The new ASUS Zephyrus G16 will be powered by AMD's new 12-Core next-gen Ryzen "Strix Point" APU, which a South African retailer has leaked. The high-end AI and gaming laptop also comes packed with mobile GeForce RTX 4070 8GB graphics, 32GB of LPDDR5X memory, and a 16-inch WQXGA OLED display. Although regional pricing varies, the listing price is translated to roughly $3,700 USD, so it won't be cheap.

The price could be a placeholder, with the final SKU launching at a much lower price point of around $2,000 USD. Based on information from a related ASUS leak, it seems that AMD's next-gen "Strix Point" Ryzen APU featured in the new ASUS Zephyrus G16 will be called the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 170 - a new naming convention from AMD that puts AI front and center.

That leak confirms that the APU features a 12-core, 24-thread CPU that clocks up to 5.1GHz (with 36MB of cache) with AI performance of up to 77 TOPS. Paired with the GeForce RTX 4070, it'll be an impressive machine for any AI or non-AI-related task.

Intel has plans to partner with 14 different Japanese companies to develop technology to automate "back-end" chipmaking processes, like advanced packaging.

In a new report from Nikkei, the US and Japan are looking to cut geopolitical risks to their semiconductor supply chains. The deal would involve electronics maker Omron, Yamaha Motor, and materials supplier Resonac and Shin-Etsu Polymer, will be led by the head of Intel's Japanese business: Kunimasa Suzuki.

This new group will invest tens of billions of yen (with 10 million yen = $65 million USD or so) that will develop the technologies in a working state by 2028. Nikkei reports that with the advances in front-end operations including circuit formation start to approach their physical limits, competition is brewing in back-end steps like stacking chips to improve performance.

Meta has purchased 500,000 more AI GPUs for a total of 1 million AI GPUs, which is valued at $30 billion.

We're hearing about the gargantuan AI GPU hardware investment from Meta AI boss Yann LeCun at the AI Summit, also saying that upcoming variations of its Llama 3 large language model are on the way. LeCun emphasized the computational limitations and GPU costs as things that are slowing the progression of AI.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman plans to spend $50 billion a year on AGI development (artificial general intelligence) by using 720,000 NVIDIA H100 AI GPUs that cost a hefty $21.6 billion. Microsoft is aiming for 1.8 million AI GPUs by the end of 2024, while OpenAI wants to have 10 million AI GPUs before the end of the year.

Apple has unveiled the new iPad Pro line-up, powered by the company's new 3-nanometer M4 chip. Available in two sizes, 13-inch and 11-inch, both feature the company's new 6K resolution Ultra Retina XDR display built with OLED technology.

Each iPad Pro uses two OLED panels to combine the light to "phenomenal full-screen brightness." We're talking 1000 nits of full-screen brightness for SDR and HDR content and 1600 nits of peak brightness for HDR.

"Tandem OLED technology enables sub-millisecond control over the color and luminance of each pixel, taking XDR precision further than ever," Apple writes. "Specular highlights in photos and video appear even brighter, and there's more detail in shadows and low light than ever before on iPad - all while delivering even more responsiveness to content in motion."

Lenovo has just teased its new ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 laptop with "Ryzen 8050" splashed front and center, which could be one of the earliest Zen 5-based laptops.

In the brochure for the ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 laptop, the company has "Ryzen 8050" right in your face, and AMD Ryzen AI technology at bottom. The Ryzen AI tech Lenovo is referring to is the NPU (neural processing unit) for AI workloads, which the Ryzen 8050 "Strix Point" APUs feature an upgraded XDNA2-based NPU for AI workloads.

AMD has its current-gen Ryzen 8040 series "Hawk Point" APUs in the wild now, with an XDNA-based NPU with up to 16 TOPS of AI workload performance from the NPU alone.

Apple has announced the latest iteration of its custom processor, the new M4 chip, which will power the new iPad Pro line-up. The M4 chip is the second generation of Apple's 3-nanometer technology (28 billion transistors), and the company is touting a brand-new display engine that will utilize the Ultra Retina XDR OLED display on iPad Pro.

The new M4 CPU features up to 10 cores (4 performance cores and 6 efficiency cores), with a next-gen 10-core GPU that "builds on the next-generation GPU architecture introduced in M3" with new caching tech called Dynamic Caching, hardware-accelerated ray tracing, and hardware-accelerated mesh shading. It's the most powerful GPU ever to hit the iPad, so it will be interesting to see how it fares with modern games.

Of course, AI is a vital component of the new M4 chip - it's "Apple's fastest Neural Engine ever," sporting an AI performance of 38 TOPS, higher than Intel's current Core Ultra and AMD's current Ryzen offerings. The M4 also features faster memory bandwidth to help push AI performance even further.

Sony now once again has more games on the PlayStation Store's best-sellers list than Microsoft does.

Once Microsoft purchased Activision for $70 billion, Xbox became an overnight powerhouse. Microsoft now owns Activision Blizzard King, Bethesda/ZeniMax, and the myriad of teams under its Xbox Game Studios banner. That's a lot of IPs and franchises--Microsoft now casts one of the widest nets in gaming.

Buying ABK wasn't enough--Microsoft also needed to break exclusivity and bring its first-party games to competing platforms so it can "use what Sony has" to sell games. As a result of these expansion efforts, Microsoft took over the U.S. PlayStation Store top-sellers charts simply by virtue of its size.

Nintendo gives fans a very loose timeline on when the next-gen Switch will be revealed.

Today, Nintendo announced its Q4 financials that clearly illustrate the Switch is on its way out. It's time for a new model, and Nintendo is set to unveil its new Switch 2 (aka the Super Switch, Switch 4K, etc). The only question is...when?

In a surprise move, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa gave an update on Twitter on the new hardware. The company plans to reveal the new Switch during the current Fiscal Year 2025 timeline, which ends in March 2025. And it won't be revealed in June. So the system could be revealed at any time in 9 months.

Windows 10 users wanting to upgrade to Windows 11 will soon be put on the latest version of Microsoft's newer operating system.

What, you might be thinking: Didn't this happen already? No, actually, because some of those upgrading from Windows 10 found themselves migrated to Windows 11 22H2, rather than the 23H2 flavor of the OS.

Windows Latest reports that they have observed on several Windows 10 PCs that Microsoft was offering the upgrade to Windows 11, but that it would install the 22H2 version.

Apple's brand-new M4 iPad Pro has officially been announced at today's 'Let Loose' event and, as expected, it's quite the beast. It comes with the new M4 chip, making this the first time that particular silicon has found its way into a device that we can buy. And it comes with a very impressive new OLED display, too. The M4 iPad Pro is every bit the flagship tablet. So it's perhaps no surprise to anyone who is paying attention that maxing one out is going to get very expensive, very quickly.

How expensive? The 13-inch iPad Pro starts at $1,299 so it's where we'll start as well. That's already more than enough for most people to start looking further down the lineup. But if you really do need everything the iPad Pro has to offer and have money to spend, it turns out Apple will very happily take $3,077 from you. To put that into perspective, the Apple Vision Pro costs $3,499 for the 256GB model.

How did we get that far? Well, that $1,299 asking price is just the base 256GB model so the most obvious way to spend more is to add extra storage. The 2TB option costs an extra $1,000 right out the gate, and then we get to the display. Such a gorgeous 13-inch display deserves the best, so let's add the nano-texture glass as well. It preserves the fidelity of the display while reducing glare and reflections, so why not?