Apple has debuted its upgraded A18 Pro SoC inside of its new iPhone 16 family of handsets -- inside of the higher-end iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max handsets -- and now we've got some benchmarks that show it's the fastest mobile SoC in the world.

The new Apple A18 Pro is fabbed on TSMC's newer 3nm process node (N3B) with reviewer "Geekerwan" posting some ranking charts showing how the new A18 Pro fares against some of the most powerful mobile SoCs on the market including the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen3, Dimensity 9300, and Apple's more powerful M2, and M4 SoCs inside of new MacBook laptops.

In CPU rankings, the new A18 beats the previous-gen A17 Pro, while the new A18 Pro beats out the Snapdragon 8 Gen3 and Dimensity 9300, while losing to the M2 inside of the iPad Pro, and the M4 (3+6) and M4 (4+6) by a larger margin. Still, it's impressive to see the new A18 Pro getting closer to the much higher-end M2 and M4 processors.

The Cybertruck Mini-PC is a beast-looking system but doesn't have much GPU grunt if you're an enthusiast-level gamer, which is where Dawid Does Tech Stuff steps in, modding the Xyber PC with a flagship NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card. Check it out:

One of the main issues is that the Cybertruck Mini-PC doesn't feature an easily accessible secondary M.2 slot, as it's positioned directly under where the wheel is, which stops devices being used in it (even if you drill into it). The Cybertruck Mini-PC isn't an easy thing to take apart, so modding it is a hefty job.

Dawid Does Tech Stuff used a PCIe adapter for the M.2 Wi-Fi slot, with teh M.2 PCIe adapter limited to two-lane operation at up to 32Gbps, slower than Thunderbolt 3 and 4 with up to 40Gbps, and much slower than OCulink with up to 64Gbps of bandwidth. The limitation in M.2 bandwidth leads to the GPU -- in this case, the monster RTX 4090 -- from running at full power levels.

A modder has created what he calls "The Ultimate Cheating Device" with a regular TI-84 calculator hacked to run ChatGPT, which is perfect for students who want to ninja an AI-powered calculator into the class.

YouTuber ChromaLock uploaded the video that is embedded above, with some hardware modifications applied and the use of some open-source software modified for the TI-84 that he made, allowing the calculator to run ChatGPT. The modder has uploaded the software required onto GitHub, under the TI-32 repository, which is described as "a mod for the TI-84 Plus Silver Edition and TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition calculators to give them Internet access and add other features, like test mode breakout and camera support".

A microcontroller small enough to fit inside of the TI-84 shell with all of its components is the hardest step, after that the software modification is applied. All of the required TI-84 software features require the use of a link port to connect to bulky external devices, so if students were doing that it would be too obvious... but hardware mods + ChatGPT installed? Game changer.

Apple has just unleashed its new iPhone 16 family, with its iPhone 17 family coming in 2025... but the iPhone 18 is when the company will use TSMC's bleeding-edge 2nm process node for its latest A-series processors.

In a new post on X, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo explained that all four iPhone 17 models will use the same 3nm chips in 2025, but there will be some iPhone 18 models that will use more advanced 2nm chips. I recently covered a story recently where Apple executives took a secret visit to TSMC to secure the very first batch of 2nm chips, which look to be going in (at least some) new iPhone 18 models.

Kuo posted: "The processors for 2025 iPhone 17 models will be made by TSMC's N3P process/3-nanometer technology. The processor for 2026 iPhone 18 models is anticipated to use TSMC's 2-nanometer technology. However, due to cost concerns, not all new iPhone 18 models may be equipped with a 2-nanometer processor".

Intel's new Core Ultra 7 268V "Lunar Lake" CPU has been tested ahead of laptops hitting the market later this month, with the 8-core, 8-thread CPU tested against AMD's new Strix Point APU and Apple's new M3 processor.

Inside, the new Intel Core Ultra 200V series "Lunar Lake" CPUs feature new Lion Cove P-Cores and Skymont E-Cores, with either 16GB or 32GB of on-package memory that sits next to the chip itself. In some early testing, we've got some numbers from a Vietnamese YouTuber that has tested a new Dell XPS 13 laptop with the Intel Core Ultra 7 268V processor, 32GB of LPDDR5X-8533 memory, and Windows 11 Home.

Cinebench R23 single-threaded performance shows that the new Intel Core Ultra 7 268V "Lunar Lake" processor beating out the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 "Strix Point" APU, and the Apple M3. Interestingly, the Core Ultra 7 268V processor using 15W of power, the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 APU using 21W of power, while Apple blows them both away with the M3 using just 6W of power.

Sony only just announced its new PlayStation 5 Pro console, and then days later announced the PS5 and PS5 Pro "30th Anniversary Limited Edition" bundles... aaaand there's one on eBay for $10,000 already.

Well, technically it's $9,990 but we're not going to split hairs because I'm sure this reseller won't be, with a listing on eBay for the PlayStation 5 Pro "30th Anniversary Edition" bundle. The seller notes that they will "ATTEMPT TO BUY FOR YOU" which basically means they'll try to buy one for you, for the hefty price of $10,000.

Press X for doubt: Be careful of these types of sellers, because the hype around Sony's beefed-up PlayStation 5 Pro console is real, and I think we'll see more and more of these shenanigans up to, and during -- and even after -- the PS5 Pro officially launches in November 2024.

At the beginning of August the Huawei CEO for Consumer Business Group was spotted on a plane holding the world's first tri-foldable smartphone. The following the month the device was officially unveiled, and I have managed to spend some time with it for a hands-on experience.

The Huawei Mate XT Ultimate Design is the official name of the device, and while I was in China I walked past a Huawei store where they had one available. This device is truly an impressive feat of engineering with its dual-hinge design that enables users to fold the Mate XT into three forms - triple folded (completely collapsed), unfolded, and completely unfolded. At each of these stages users will get a different screen size, with the triple fold rocking a standard 6.4-inch display that's then bumped up to a 7.9-inch display when unfolded, and then a 10.2-inch display when completely unfolded.

The above video shows each of these folding stages, and through my brief time holding the device I was truly impressed at the ease of the folding, along with the thinness of the device. Huawei designed the Mate XT with a shockingly thin battery that enables the device to be just 3.6mm thick, but still sport a 5,600mAh. However, due to the triple folding design when completely folded together the Mate XT Ultimate Design is a chunky 12.8mm thick, or half an inch.

Sony is expected to unveil a new OLED-based INZONE gaming monitor, with an identical design to its previous INZONE M9 gaming monitor but with an OLED panel.

Sony first introduced its INZONE M9 gaming monitor in 2022, but since then we haven't heard a peep... until a new post on Weibo by a leaker that said Sony is introducing its first OLED INZONE gaming monitor. The new flagship OLED INZONE gaming monitor should look identical to the INZONE M9, but with an OLED panel.

We don't know if it will be a 1440p or 4K display, but given that Sony's 27-inch INZONE M9 gaming monitor features a 4K 144Hz HDR panel, it would be disappointing to not see the new OLED INZONE gaming monitor without 4K and at least 144Hz, so we could expect 4K 240Hz as there are more and more 4K 240Hz OLED gaming monitors popping up from various companies.

AMD's upcoming Ryzen AI Max series "Strix Halo" APU has been teased heavily recently, but now we're hearing it'll appear in HP's new ZBook Ultra 14 mobile workstation.

HP's new ZBook Ultra 14 mobile workstation was spotted with an AMD Ryzen AI Max 390 "Strix Halo" APU in engineering sample (ES) form on Geekbench, with its 12 cores and 24 threads of Zen 5 CPU power, massive 40 Compute Units of RDNA 3.5 integrated GPU, and support for up to 96GB of RAM.

The Geekbench result page has an identifier for the CPU of "AuthenticAMD Family 26 Model 112 Stepping 0" with teh HP ZBook Ultra 14-inch G1a Mobile Workstation PC benchmarked in the AI runs with 4733 points in single precision, 4944 in half-precision, and 13944 in quantized tests.

Apple launches its new iPhone 16 family of smartphones today, but there's a leak for its next-gen iPhone 17 and iPhone 17 Air smartphones that tease will feature 120Hz ProMotion displays.

Display analyst Ross Young from DSCC talked with MacRumors, teasing that the Apple iPhone 17 (standard) and ultra-slim thinner iPhone 17 Air smartphones will feature Apple ProMotion display technology: 120Hz goodness for everything. Right now, the standard iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro have 60Hz panels... which in 2024, isn't a good look when competing smartphones ship with 120Hz displays.

Apple introducing 120Hz ProMotion displays with its next-gen iPhone 17 and iPhone 17 Air should boost sales, as the hype for the new iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Pro, and iPhone 16 Pro Max smartphones just isn't there this year.

Apple has a bunch of internal tweaks to its new iPhone 16 series smartphones, with some huge improvements inside of the new iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max smartphones revealed in a new teardown.

The new iPhone 16 Pro with its 6.3-inch display has a redesigned A18 Pro logic board, and a protection cover for the battery. REWA Technology did the teardown on Apple's new iPhone 16 Pro, with the two logic boards and batteries tweaked over the iPhone 15 Pro.

In the image above, we've got the A18 Pro on the left and the A17 Pro logic board on the right, where you can see that the new A18 Pro logic board inside of the iPhone 16 Pro being smaller, and more densely packed than its predecessor. The new part also sports a larger metal cover, which is most likely there to help with the thermals of the A18 Pro, which is made on TSMC's bleeding edge 3nm process node.

According to rumors and information from several sources, NVIDIA plans to launch its next-gen GeForce RTX 50 Series with the new flagship GeForce RTX 5090 and GeForce RTX 5080 early next year - Q1 2025.

With that, companies are lining up new hardware, including Power Supplies or PSUs, designed for the next generation of PC gaming and desktop AI. For example, MSI's impressive new 1600W MEG Ai1600T PCIE5 and the 1250W MPG A1250 (also available in 1000W and 850W), which we got to see during a recent tour of MSI's impressive factory in Shenzhen, China.

Interestingly, these new PSUs feature two 12V-2x6 power connectors (the updated 16-pin 12VHPWR that can deliver up to 600W on a single cable). MSI's reason for the additional connector is to support the next generation of graphics cards. Could we see the GeForce RTX 5090 launch with two power connectors? Possibly.

Windows 11 has not gone down well with the computing public for one reason or another - from system requirements, through to bewildering interface changes (steps backward in places), ad pushing, and other niggles besides - and we've just caught a glimpse of what we could have had instead.

Well, kind of - if Microsoft had sat down and properly thought out making a desktop operating system which is clean and streamlined, free of bloat and, yes, dare we say it, with AI pushed more to the side.

BetaNews spotted that a well-known concept creator, AR 4789 on YouTube, put together a video clip showing off a mock-up of a fictional Windows 12.1. (It's not Windows 12, as AR 4789 already did a concept for that, so this is a refinement on that previous take).

Unity has just shown off a new tech demo it's calling "Time Ghost" and it looks pretty spectacular, check out the 4K trailer below:

The team that worked on the beautiful The Blacksmith, Book of the Dead, and The Heretic videos powered by Unity worked on Time Ghost, with some huge visual upgrades that were made through improvements made in HDRP (High Definition Render Pipeline), a bunch of new lighting options with APVs, Scenario Blending, Smoke Lighting, and a huge focus on performance with Unity's Resident Drawer.

There are individual fibers that you can see on the close-up shots of the cloth, which is damn impressive, and on top of that clothing deforms realistically, even in those high-motion scenes like when the character is running. Unity 6 also uses Machine Learning to create accurate and realistic cloth deformation, with the team using Unity Sentis which was trained with their ML model with 2000 frames of vertex animation. The accurate deformations occur every 0.8ms per frame, which allows for the project to keep the high-quality visuals.

Intel's new Core Ultra 200 series "Arrow Lake" desktop CPUs will be here soon, with their retail packaging now leaked showing us the refreshed look that Intel has for Arrow Lake (and the new Core Ultra naming scheme for the desktop). Check them out:

It looks like Intel is going with a darker blue rectangular box with dots as accents, with the "ULTRA" branding in a smaller font than the "Intel CORE" above it. This is similar to previous-gen Core boxes in retail form, except we've moved away from the Core i3, Core i5, Core i7, and Core i9 into the Core Ultra 5, Core Ultra 7, and Core Ultra 9 processors for Arrow Lake.

Intel will debut its Arrow Lake-S desktop CPU family with the flagship Core Ultra 9 285K processor, with 24 cores and 24 threads (no Hyper-Threading) and CPU boost clocks of up to 5.5GHz. The Core Ultra 9 285K will feature 8 P-Cores based on the Lion Cove architecture, and 16 E-Cores based on the Skymont architecture.

Intel is preparing new Core Ultra 200HX series "Arrow Lake-HX" enthusiast laptop CPUs, with new leaks pointing to the flagship Core Ultra 9 285HX processor with up to 24 cores and up to 5.5GHz boost clocks.

In a new post on X, leaker "Jaykihn" posted details on Intel's fleet of Arrow Lake-HX mobile processors for new enthusiast gaming laptops that I'm sure we'll see debut at CES 2025 in January 2025. We are to expect 6 different SKUs of the Core Ultra 200HX series CPUs, which will share a similar die to the desktop Arrow Lake-S processors.

We can expect the following Arrow Lake-HX processors:

It looks like Rockstar Games is cooking up Grand Theft Auto 6, Grand Theft Auto 5 Gen9, and Red Dead Redemption 1 for the PC with some juicy Rockstar Launcher leaks.

Rockstar left some metadata behind in its latest GTA 5 update, with files left over confirming that the game is getting BattleEye anti-cheat support, but there's also some unannounced PC titles in the mix. There are directories for "Americas", "GTA V Gen9", and "Red Dead Redemption".

What is codename "Americas"? The GTA community knows Project Americas as the internal codename for GTA 6, something that was first reported all the way back in 2018. We know that GTA 6 is coming to the PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 5 Pro, but the PC release we're expecting for 2026 or later. But, now we know that Rockstar is working on GTA 6 for the PC under "Project Americas" in the Rockstar Launcher.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 launches on November 19 and will command a huge 64GB of RAM for the ultra-spec configuration, with a hefty CPU and GPU required, too. Here are the full PC system requirements:

The "Ideal Spec" for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 sees Windows 10 with the latest updates installed, an AMD Ryzen 9 7900X or Intel Core i7-14700K processor, 64GB of RAM (!!!), 50GB of SSD storage, and an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT or NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 graphics card with 12GB of VRAM or more, and a 100Mbps internet connection.

The Minimum Spec requires an AMD Ryzen 5 2600X or Intel Core i7-6800K processor, a much tamer 16GB of RAM, and an AMD Radeon RX 5700 or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 graphics card with at least 4GB of VRAM, and a 10Mbps internet connection.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is shaping up to be an incredible experience, where the game is a complete overhaul and upgrade of Flight Simulator 2020: but it's so, so much bigger. Check it out:

One of the biggest changes that Flight Simulator 2024 delivers is that the game's computing has been shifted from your PC, to the cloud. There are massive amounts of data -- 2,500,000GB of aerial data to be precise -- that will be streamed from the cloud and onto your PC in real-time.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 used a hybrid structure that streamed data from the cloud, but also used the local compute resources (PC or Xbox Series X/S) as well, this meant that downloads to your system were up to 500GB, which is a huge cry from the much, much smaller 23GB install for Flight Simulator 2024. That doesn't mean you're going to lose detail, in fact there is 4000x more detail in Flight Simulator 2024, a full-fledged single-player Career mode, and ungodly amounts more.

Microsoft has just signed a 20-year deal with Constellation Energy, the owner of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, and once revived, will provide clean energy to Microsoft and its AI data center and cloud computing needs for 20 years.

Three Mile Island has two nuclear reactors: the first with a capacity of 906 MW was shut down back in 1979 after the "Three Mile Island nuclear incident" that I'm sure you've heard of (if not, you should read into it). The other, has a capacity of 819 MW and was closed in 2019 over economic issues, but will now be restarted thanks to the deal with Microsoft.

Constellation Energy will invest $1.6 billion in restarting the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor, a process that had been in development since early 2023 when the company looked at the feasibility of bringing the nuclear reactor back online. After it decided to go ahead and restart the nuclear reactor, it began talking with potential buyers... with Microsoft showing immediate interest, and now the deal is inked (and for 20 years).