This week on the TT Show, Lord of the Rings superfan (and also superfan) Jak and Kosta discuss Peter Jackson returning to The Lord of the Rings franchise with the new movie 'The Hunt for Gollum.' They discuss the potential story, timeline, and their hopes for a return to the magic of the original trilogy. And not, you know, The Hobbit.

Another big story this week is Apple's apologizing for its seemingly tone-deaf iPad Pro advertisement that quickly caused a massive wave of negative backlash. Is it as bad as some of the comments? As a fan of retro hardware who doesn't like seeing it get destroyed, Kosta thinks so, while Jak is more on the fence and 'meh.'

And it wouldn't be an episode of The TT Show without GPU news, with all of the latest GeForce RTX 50 Series, Radeon, and Intel graphics talk bundled into a new section of the podcast called 'GPU Corner.' Speaking of new sections, Jak and Kosta play a round of Guess the Headline for some fun.

With the release and success of Baldur's Gate 3, developer Larian Studios is now one of the world's most esteemed RPG creators. Although we won't be getting an expansion, and Larian is officially moving on from the Baldur's Gate franchise (Hasbro is looking to pick up the pieces), the studio is hard at work on "two very ambitious RPGs."

With that, Larian Studios is expanding, with Larian Studios Warsaw opening in Poland to help work on its upcoming games. Larian calls Warsaw "one of the greatest RPG development hubs in the world," and it's no secret why - the city is home to CD Projekt Red, who created The Witcher series and Cyberpunk 2077.

Interestingly, this isn't the only news surrounding a high-profile developer opening a Polish-based studio. Activision announced that its new Elsewhere Entertainment studio in the region is being set up to create a new "narrative-based, genre-defining AAA franchise."

Microsoft will integrate Copilot AI into Xbox and PC games like Minecraft. The company showcased how it will work with the latter at its big Surface and AI event earlier today, and the results are pretty wild. In a demonstration, Microsoft showed how Copilot can act as a digital assistant that you can verbally interact with to provide in-game information, help, and tips.

In Minecraft, it could be as simple as asking for a crafting recipe. Copilot can then step you through the process and even assess your inventory to provide answers on what you might need and where to find it. The whole presentation included a scenario where Copilot acted as an interactive guide for a player looking to craft a sword. It's filled with rich, naturalistic conversational delivery and is impressive, to say the least - watch a short clip of it above.

It's reminiscent of some AI tutors and educational tools that OpenAI has demonstrated - except this time, it's for gaming. This feature will undoubtedly make its way to Xbox consoles and hardware, but as it will require NPU hardware to run, it probably won't arrive for televisions until Microsoft launches its next-gen Xbox console.

Ubisoft has just unveiled its next instalment in the Assassin's Creed franchise in a new cinematic trailer, which appears to have caused quite a stir in the gaming community.

The new Assassin's Creed game is called Assassin's Creed Shadows and it takes place in 16th century feudal Japan, where players will take control of two main characters in an open-world setting that is similar in scope to previous Assassin's Creed titles Valhalla and Odyssey.

The new trailer hasn't been well received by viewers as at the time of writing it has 250,000 likes and 600,000 dislikes, along with countless negative comments. Why is this happening you ask? Without mentioning the character choices and the setting of the game, which many gamers seem to be upset with, I believe the main issues for Shadows are Ubisoft's decisions when it comes to pricing.

Microsoft has announced a new lineup of Windows laptops and portable devices called Copilot+ AI PCs. These new bits of hardware feature built-in NPUs that will power a suite of AI features in Windows 11, running natively on local hardware. With a long list of partners, including Dell, Lenovo, Samsung, HP, Acer, and ASUS, Microsoft has also lifted the lid on its own Copilot+ AI PCs, the 11th edition Surface Pro and Surface Laptop.

These new devices are set to compete with Apple's new M4-powered iPad devices and current M3 Macbook offerings. The new Surface Copilot+ AI PCs sport the latest Qualcomm Arm-based Snapdragon X chips. The flagship Surface Pro ships with an OLED display, the Snapdragon X Elite processor, up to 32GB of LPDDR5x memory, and, in a very welcome move, a removable PCIe Gen 4 SSD.

With AI at the heart of Microsoft's vision for Windows, the new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop devices include the Qualcomm Hexagon NPU with 45 TOPS of AI performance. Microsoft classifies an AI PC as featuring at least 40 TOPS of AI performance. This makes the new Snapdragon X-powered Copilot+ AI PCs and Surface devices some of the first single-chip Windows 11 devices to run Copilot locally.

Intel teased its next-gen mobile-focused Lunar Lake CPUs today, but also confirmed its next-gen Arrow Lake-S, Arrow Lake-HX, and Arrow Lake-H processors for both desktop and laptops are coming in Q4 2024.

Intel's new high-performance Arrow Lake CPUs will hit the desktop later this year in Arrow Lake-S form, something that we should see confirmed (and detailed) at Computex 2024 in just a couple of weeks time. Intel has now provided a preview of its next-gen Core Ultra 200 "Arrow Lake-S" desktop CPUs, with a tease of the monolithic design that has multiple tiles inside.

Arrow Lake will feature a CPU, GPU, SoC, and I/O tiles, with the biggest of the tiles being the CPU and SoC which are the larger rectangular-shaped ones at the bottom, and the square one in the middle. There's also a dummy tile used, which is something Intel is also doing with its new Lunar Lake CPUs, too.

Intel has teased its next-generation Lunar Lake CPUs ahead of Computex 2024, teasing the new AI NPU and latest Battlemage "Xe2" integrated GPU.

The next-gen Lunar Lake CPUs will set the foundation for the next-generation AI PC platform, with Intel planning to have the new Lunar Lake CPUs out and in products in Q3 2024. Intel's next-gen Lunar Lake is something truly special: it features all-new architectures across the board with new CPU cores, new GPU cores, new NPU cores, and more thanks to advances in 3D packaging technology and power innovations.

Intel will be using next-gen Lion Cove P-Cores and Skymont E-Cores for Lunar Lake, with some hopefully very delicious IPC improvements. Intel has teased that we'll have 3x the AI performance from Lunar Lake over Meteor Lake, with 45+ TOPS of NPU power for AI workloads. This is just from the NPU alone, while Lunar Lake offers 100+ TOPS of AI performance in total (NPU + CPU + GPU).

Lenovo has just unveiled its latest Yoga Slim 7x and ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 laptops, both Copilot+ ready AI laptops with Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X processors.

First up we've got Lenovo's new Yoga Slim 7x which features Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X Elite processor with an on-board Hexagon NPU for AI workloads. There's a 14.5-inch 3K display (2944 x 1840) PureSight OLED display with up to 1000 nits of HDR brightness. There's up to 32GB of RAM, up to 1TB of SSD storage, 3 x USB-C ports with Power Delivery and DisplayPort 1.4 support.

Lenovo says its new Yoga Slim 7x laptop will have multiple days of battery life, which will be awesome to see in the flesh.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang is happy to team up with long-term partner Dell on providing its new Blackwell AI GPUs for Dell's new AI factory. In a chat with Bloomberg today, Jensen covered it all:

Jensen says that Dell's AI factories will help drive the continued artificial intelligence (AI) wave, and that the AI factory will be filled with the very latest CPUs, GPUs, switches, and other high-end components.

Acer has launched its first Copilot+ PC with the introduction of the new Swift 14 AI laptop, working with both Microsoft and Qualcomm on the new laptop.

The new Acer Swift 14 AI laptop features Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X Elite or Snapdragon X Plus processors, both featuring a built-in NPU (Neural Processing Unit) for AI workloads. Microsoft has some strict requirements on Copilot+ AI PCs, with 16GB of RAM, 256GB of SSD storage, and an NPU to get the stamp of Copilot+ AI approval.

Inside the new Swift 14 AI laptop we've got a Snapdragon X Elite with 12 high-performance CPU cores based on TSMC's 4nm process node, up to 32GB of LPDDR5X-8533 memory, and up to 1TB of NVMe PCIe Gen4 SSD goodness. We've got a 14.5-inch 2560 x 1600 IPS display with a 120Hz refresh rate, and a 1440p QHD IR webcam that supports Acer's suite of AI-boosted conferencing tools in Acer PurifiedView 2.0 and Acer PurifiedVoice 2.0.

Dell has just announced 5 new Copilot+ AI PC laptops powered by Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X series SoC.

The new XPS 13 (9345), Inspiron 14, Inspiron 14 Plus, Latitude 7455, and Latitude 5455 laptops all feature Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X SoC with an on-board NPU for AI workloads, ready for Microsoft's new Copilot+ branded AI PC era.

Dell's new XPS 13 laptop has a mid-range 12-core Snapdragon X Elite processor with Dual Core Boost, with support for up to 64GB of RAM, up to 2TB of PCIe SSD storage (4TB in the future), and 3 x 13.4-inch display options: a 500-nit 1920 x 1200 non-touch IPS display at 120Hz refresh rate, a 500-nit 2560 x 1600 IPS display with HDR and 120Hz refresh rate, and a 400-nit 2880 x 1880 OLED display with HDR at the 60Hz refresh rate.