Author: CAT

New details about the camera systems found on the iPhone 17 series have leaked. It’s interesting news.

The cop goes gangster in Den of Thieves 2: Pantera. We spoke to Gerard Butler and O’Shea Jackson Jr. about returning for another heist in the action sequel.

A bloated leak has exposed details of the Galaxy S25 series’ internal hardware. You won’t find any notable upgrades, but a price hike appears certain. Ouch!

CES 2025 was a fantastic show for companies making good on the promises of years past. At these events, we’re used to seeing booth after booth of gadgets in concept and prototype phases, with vague details about final designs and release windows of “eventually.” This year, however, the vibe was way more release-ready. A handful of high-profile projects that debuted at previous CESes are back with concrete plans and actual release dates, and many of these products are available right now. It’s a veritable CES miracle.

Remember Ballie, the rolling robot that Samsung debuted in 2020 and then brought to CES 2024? This is exactly the type of thing that we’d expect to never see again, doomed to forever haunt the consumer-electronics graveyard, but this year Samsung revealed Ballie’s final form and set its release window in the first half of 2025. Ballie is a cute yellow robot about the size of a bowling ball, with an Among Us-style cutout housing a projector that allows it to beam images and videos onto your walls and floors. This is a fun one from Samsung, and even though we don’t know an exact price or release date just yet, the news that it’s actually coming out this year is a welcome update.

Sony Honda Mobility

Sony Honda Mobility’s Afeela 1 is officially available to preorder right now, nearly five years after Sony announced its intent to enter the EV market. The Afeela 1 started out as the Vision-S concept car, which Sony unveiled at CES 2020, and it picked up the Afeela name in 2023 after Sony and Honda established their joint venture for EV manufacturing. At CES 2025, Sony Honda Mobility opened up reservations for the Afeela 1 Origin and the Afeela 1 Signature, which respectively cost $89,900 and $109,900. Reservations are only available to customers in California for now, and the first vehicles will be delivered in mid-2026. It’s definitely cool to see Sony’s EV ambitions manifesting after half a decade of build-up.

One of the headlines we published this year with the word “finally” in it was dedicated to Displace TV’s wireless 4K OLED screens with suction attachments. First revealed at CES 2023, Displace’s suction-cup TVs are now ready for mass consumption, and they’re available for pre-order with shipments expected in March. Displace is selling two models, the Basic and the Pro, both with 4K OLED displays and screen sizes of 27 inches or 55 inches. They all support rudimentary gesture controls, too. The 27-inch Basic model goes for $2,500, while the 55-inch Pro is $6,000, with the other prices in between.

LG

Speaking of TVs, the hottest bit of home entertainment tech at CES 2024 was LG’s transparent OLED T — and this year, it’s officially on sale. LG brought the OLED T to CES 2025, just a few weeks after the display hit the market at the eye-watering price of $60,000. The OLED T is a 77-inch, 4K, transparent TV, and even though it costs as much as a fancy car, it’s stunning in action.

Here’s another idea we were prepared to forget about forever: Lenovo’s rollable laptop. A handful of concept products with rollable screens have hit CES since 2019, and Lenovo has been talking about its rollout laptop idea since 2022. At CES 2025, the company showed off its first market-ready model, the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable. It has a vibrant OLED display that expands from 14 inches to 16.7 inches at the press of a button, and we found it to be shockingly elegant in person. The ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable should go on sale this spring, expected to start at $3,500.

It should be noted that this list isn’t limited to things that fit inside your home — some products hitting the market after previous CES appearances are actual houses themselves. Pebble brought its Flow all-electric RV trailer to CES 2024 and even opened up pre-orders that year, but at CES 2025, the company shared its final design and officially kicked off production. The Pebble Flow should ship out this spring, starting at $109,500 and topping out at $175,000.

Amy Skorheim / Engadget

AC Future brought concepts of its transformable RV home to CES 2024, and at the 2025 show, the company unveiled its finished product. AC Future’s Ai-TH line comes in three models: a deliverable pod (Ai-THu), a pullable trailer (Ai-THt) and a drivable EV RV (Ai-THd). The RV expands into a 400 square foot apartment with one bedroom, one bathroom, a living room, and a kitchen with a full-sized refrigerator, two-burner induction stovetop and microwave. There’s even a washer and dryer in the bathroom. Production on the Ai-TH range will begin as soon as the AC Future gets home from CES 2025, and pre-orders are live now, priced at $98,000 for the pod, $138,000 for the trailer and $298,000 for the EV RV.

It’s always nice to see innovative concepts like these become real products. The glut of actual release announcements out of CES 2025 is a relief, and it feels like a positive sign for the current consumer-tech production cycle.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/general/ces-2025-was-more-shoppable-than-conceptual-160010350.html?src=rss

As the world turns, so do the console generations. The Nintendo Switch is over seven years old, so it’s due for a refresh. Nintendo Switch 2 rumors have been swirling for years, but now they are really heating up. A sequel to Nintendo’s most successful home console ever is coming and it’s likely coming sooner rather than later.

Will it be a straight up sequel to the Switch with updated specs while retaining the same hybrid functionality or will Nintendo get weird with it? Will it even be called the Switch 2, or will the company go with something like the Super Switch or even the New Nintendo Switch? You can never tell with Nintendo. Heck, maybe it’ll call the thing the Switch U.

In any event, recent weeks have brought feverish speculation regarding all aspects of the forthcoming gaming console. It’s important to note, however, that very little information has been confirmed by Nintendo. The company operates on its own timetable. With that said, here are all of the rumors that are most likely to come true, given industry analysis.

When will the Nintendo Switch 2 be announced?

As previously mentioned, Nintendo marches to the beat of its own drum. We don’t exactly know when it’ll hold an event to reveal the console. A lot of people wrongly assumed it would happen toward the latter part of 2024, but that didn’t happen. 

Even Nintendo has trouble keeping the lid on a major console release, so we could learn something before the official reveal. There are parts that have to be sourced and shipments that have to be made. A senior analyst at MST Financial noted a spike in production equipment spending by Nintendo assembler Hosiden.

When will the Nintendo Switch 2 come out?

Once again, this is more or less a mystery. We aren’t totally in the dark, but it’s mostly rumor and speculation. One thing we know for sure is that Nintendo will announce the Nintendo Switch 2 (or whatever it chooses to call it) by March 2025, as the company confirmed back in May. Some are saying there will be a March release date, which makes sense given the OG Switch came out on March 17, 2017. However, other reports put the console’s release window later in 2025.

Accessory manufacturer Genki, which has been a major source of leaks in recent months, claims the console will be released in April. 

Will it even be a proper Switch sequel?

Nintendo has a weird track record here. The baffling Wii U followed the massive success of the Wii. The Wii itself followed the more traditional GameCube. In other words, it’s possible it’ll be something out of left field and not exactly a true sequel to the Switch. However, this is unlikely this time around. As much as I would love to see wacky VR glasses or a completely bonkers console concept, all points indicate a more traditional approach.

Developers have already seen the hardware, though in a much earlier form, and it seems to be a regular old console. While Nintendo hasn’t confirmed hybrid functionality, it’d be a weird omission given the absolute financial firestorm of the Switch. We’ve also heard rumors of a Mini-LED display, which would track for a hybrid console. It’s highly likely this will be a straight-up Switch 2, or something like it, calling to mind the Super Nintendo.

To that end, recent rumors suggest a design that recalls the original Switch. According to reporting by VGC, photos of the console have appeared online and they show an 8-inch screen and magnetic Joy-Con controllers. There looks to be SL/SR buttons and front-facing player LEDs on these controllers. 

Will there be a bit of Nintendo weirdness? 

Everything leaked or rumored so far on this console has been fairly, well, traditional. It looks like the original Switch, but better. That’s awesome, but will there be any of that unpredictable Nintendo magic? Maybe! Recent reports indicate two puzzling additions that folks can’t make hide nor hair of. 

An accessory maker called Genki accidentally leaked an alleged mockup of the entire console. If the console is coming sooner rather than later, it makes sense that accessory makers would have these kinds of mockups. There looks to be a mysterious “C” button on the bottom-right side and nobody knows what it does. Could it initiate voice chat during gameplay? Could it calibrate the controllers? Could it create a room-sized hologram of Bowser in your living room? We’ll have to wait and see, and there’s always a chance that the button won’t even exist. 

Now onto the updated Joy-Cons, those same leaks seem to indicate a new sensor on the connecting side of each controller. It looks a whole lot like an optical sensor, which is what a computer mouse uses. This has led to speculation that players will be able to flip the Joy-Con over and use it like a mouse.

But why would anyone even want this? I can think of three words. New Mario Paint. In any event, take all of that Genki stuff with a grain of salt, as Nintendo came out and said that the images and video were “not official.” 

Is the Nintendo Switch 2 backwards compatible?

If it’s a sequel to the Switch, the next question has to be about backwards compatibility. The Switch’s library is absolutely massive, and continues to grow, so gamers would be rightfully peeved if they couldn’t play Tears of the Kingdom on their new next-gen console. There’s good news on this front.

The company has officially announced in a recent earnings report that the console will be fully backwards compatible. It will also feature access to Nintendo Online, so users will be able to play all of those old retro titles. 

What about specs?

The rumors regarding specs are all over the place, so it’s tough to pin down. We know one thing for sure: It’ll be more powerful than the ancient Switch hardware, which was already antiquated back in 2017. One analyst allegedly got a hold of a spec sheet from the Korean United Daily News that said the Switch 2 would boast an eight-core Cortex-A78AE processor, 8GB of RAM, and 64GB of internal eMMC storage. This tracks for me, as these specs are about as underpowered in 2024 as the original Switch was in 2017. However, some reports do indicate that the console would include 12GB of RAM. 

Another source suggests that the eight-core CPU will be packaged inside an NVIDIA-produced Tegra239 SoC (system on a chip). Given the current Switch runs on an NVIDIA chip, that makes a lot of sense. The CPU will be more powerful, but it’s the Switch 2’s new GPU that will be a major differentiator. It’s all-but-confirmed that the Switch 2 will support DLSS, NVIDIA’s “deep learning supersampling” upscaling tech, which would allow the console to render games at a low resolution internally while outputting a high-resolution image. (Fun fact: We actually wrote about how perfect DLSS was for the Nintendo Switch 2 when the technology was announced alongside the RTX 20 series back in 2018.)

There are still questions about the Switch 2 and DLSS: Will the system support newer DLSS features like frame generation? Will existing games be automatically tidied up by NVIDIA’s algorithm? Regardless of the exact implementation, DLSS upscaling will be a huge leap over the rudimentary techniques available to Nintendo Switch developers.

As for the display, there are many conflicting rumors. Early reports from solid sources suggested the Switch 2 would have an 8-inch display LCD display, but there have also been rumors about an 7-inch display with a 120Hz refresh rate. Some analysts have suggested this would be an OLED screen, while others have said it would be a Mini-LED display. A Mini-LED display is basically an LCD display that has a backlight made of (surprise!) mini-LEDs rather than edge lighting. This allows for local dimming, making the blacks more black. I’m hedging my bets here. I think it’ll be a standard LCD, to cut costs, with an OLED or Mini-LED model coming later down the line. However, Mini-LED screens are slightly cheaper than OLED displays, so that’s certainly a possibility at launch.

As for resolution, recent reporting suggests that the console will output 1080p in handheld and 4K when docked. That’s much better than the OG Switch. 

How much will the Nintendo Switch 2 cost?

We don’t have too much information regarding price but we do have plenty of history to work with. The original Nintendo Switch launched at $300, which is pretty much the “magic number” when it comes to Nintendo console releases in recent years. The Wii U also came in at $300. 

However, there are plenty of rumors circulating that Nintendo could be upping the asking price for the Switch 2. Numerous outlets have reported it’ll be $400, or potentially even more expensive. However, the same analysts who say the console will be $400 were also fairly certain it would be out by the end of 2024 and, well, it looks like that ain’t happening. 

Dipping back into history, there is some precedence for a price uptick. The GameCube was $200 and the Wii was $250. The Wii U and Switch increased to $300 and, well, numbers like to go up. A $400 price tag would make it nearly as expensive as a PS5 and Xbox Series X. That would also put it at the same price as the 256GB LCD Steam Deck. 

Do we know about any launch games?

Nope! But it’s certainly been a long time since we’ve gotten a proper 3D Mario adventure, right? That would be one heck of a system seller. Other than that, your guess is as good as mine. Past as prologue, we can expect something from Ubisoft and an off-the-wall title like 1-2-Switch. 

If there’s a gimmick or hook involved with the console, we’ll also get a game that takes advantage of that. A dual release of Metroid Prime 4, just like Breath of the Wild and Twilight Princess before that, is also a possibility. Finally, there have been rumblings that the big launch title could be none other than Mario Kart 9. 

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That’s everything we know about the Nintendo Switch 2 today. We’ll update this article with rumors we trust and with information we gather directly from sources. Any changes made to the article after its initial publishing will be listed below.

Update, January 10, 2025, 11:50 AM ET: This story has been updated with details about the Switch 2’s alleged “C” button, along with the Joy-Con optical sensors. We also wrote about the announcement window and launch games. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/nintendo/did-the-nintendo-switch-2-leak-at-ces-everything-we-know-about-the-upcoming-console-110023591.html?src=rss

It’s CES week at Engadget, and our team has been on the ground in Las Vegas checking out tons of new devices, from the good to the weird to the ones that make you look like a sleep paralysis demon. Only a few gadgets from the show are actually available to buy, however, and even less are discounted. If you’re looking for a good sale right now, we’re back with another edition of our weekly deal roundup. This week’s highlights include a four-pack of AirTags for nearly $30 less than Apple’s standard selling price, deep discounts on our favorite microSD card and portable SSD, extended free trials for Audible Premium Plus and Apple TV+, and more. Here are the best tech deals from this week that you can still get today. 

• Apple AirTag (4-pack) for $70 at Amazon ($29 off MSRP): A new model may arrive later this year, but we still consider Apple’s current AirTag to be the best Bluetooth tracker for iPhone owners. While this discount on a four-pack isn’t quite an all-time low, it beats the bundle’s typical street price over the last few months by a few bucks. Also at Best Buy.

• Samsung Pro Plus (256GB) microSD card + USB reader for $20 at Amazon ($11 off): The Pro Plus is the top recommendation in our guide to the best microSD cards. This 256GB model has gone for a few bucks less in the past, but this deal ties the lowest price we’ve tracked for the bundle with a USB reader, which helps the card achieve its fastest possible speeds on compatible devices. Also at Samsung. 

• Crucial X9 Pro (1TB) portable SSD for $70 at Amazon ($50 off): The X9 Pro heads up our guide to the best portable SSDs: It’s rugged, super compact and consistently quick for common tasks. This is the largest discount we’ve seen for the 1TB model since late 2023. Also at Crucial and B&H. The 2TB model is a bit cheaper than usual at $120 as well.

Photo by Jeff Dunn / Engadget

• Apple Watch Series 10 (42mm) for $329 at Amazon ($69 off): The latest Apple Watch remains our pick for the best smartwatch. It’s a bit slimmer and lighter than past models, with mildly improved battery life, a rich wide-angle OLED display and the usual range of fitness-tracking features (blood oxygen monitoring aside). This deal on the 42mm GPS model has been live for a few weeks, but it still ties an all-time low. Also on Best Buy. The 46mm version is similarly discounted at $359.

• 8BitDo Ultimate Wired Controller for $27 at Amazon ($18 off, Prime only): This is a wired version of 8BitDo’s Ultimate Bluetooth Controller, we’ve previously praised for its durable Hall effect joysticks, comfy shape and useful software. (Though it’s somewhat on the smaller side.) This variant is made for Xbox and PC; the discount is within $2 of its all-time low. Both the black and white versions are on sale.

• Audible Premium Plus (3-month) for $3 at Amazon ($30 off, new and returning users only): Up until January 21, new and returning users can get three months of Audible Premium Plus for $3 total. Normally, the audiobook service costs $15 per month after a 30-day free trial. Premium Plus, as a refresher, is Audible’s highest tier: Beyond granting access to the full Audible Plus library, it lets you keep one title from a curated selection of audiobooks each month. Just note that your subscription will auto-renew by default if you decide to take the plunge.

Cherlynn Low for Engadget

• Corsair MP600 Mini (1TB) M.2 2230 SSD for $80 at Amazon ($30 off): The MP600 Mini is a small-size SSD you can pop into gaming handhelds like the Steam Deck or devices like Microsoft’s Surface notebooks. It’s not hugely far off for the M.2 2230 drive we recommend in our SSD buying guide, but more importantly it’s $20 cheaper as of this writing. This deal ties the 1TB model’s best price since March. Also at Corsair. 

• Beats Pill for $100 at Amazon ($50 off): The latest Beats Pill is a pick in our guide to the best Bluetooth speakers. As we note in our review, its audio performance can struggle at high volumes, but in general it pumps out strong bass without sounding imbalanced. It’s also water-resistant, with a 24-hour battery life rating and wired audio support via USB-C. This discount has been live for several weeks, but it ties the device’s lowest price to date. Also at Target, Best Buy and others.

• 8BitDo Retro Mechanical Keyboard (N Edition) for $70 at Best Buy ($30 off): While this NES-themed keyboard isn’t a formal pick in any of our buying guides, it’s still a nice value for those looking to give their desk a more vintage look. It’s comfy for typing and hot-swappable, though the default switches are fairly loud. This discount is $10 more than the lowest price we’ve seen, but it’s $20 off the device’s typical street price in recent months. The keyboard also comes with a fun joystick and a pair of “Super Buttons” that you can use for custom macros.

Will Lipman Photography for Engadget

• Anker Charger (140W, 4-port, PD 3.1) for $80 at Amazon ($10 off): Announced this week at CES, Anker’s latest wall charger includes three USB-C ports, one USB-A port, a foldable plug and a built-in display that can show the device’s power output and temperature at a glance. Those ports are located on the bottom, which might be awkward but should help keep the device more stable in an outlet. Anker says it can supply up to 140W of power, which is enough to quickly refill larger laptops, though you’ll have to avoid using multiple ports simultaneously to reach that maximum speed. Full disclosure: We haven’t tested this one for ourselves, but we’ve recommended several Anker charging devices in the past, and this early discount takes $10 off the new model’s MSRP. Just clip the on-page coupon to see the discount. Also at Anker.

• Apple TV+ (3-month) for free at Best Buy ($30 off, new and select returning users only): Apple’s streaming service is far from essential, but it does include plenty of exclusive shows worth checking out, from Severance and Slow Horses to Ted Lasso and Bad Sisters. If you’ve never subscribed but have been meaning to take a look, this extended free trial deal from Best Buy seems like a good opportunity. The service normally costs $10 per month after a seven-day trial. Again, remember that the subscription will auto-renew at full price unless you cancel. 

• Samsung The Frame (2024) 55-inch QLED TV for $868 at Woot ($630 off): Outside of an eBay coupon deal on Black Friday, this is the best price we’ve seen for the 55-inch version of Samsung’s stylish TV. It’s worth noting that the company unveiled a new “Frame Pro” model at CES this week: That one promises improved contrast and brightness, plus support for Samsung’s wireless breakout box, though it’ll almost certainly cost more whenever it’s launched. If you aren’t as demanding about picture quality but still want a TV that looks like a framed piece of art, there’s value to be had here. You’re still paying for the design first and foremost, but this is also one of the few TVs with a matte finish, which helps it ward off glare in a bright room.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/an-apple-airtags-four-pack-is-down-to-70-plus-the-rest-of-the-weeks-best-tech-deals-163020795.html?src=rss

It’s always gratifying when something promised at CES actually comes to market. That’s the case with the Pebble Flow electric trailer that my colleague Sam Rutherford checked out last year’s CES. I was able to see the final draft on the show floor this week and was adequately impressed. Like the (four!) other sustainable, electrified tiny homes we saw this year, it was shiny and luxe and decked out in wood tones, glass, metal and white polymers. 

The main features that drew us to the Flow last year remain intact: sleeping for four, a 45 kWh battery and a 1.1 kW solar panel, full kitchen and bath, a queen-size Murphy bed that transforms into a shared working space and a convertible dinette at the other end. The kitchen faucet even spins 180-degrees and out the window to let you do some washing up outside. 

The option for the Magic Pack add-on is still here. For an upcharge, it allows the Flow to self-park, automatically hitch itself and provide it’s own propulsion from dual motors so it’s not such a drag (literally) on the vehicle that’s towing it. 

One of the coolest features is still the glass separating the bathroom from the rest of the cabin. At the push of a button it goes from clear to opaque so you can have some privacy without having to kick your entire family out of the trailer. 

Amy Skorheim for Engadget

As for what’s new, those changes were partly sourced from prospective customers. One directive was “more windows,” so a skylight was added, along with a larger window at the back. The cupboards are now easier to access by flipping up instead of down. And the overall shape was refined to be more aerodynamic. 

Walking around in the Flow, everything felt soothing and clean. The bed was so plush I wanted to melt into it. The seating area was inviting and spacious. It was tough to leave this homey pod (especially considering how stupendously hard it is to just find a place to sit down at CES). I don’t have a vehicle that can pull a trailer, but I would love to park one of these in my backyard. Even if I never took it on the road, I’d happily hang out in its well-appointed comfort and even (reluctantly) give it up to guests when they visited.

Production on the Flow will begin early this year and shipping is scheduled for spring. The option without the motor assist and self-parking features will go for $109,500. If you want the Magic Pack package, that brings your price to $135,500. There’s also a “Founders Edition” with a limited-edition color scheme and a few more upgrades going for $175,000.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/evs/cess-pebble-flow-ev-trailer-gets-some-tweaks-ahead-of-its-spring-shipping-date-161502791.html?src=rss

There was no question that NVIDIA’s RTX 5000 GPUs would be one of the biggest stories at CES 2025, and I figured Intel and AMD to arrive with some new hardware of their own. But I didn’t expect that each of these companies would, in their own way, be putting the pedal to the metal when it comes to power for their chip designs. After all, we’ve spent the last few years covering AI PC CPUs that was targeting efficiency more than raw performance.

While NVIDIA RTX 5000 GPUs seem to deliver the performance leap we expected over its 2022-era cards, AMD is also redefining what’s possible for mobile workstations with its Ryzen AI Max chips, which combine powerful graphics with gobs of integrated memory. Intel isn’t sitting still either — it’s finally moving Arrow Lake into the high-performance and gaming arena with its Core Ultra 200HX chips, which can reach up to 24 cores and 5.5GHz speeds.

I’m not just talking about power in the sheer performance sense, either. NVIDIA’s $1,999 RTX 5090 requires a 1,000-watt power supply to function and uses up to 575 watts. The Ryzen AI Max chips, meanwhile, could eat up as much as 120-watts. Intel’s Core Ultra 200HX chips go as high as 120-watts. Clearly, none of this hardware is meant for anyone concerned about their energy bills or potential laptop battery life.

	RTX 5090	RTX 5080	RTX 5070 Ti	RTX 5070	RTX 4090
Architecture	Blackwell	Blackwell	Blackwell	Blackwell	Lovelace
CUDA cores	21,760	10,752	8,960	6,144	16,384
AI TOPS	3,352	1,801	1,406	988	1,321
Tensor cores	5th Gen	5th Gen	5th Gen	5th Gen	4th Gen
RT cores	4th Gen	4th Gen	4th Gen	4th Gen	3rd Gen
VRAM	32 GB GDDR7	16 GB GDDR7	16 GB GDDR7	12 GB GDDR7	24 GB GDDR6X
Memory bandwidth	1,792 GB/sec	960 GB/sec	896 GB/sec	672 GB/sec	1,008 GB/sec
TGP	575W	360W	300W	250W	450W

So what do you get for all of this energy consumption? AMD says the RTX 5090 will deliver roughly twice the performance of its previous flagship, the $1,499 RTX 4090. In a 4K Cyberpunk 2077 demo with full ray tracing, the 4090 hovered around 108 fps while the 5090 was reaching 240 fps. That frame count is a bit controversial, though, since the RTX 5090’s DLSS 4 AI upscaling generates three frames for every natively rendered frame. The end result may look smoother to most people, but some gamers might question the integrity of so-called false frames.

It’s those same AI-generated frames that allow NVIDIA to proclaim that the $549 RTX 5070 could be as powerful as the 4090. That may be true when it comes to pure frames-per-second count, but it certainly won’t be for rasterized performance without DLSS 4.

AMD’s Ryzen AI Max chips aren’t aiming for the same sort of graphical heights as NVIDIA’s new GPUs, but they’re still notable for the sheer amount of hardware they contain. The top-of-the-line Ryzen AI Max+ 395 sports 16 CPU Zen 5 cores, 50 TOPS of AI performance and 40 RDNA 3.5 GPU compute units. According to AMD, it should be on-part with Apple’s 14-core M4 Pro chip (and even faster in the Vray benchark), and it’s 2.6 times faster in 3D rendering than Intel’s Core Ultra 9 288V.

AMD

In an interview with AMD CVP and product CTO Joe Macri, he told Engadget that the success of Apple Silicon as a major reason why the Ryzen AI Max exists. “What Apple showed was consumers don’t care what’s inside the box,” he said. Macri later noted, “I always knew, because we were building APUs, and I’d been pushing for this big APU forever, that I could build, a system that was smaller, faster, and I could give much higher performance at the same power.”

AMD also briefly previewed its RDNA 4 graphics at CES, though at this point it’s clearly aiming for the mid-range and not NVIDIA’s RTX 5090. Notably, AMD will debut a new AI powered upscaling technology in RDNA 4 GPUs, FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 (FSR 4). That should finally give AMD a way to directly compete against NVIDA’s DLSS, which for years has looked better than earlier versions of FSR. The first RDNA 4 cards, the Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT, will arrive sometime in the first quarter.

Intel’s presence at CES 2024 was more muted than the competition, but loyalists will likely appreciate the new Core Ultra 200HX chips. While they scale back NPU performance from its recent AI PC hardware (12 TOPS down from 48 TOPS), the Core Ultra 9 285HX looks like a 24-core beast. It’ll be interesting to see how it competes AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 hardware, though it likely won’t stand a chance against the Ryzen AI Max when paired up with a discrete GPU.

Intel

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/nvidia-amd-and-intel-aimed-for-maximum-power-at-ces-2025-150038070.html?src=rss

At CES 2017, Faraday Future introduced its futuristic luxury EV, the FF 91. Seven years later, following repeated delays, bankruptcy, lawsuits and other controversies, the company has sold “15 or 16” FF 91s. Now the company is detailing its latest strategy shift, with a plan to sell cheap EVs under its new low-cost “FX” brand. FX CEO Max Ma came to CES, along with two prototype vehicles, to pitch the plan that he described as a “fresh start” for the embattled company.

As you might expect with Faraday, the exact details are somewhat hazy, but it involves sourcing parts from Chinese car-makers and bringing them to the US to produce “mass volume mainstream vehicles” with some of the premium touches Faraday is known for. “We want to take that $300,000-car expertise from a technology and features and performance [standpoint] into a $30,000, $40,000 car to try to upgrade the overall user experience,” Ma said during a briefing with Engadget. The first FX vehicle, the flagship product of the brand’s lineup, will be a minivan (or, as Ma referred to it, “an AI MPV”) called the “Super One.”

Faraday showed off two prototype minivans to demonstrate the concept. We were not permitted to take photos but the vehicles in the photo at the top of this post are the ones I saw.

One was meant to show the kind of premium in-cabin experience Faraday is envisioning for the low-cost car. It had two rows of white leather captain seats. The second-row seats had reclining footrests, heated seats and built-in massagers. There was also a small fridge underneath the center console for keeping drinks cold. The vehicle was missing its door handles and several other pieces. “Obviously, we’ll have door handles,” a Faraday rep assured us.

The second minivan was even less finished. The entire interior, including the dashboard and instrument cluster, was covered in black fabric held together with binder clips. But a Faraday rep took me and other reporters for a ride in it, driving in small, slow circles around a Las Vegas parking lot. Later, Faraday offered to let me take the minivan for a spin and I — apparently the “first lady” to pilot the vehicle — also drove it in slow circles around the parking lot. I’m not sure what I was supposed to get out of it, though, it felt like driving a minivan.

There are two other vehicles planned for the initial FX lineup, the FX 5 and FX 6, which were previously announced by the company. Faraday is aiming for a $20,000 – $30,000 price for the FX 5 and $30,000 – $50,000 for the FX 6. There aren’t many other details yet about either, though Faraday shared a teaser image of an FX 6 prototype, which it described as an “extra-large luxury AIEV.”

Faraday Future

Faraday claims it will start producing one of its planned vehicles later this year, with the first “pre-production” model rolling off the production line by the end of 2025, according to a timeline shared by Ma. That’s a lofty promise considering the company’s past history of mismanagement and delays. Faraday Future CEO Matthias Aydt also acknowledged that the company has yet to finalize its partnerships with the companies that will supply its parts. He also didn’t address how tariffs may affect those plans.

Ma said he understood the skepticism. “Basically, this is a kind of fresh start. We really want to demonstrate that through our dedication of hard work, we can achieve what we promised.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/evs/faraday-future-pitches-a-fresh-start-with-a-minivan-ev-prototype-at-ces-2025-010050422.html?src=rss