together.
That said, all of this feels a bit like a solution in search of a problem. When I talk to readers about their streaming woes, they’re mainly concerned about figuring out where to watch their favorite shows while streamlining unnecessary subscriptions. Being able to ask one’s TV for vacation ideas or space facts is not high on the list of needs.
Google is wagering that we just need to start thinking bigger in how we use our TVs in the first place.
“People are not used to it, and so it will take some time for them to adapt to it,” Govil-Pai said, “but the use cases are so compelling that I believe this is the way things will start getting consumed in the next year or two.” Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
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