AOC U27G3X 27-inch Gaming Monitor Review - 4K 160Hz for $500

AOC U27G3X 27-inch Gaming Monitor Review - 4K 160Hz for $500

AOC launched the U27G3X, a $500 4K, 160Hz refresh rate, 1ms response time IPS gaming monitor. Join us as we take a close look at it.

Nintendo Switch 2: docked mode could hit 4 TFLOPs, will be clocked 'crazy low' in handheld mode

Anthony Garreffa | Gaming | May 1, 2024 10:45 PM CDT

Nintendo's next-generation Switch 2 -- or a better name, the Super Switch -- will be clocked "crazy, crazy low" in handheld mode according to the latest leaks.

Nintendo Switch 2: docked mode could hit 4 TFLOPs, will be clocked 'crazy low' in handheld mode

We know that Nintendo's next-gen Switch 2 is on the way, with a new Tegra SoC that has a GPU based on mostly NVIDIA's previous-gen Ampere GPU architecture, but borrows some tricks from current-gen Ada Lovelace, all on-the-go.

In a new video from Moore's Law is Dead, the topic of Nintendo's new Switch 2 is bought up and discussed. MLID says that we can expect "crazy, crazy low" clocks for the Switch 2 in handheld mode, far lower than 800MHz according to his sources. But when it's docked, clock speeds will reportedly 3x and the gaming experience will be amplified greatly.

Continue reading: Nintendo Switch 2: docked mode could hit 4 TFLOPs, will be clocked 'crazy low' in handheld mode (full post)

AMD just turned 55 years old: from making CPUs for Intel, to Ryzen and EPYC beating Intel

Anthony Garreffa | Business, Financial & Legal | May 1, 2024 10:12 PM CDT

Can you believe AMD has just turned 55 years old? AMD was founded on May 1, 1969, starting as a microprocessor company, turning into an everything giant now with Ryzen, EPYC, Radeon, AI GPUs, and so much more.

AMD just turned 55 years old: from making CPUs for Intel, to Ryzen and EPYC beating Intel

AMD started out with its own Athlon CPUs back in the day, moving onto acquire ATi and bringing the Radeon brand in-house. From there, the company has had ups and downs with its Radeon GPUs, but the Ryzen and EPYC CPUs have been powerhouse successes for the company over the last 10 years.

Turning 55, the future is bright for AMD with the rise of AI PCs this year and its NPU inside of its APUs and CPUs with Ryzen AI. AMD is inside of the Microsoft Xbox Series X/S and Sony PlayStation 5 consoles, and countless gaming handhelds, desktop PCs, laptops, and more.

Continue reading: AMD just turned 55 years old: from making CPUs for Intel, to Ryzen and EPYC beating Intel (full post)

NVIDIA ChatRTX updated: new models, voice recognition, media search, and more with AI

Anthony Garreffa | Artificial Intelligence | May 1, 2024 9:36 PM CDT

NVIDIA has just updated its ChatRTX AI chatbot with support for new LLMs, new media search abilities, and speech recognition technology. Check it out:

NVIDIA ChatRTX updated: new models, voice recognition, media search, and more with AI

The latest version of ChatRTX supports more LLMs including Gemma, the latest open, local LLM trained by Google. Gemma was developed by the same research and technology that Google used to create Gemini models, and is built for responsible AI development.

ChatRTX now supports ChatGLM3, an open, bilingual (English and Chinese) LLM based on the general language model framework. The updated version of ChatRTX now lets users interact with image data through Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training from OpenAI. CLIP is a neural network that, as NVIDIA explains, through training and refinement will learn visual concepts from natural lanage supervsion -- a model that recognizes what the AI is "seeing" in image collections.

Continue reading: NVIDIA ChatRTX updated: new models, voice recognition, media search, and more with AI (full post)

NVIDIA says RTX is the 'premium' AI PC platform, NPUs are for 'basic' AI PCs

Anthony Garreffa | Artificial Intelligence | May 1, 2024 9:10 PM CDT

NVIDIA isn't going to be left out with the coming AI PC revolution, with AMD and Intel already releasing NPU-powered processors for AI workloads, NVIDIA has just announced the "Premium AI PC" with RTX hardware, compared to the "Basic AI PC" with an NPU on the CPU.

NVIDIA says RTX is the 'premium' AI PC platform, NPUs are for 'basic' AI PCs

NVIDIA compares that a Premium AI PC with an RTX GPU for AI workloads can provide gigantic performance uplifts for AI TOPS of between 100 and a whopping 1300+ TOPS (int8 + FP8 workloads) compared to just 10-45 TOPS on current, and next-gen CPUs with beefed-up NPUs.

Intel and AMD will combine the TOPS performance of the CPU + GPU + NPU, because if they used the NPU alone, the AI power is nowhere near as great. The more the NPU is used, the more resources that are taken away from other key parts of the chip: ya know, like the CPU and GPU.

Continue reading: NVIDIA says RTX is the 'premium' AI PC platform, NPUs are for 'basic' AI PCs (full post)

Intel Core Ultra CPU flexes its NPU muscle: AI runs over 500 models optimized

Anthony Garreffa | CPU, APU & Chipsets | May 1, 2024 8:34 PM CDT

Intel has just announced that it has surpassed 500 AI models running optimized on its Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" CPUs.

Intel Core Ultra CPU flexes its NPU muscle: AI runs over 500 models optimized

The company issued a press release today, saying that the industry's leading AI PC processor is available right now enabling new AI experiences, immersive graphics and optimal battery life. This significant milestone is a result of the investments by Intel in client AI, the AI PC transformation, framework optimizations and AI tools including OpenVINO toolkit.

Intel said that the 500 AI models that were trained can be deployed across the CPU, GPU, or NPU, with models drawing from categories of local AI inferencing, including large language, diffusion, super resolution, object detection, image classification/segmentation, computer vision, and more.

Continue reading: Intel Core Ultra CPU flexes its NPU muscle: AI runs over 500 models optimized (full post)

Intel Arrow Lake-S CPU details: Core Ultra 9 285K is the successor to the Core i9-14900K

Anthony Garreffa | CPU, APU & Chipsets | May 1, 2024 7:57 PM CDT

Intel's next-generation Core Ultra 200 "Arrow Lake-S" desktop processors will launch later this year, with 6 different SKUs and a flagship 24-core CPU based on next-gen P-Core and E-Core architectures.

Intel Arrow Lake-S CPU details: Core Ultra 9 285K is the successor to the Core i9-14900K

Now we've got some new information regarding upcoming SKUs in the Arrow Lake-S desktop CPU family, with the Core Ultra 9 285K, Core Ultra 7 265K, and Core Ultra 5 245K. The new Core Ultra 9 285K will be the successor to the Core i9-14900K, the Core Ultra 7 265K is the successor to the Core i7-14700K, and finally, the Core Ultra 5 245K is the successor to the Core i5-14600K.

We'll also see non-K variants of these processors, with the Core Ultra 9 275, Core Ultra 7 255, and Core Ultra 5 240 processors. The leaks are coming from "OneRaichi" on X, who said that "the rules of names look like a little change".

Continue reading: Intel Arrow Lake-S CPU details: Core Ultra 9 285K is the successor to the Core i9-14900K (full post)

AMD's next-gen Strix Halo LP teased: 6-8 cores, 20 CUs, perfect for next-gen gaming handhelds

Anthony Garreffa | CPU, APU & Chipsets | May 1, 2024 7:33 PM CDT

AMD is preparing a huge wave of next-gen Zen 5 processors in the coming months, with its Strix Halo APUs shaping up to be beasts.

AMD's next-gen Strix Halo LP teased: 6-8 cores, 20 CUs, perfect for next-gen gaming handhelds

In a new video from Moore's Law is Dead, we're hearing whispers of AMD's new Strix Halo-LP APU, which would be a low-power version of Strix Halo with 6 to 8 cores, and 20 CUs of GPU power that would provide RTX 3050 performance-per-watt-style power.

MLID says that AMD's new Zen 5-powered Strix Halo APUs will come in four different SKUs: Best, Better, Good, and the new LP model we're talking about today. The Strix Halo "Best" APU will feature 8, 12, or 16 cores based on the new Zen 5 architecture, with 40 CUs of RDNA 3.5-based GPU power that provides RTX 4070-class performance. We'll see a 256-bit memory bus on the Strix Halo "Best" APU with around 270GB/sec of memory bandwidth.

Continue reading: AMD's next-gen Strix Halo LP teased: 6-8 cores, 20 CUs, perfect for next-gen gaming handhelds (full post)

Apple TV Plus confirms June 29 premiere date for animated adventure show WondLa

Oliver Haslam | TV, Movies & Home Theatre | May 1, 2024 2:00 PM CDT

Apple TV Plus, the Apple-owned streaming service best known for shows like Severance and Ted Lasso, has announced the first season premiere date for something entirely different - an epic animated adventure called WondLa. The season is the first of a trilogy and is based on the New York Times bestselling book series "The Search for WondLa" by Tony DiTerlizzi.

Apple TV Plus confirms June 29 premiere date for animated adventure show WondLa

Apple TV Plus confirmed that the seven-episode first season of WondLa will premiere globally on the streaming service on Friday, June 28, although there is no confirmation on when the rest of the trilogy will land on our screens.

The press page for the WondLa show on Apple's website says that the adventure centers around Eva, a character voiced by Jeanine Mason, a character who's described as being curious, enthusiastic, and a spirited teenager. She's being raised in a state-of-the-art underground bunker by Muthr, a robot caretaker, voiced by Emmy Award nominee Teri Hatcher. But on her 16th birthday, an attack on the bunker forced her onto the Earth's surface which just so happens to now be inhabited by aliens and otherworldly fauna.

Continue reading: Apple TV Plus confirms June 29 premiere date for animated adventure show WondLa (full post)

Apple TV Plus thriller Presumed Innocent with Jake Gyllenhaal gets its first trailer

Oliver Haslam | TV, Movies & Home Theatre | May 1, 2024 1:45 PM CDT

If you're an Apple TV Plus subscriber you're no stranger to having some top-notch TV show content to watch, and it would appear that there's something new for you to start to get excited about. Presumed Innocent is an eight-part limited series starring and executive produced by Jake Gyllenhaal and Apple TV Plus just made the first teaser trailer available online. And it looks very good indeed.

Apple TV Plus thriller Presumed Innocent with Jake Gyllenhaal gets its first trailer

The show also includes a star-studded ensemble cast including Ruth Negga, Bill Camp, O-T Fagbenle, Chase Infiniti, Elizabeth Marvel, Nana Mensah, Renate Reinsve, Peter Sarsgaard and Kingston Rumi Southwick

The new show will premiere on Apple TV Plus with the first two episodes on Wednesday, June 12 before a new episode arrives every Wednesday until the season's completion on July 24. The show, like many of Apple TV Plus' best, is based on a New York Times bestselling novel of the same name by Scott Turow.

Continue reading: Apple TV Plus thriller Presumed Innocent with Jake Gyllenhaal gets its first trailer (full post)

Apple is offering the MLS Season Pass subscription with a massive 25% discount

Oliver Haslam | TV, Movies & Home Theatre | May 1, 2024 1:30 PM CDT

If you're a soccer fan who hasn't yet signed up for the MLS Season Pass offering on Apple TV, now is the time to do just that. Apple is offering a full 25% discount off the usual asking price for a year's subscription, giving you the chance to take all of the soccer in at a discounted price. However, as great as that is, there's a catch.

Apple is offering the MLS Season Pass subscription with a massive 25% discount

That catch? You're getting a 25% discount because this isn't a full season - the subscription will give you access to the rest of the season's content but you've obviously already missed a chunk after the MLS season began in February. Still, if you want to jump in now it's great that you aren't paying for content that you've already missed.

This offer means that you can take out an MLS Season Pass subscription for just $69 for the remainder of the season, down from the usual $99 asking price that was being offered previously. Those who are already Apple TV Plus subscribers can also benefit from an additional discount, making the MLS Season Pass offering just $59 for the remainder of the season. The MLS Season comes to a close on October 19 and the pass also includes the end-of-season playoffs that are expected to kick off around that time too.

Continue reading: Apple is offering the MLS Season Pass subscription with a massive 25% discount (full post)