Category: Technology

While it’s nice to see desktop support in AMD’s new Ryzen AI 400 chips, demanding gamers and enthusiasts will likely be more intrigued by the company’s next batch of Ryzen AI Max+ chips, as well as the new Ryzen 7 9850X3D with 3D V-Cache. The former will make its way into small desktops and a handful of workhorse laptops, while the latter is another option for gamers who want the speed bump of 3D V-cache without shelling out for the $700 9950X3D. 

Last year, AMD debuted its Ryzen AI Max chips as a way to create a single piece of silicon with powerful CPU cores, GPU cores, NPUs and integrated memory, similar to Apple’s home-brewed chips. At the time, AMD VP Joe Macri also noted that the existence of Apple Silicon helped make the Ryzen AI Max chips possible.

“Many people in the PC industry said, well, if you want graphics, it’s gotta be discrete graphics because otherwise people will think it’s bad graphics,” Macri said at last year’s CES. “What Apple showed was consumers don’t care what’s inside the box. They actually care what the what the box looks like. They care about the screen, the keyboard, the mouse. They care about what it does.”

AMD Ryzen AI Max+ chip family

At CES this year, AMD is unveiled the 12-core Ryzen AI Max+ 392 and eight-core Ryzen AI Max+ 388. Both chips feature boost speeds up to 5GHz, 50 TOPS NPUs and GPUs capable of 60 TFLOPs. We’ve seen the earlier Ryzen AI Max chips in the Framework Desktop and the ROG Flow Z13, and we were generally impressed with its performance. For small systems, it was powerful enough that we really didn’t miss having dedicated GPUs.

AMD Ryzen 7 9000X3D

As for the Ryzen 7 9850X3D, it’s an 8-core chip that can reach up to 5.6GHz boost speeds with 104MB of combined L2 and L3 cache. Like all of AMD’s X3D chips, it uses 3D V-cache technology to vertically stack additional cache memory. In comparison, the standard 9850HX chip has 76MB of L2 and L3 cache.

AMD says the new Ryzen AI Max+ chips and the 9850X3D will ship in the first quarter. There’s no pricing information on the latter, yet, but recent leaked listings suggest it may go for around $200. Rumors also point to a massive dual-cache (192MB!) 9950X3D2 chip coming soon.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/amds-new-ryzen-ai-max-chips-and-ryzen-7-9850x3d-court-desktop-enthusiasts-at-ces-2026-033000587.html?src=rss 

You’ll be able to watch more live sports programming on Peacock that supports Dolby Vision and Atmos starting this year. At the moment, the only live sports offering you can enjoy with Atmos on the service is Sunday Night Football. Now, Dolby Laboratories has announced at CES that Peacock is expanding the availability of Dolby Vision and Atmos across live sports over the coming year. Peacock will add support for both technologies to Sunday Night Football, NBA and MLB live sporting events that the streaming service will offer its subscribers.

“Our partnership with Dolby ensures that whether our subscribers are streaming a thrilling playoff game, the latest Universal blockbuster, or a critically acclaimed Peacock Original, they’re experiencing it exactly as creators intended — with breathtaking picture and immersive sound that brings every moment to life,” said David Bohunek, Senior Vice President of Global Video Engineering at NBCUniversal.

The companies have also announced that Peacock will start supporting Dolby Vision 2 and Dolby AC-4 starting later this year. Dolby Laboratories called Vision 2 “a groundbreaking evolution of its industry-leading picture quality innovation” when it announced the technology at IFA 2025. It was designed with today’s TV technology in mind, and it uses AI to automatically adjust your TV based on what you’re watching and where you’re watching it. Meanwhile, AC-4 is a new audio format that Dolby says can deliver the highest audio quality “at a much lower bandwidth than other formats.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/peacock-is-expanding-dolby-vision-and-atmos-availability-for-live-sports-023000794.html?src=rss 

“Relaxing” isn’t a word anyone is likely to associate with CES. If anything, it is the antithesis of CES, an exhausting and wildly overstimulating marathon event that takes place in the already exhausting and wildly overstimulating Las Vegas. But a demo of Ambient’s bedside device, Dreamie, ahead of its appearance at CES-adjacent Pepcom had me properly lulled and ready to go right back to bed. Dreamie is a smart sunrise alarm clock and nighttime wind-down device that has a built-in podcast player, a catalog of green, pink and brown noise sound masks, guided breathing programs, contactless motion sensors to provide insights into your sleep habits, dynamic lighting with simulated sunrise wake-ups and Bluetooth connectivity for headphones.

But most importantly for anyone trying to avoid using their phone immediately before bed, it’s a standalone system in which all controls, features and scheduling options as well as data storage are on-device. And there’s no subscription. 

The goal of Dreamie is “to help you separate from your phone while providing a lot of the conveniences that you would normally have,” said CEO and co-founder Adrian Canoso. You can set multiple alarms on different schedules, access soothing content to fall asleep to and customize how gradual your sunrise wakeup is. There are environmental sensors to clue you in on the humidity, temperature and lighting conditions over the course of the night, to give you a better idea of how these things may be affecting your sleep. 

Dreamie is a relatively small device compared to other sunrise-style clocks, with a truncated pill-shaped body and a sleek circular touchscreen. Around the display is a hidden dial for volume control, and it feels great to rotate, with just the right amount of resistance. There’s also a touch strip on top of the device to easily adjust the dimness of the light by dragging your finger along it. From the display, you can even change the direction the light is pointing so you don’t blast yourself (or your partner) with it when your eyes aren’t ready, casting the light off to the back instead. 

Dreamie’s brightness controls

Its 20-LED array can go from a soft, warm orangey glow to cool and bright blue-white, and certain programs, like the aurora borealis soundscape, will trigger other colors of the rainbow, throwing soothing green, blue and magenta. More impressive is the rich sound that comes from its 50 millimeter speaker. Dreamie has a 360-degree speaker grille on the bottom of the device that sends sound in all directions to create more immersive ambient sound. 

When a speaker is pointing toward you, “it’s almost like a laser beam coming at you,” which isn’t exactly the most relaxing experience, explained Canoso, who previously worked in industrial design and robotics, and before that, as a studio recording engineer. “[Dreamie] projects the sound all the way around… So when you put it next to you on a night table, it sounds more diffused. It’s not the loudest speaker out there because we’ve optimized it for rich sound quality at lower volumes. We don’t need it loud. We just need it to sound good.” 

And sound good, it does. It’s seriously got me thinking I may finally have found the thing to replace the Philips Wake-Up Light I’ve been clinging to for close to 10 years now that has decent lighting but absolutely abysmal sound quality.

Dreamie, which costs $250, recently started shipping after a successful crowdfunding campaign, and certain features — including podcasts and sleep insights — haven’t launched just yet (though I did get to see the podcast library during the demonstration, so it is a real thing, and it’s expected to roll out later this month). Those and other future features will arrive via free over-the-air updates. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/home/smart-home/this-tabletop-sleep-device-and-sunrise-alarm-clock-aims-to-help-you-put-your-phone-away-before-bed-004751464.html?src=rss 

After years of testing its humanoid robot (and forcing it to dance), Boston Dynamics’ Atlas is entering production. The robotics company says the final product version of the robot is being built now, and the first companies that will receive deployments are Hyundai, Boston Dynamics’ majority shareholder, and Google DeepMind, the firm’s newly minted AI partner.

This final enterprise version of Atlas “can perform a wide array of industrial tasks,” according to Boston Dynamics, and is specifically designed with consistency and reliability in mind. Atlas can work autonomously, via a teleoperator or with “a tablet steering interface,” and the robot is both strong and durable. Boston Dynamics says Atlas has a reach of up to 7.5 feet, the ability to lift 110 pounds and can operate at temperatures ranging from minus 4 to 104 degrees Fahrenheit. “This is the best robot we have ever built,” Boston Dynamics CEO Robert Playter said in the Atlas announcement. “Atlas is going to revolutionize the way industry works, and it marks the first step toward a long-term goal we have dreamed about since we were children.” 

Boston Dynamics has been publicly demoing its work on humanoid robots since at least 2011, when it first debuted Atlas as a DARPA project. Since then, the robot has gone through multiple prototypes and revisions, most notably switching from a hydraulic design to an all-electric design in 2024. Later that year, Boston Dynamics demonstrated the robot’s ability to manipulate car parts, which appears to be one of the first ways Atlas will be put to work.

Hyundai plans to use Atlas in its car plants in 2028, focused on tasks like parts sequencing. In 2030, the car maker hopes to have the robot’s responsibilities “extend to component assembly, and over time, Atlas will also take on tasks involving repetitive motions, heavy loads, and other complex operations,” Hyundai says. Google DeepMind, meanwhile, is receiving Atlas robots so it can work on integrating its Gemini Robotics AI foundation models into Boston Dynamics’ system.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/boston-dynamics-announces-production-ready-version-of-atlas-robot-at-ces-2026-234047772.html?src=rss 

A couple years ago ASUS made its first dual-screen laptop in the ZenBook Duo. Now at CES 2026, the company has taken that idea and branched off in a somewhat unexpected way with the ROG Zephyrus Duo, which might just be the world’s first true dual-screen gaming laptop.

Unlike a more traditional productivity notebook with two built-in displays, the concept of a dual-screen gaming notebook doesn’t translate quite as naturally because powering two screens comes with a performance hit. Plus, in the heat of battle, it’s not like you have a lot of opportunity to utilize that second monitor. But if you view this Zephyrus Duo as more of an all-purpose portable content creation and gaming station, things begin to make a lot more sense. 

Both of Zephyrus Duo’s 16-inch Nebula OLED panels have strong specs including support for HDR with up to 1,100 nits of peak brightness, NVIDIA G-Sync, stylus integration and a very strong Delta-E (which measures color accuracy) of less than one. Performance also looks solid with ASUS offering the latest Core Ultra processors from Intel and up to an NVIDIA RTX 5090 GPU. Sure, with a TDP of 135 watts, the Zephyrus Duo won’t be quite as punchy as a comparable single-screened 16-inch gaming notebook, but those won’t be nearly as adaptable as the ROG either. 

Just like the Zenbook Duo, the Zephyrus Duo comes with a detachable wireless keyboard that can be charged up magnetically. This allows users to set up the laptop in all sorts of positions, which are enhanced thanks to a built-in kickstand. The one people will use the most is probably the stacked arrangement with one display above the other. However, you can also keep the Duo and clamshell mode, slide the keyboard forward for drawing, lay it down flat on a table or even put it into tent mode and game on it. Though even ASUS admits that may not be super practical as apps will need to specifically support that use case. Though at the very least, you can mirror your screen for a friend on the other side of a desk/table.

The ROG Zephyrus Duo comes with a built-in kickstand which makes it easy to set it up in all sorts of different positions, even if it is a bit heavy.

Now I will admit that after messing around with the Zephyrus Duo in person, it is a bit ungainly due to its weight of 6.28 pounds. But ASUS managed to do a good job of keeping it relatively thin (0.77 inches) without skimping on features like sound thanks to the Duo’s six-speaker stereo system and cooling which features a vapor chamber and a liquid metal thermal material. You also get a surprising amount of ports including multiple USB-C with Thunderbolt 4, USB-A, HDMI 2.1 and a full-size SD card slot, plus a decently large 90Whr battery. 

The one important thing we don’t know yet though is how much it will cost, particularly because this thing almost certainly won’t be cheap (I’m guessing a starting price of around $2,500). A dual-screen gaming laptop might not make a lot of sense, but I appreciate how ambitious ASUS is being with the ROG Zephyrus Duo and I’m looking forward to testing it out sometime later this year. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/laptops/the-asus-rog-zephyrus-duo-is-big-weird-and-kind-of-awesome-000000156.html?src=rss 

Who among us hasn’t looked at the ASUS ROG Flow Z13 and said, “That’s great and all, but what if it had more Hideo Kojima?” Well, our cries have been heard. Behold, the ROG Flow Z13-KJP, a collaboration between ASUS and Kojima Productions.

On the inside, this model is no different than the standard version we reviewed last May. The device takes a Surface Pro-like form factor and beefs it up into something that’s more like a gaming laptop. (Ergo, ASUS’s pitch of the product as a “gaming tablet.”)

But on the outside, you’ll find a design “for Ludens who dare.” The Death Stranding influence is evident, but you may pick up on some Metal Gear-adjacent touches as well. The tablet’s gold color, symbols and integrated carbon fiber conjure Kojima’s Ludens mascot. This variant is slightly larger than the standard one, most noticeably in the detachable keyboard.

ROG Flow Z13-KJP

There will also be matching accessories available, including a mouse, case, headphones and a desk mat. Depending on your region, those may or may not be bundled with the device. (We’ll update this story when we find out more.)

Fortunately, once the design novelty wears off, you’re left with a fairly powerful gaming machine. The Copilot PC has a 13.4-inch IPS touchscreen with a 180Hz refresh rate and 500 nits of brightness. Its port selection is surprisingly generous: two USB 4 Type-C ports, one USB-A port, HDMI 2.1, 3.5mm audio and a microSD slot. The Ryzen AI Max+ 395 chip inside has integrated graphics that punch above what you’d expect. You can configure it with up to 128GB LPDDR5X 8000 RAM.

More Kojima than you ever expected from a “gaming tablet”

ASUS hasn’t yet revealed pricing or availability for the ROG Flow Z13-KJP. You can read more about the standard version in Sam Rutherford’s review.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/ces-asus-made-a-special-hideo-kojima-version-of-the-rog-flow-z13-000000768.html?src=rss 

Intel turned up to CES 2026 to herald the birth of the Core Ultra Series 3, a new range of chips offering “exceptional performance.” It says the mobile processors, formerly known as Panther Lake, deliver great graphics and battery life alongside the aforementioned grunt. And that, for the first time, the silicon has been certified for embedded and industrial use cases, including robotics and smart cities. But, like so many stories about Intel these days, the launch is loaded with so much subtext you’ll need a copy of Cliffs Notes to understand it.

On the face of it, these are just some snappy flagship chips, available in Core Ultra 7 and 9 ranges as well as Core X7 and X9, which ship with 12 Xe graphics cores over the usual four. Almost all of them offer 16 total cores and threads, and all bar two have total NPU performance of 50 PTOPS.

Image of the Core Ultra Series 3

These chips are going to be famous for two key reasons: First, Intel claims they’re the most advanced chips ever manufactured in the US. Second, they’re the first to be made using Intel’s long awaited 18A process, which has dogged the company for several years. 18A was a key plank of former CEO Pat Gelsinger’s rescue plan to restore Intel to the top of the chip world. But sadly that comeback didn’t come fast enough to prevent the CEO from being (unfairly, in my mind) deposed at the end of 2024. It didn’t help that, for all of the money spent on 18A, as recently as August 2025, the company was reportedly still suffering from low yields and high defect rates.

18A is short for 18 Angstrom, a measurement that’s far smaller than the nanometers we currently use to denote transistor size in chips. 18 Angstrom is roughly equivalent to 1.8 nanometers, putting it on the same rough level as the most advanced manufacturing process — N2 — available at TSMC in Taiwan. At CES, Intel’s new CEO Lip Bu-Tan said the company was now ahead of schedule for ramping production on 18A, which could mark an important shift in the global chip market. 

You should expect to see these chips show up in laptops from all the usual suspects, including HP, Acer, Lenovo, Dell, Samsung and the rest across this year. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/ces-2026-intel-hopes-its-core-ultra-series-3-chips-are-the-start-of-a-comeback-000155611.html?src=rss 

Jensen Huang took to the CES stage on Monday to share the latest from NVIDIA, and while the presentation was more a refresher of technologies the company has been working on for the past few years, there were a couple of notable announcements.

NVIDIA announced Alpamayo, a family of open-source reasoning models designed to guide autonomous vehicles through difficult driving situations. The centerpiece of the release is Alpamayo 1 , a 10-billion parameter chain-of-thought system NVIDIA says is capable of approaching driving more like a human being would. The model works by breaking down unexpected driving situations into a smaller set of problems before finding the safest path forward. At each step of the way, the model can explain its reasoning.

A sister model named AlpaSim allows developers to do closed-loop training for driving scenarios that are rarely encountered in real life. Huang said the 2025 Mercedes Benz CLA will be the first vehicle to ship with NVIDIA’s entire AV stack, including Alpamayo. “Our vision is that someday, every single car, every single truck, will be autonomous,” Huang said.

Following the Alpamayo announcements, a pair of BD-1 droids from Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order joined Huang on stage. We saw one join the executive at last year’s CES. After that, Huang turned to Vera Rubin. NVIDIA first announced the GPU architecture in 2024, and now the company has begun production on a super computer that makes use of the new tech. One Vera CPU has 88 custom Olympus cores and 1.5TB of system memory for a total of 227 billion transistors. Meanwhile, one Rubin GPU features 336 billion transistors. Each Vera Rubin supercomputer has a pair of both components.

For those hoping for some gaming-related announcements, Huang didn’t have anything to say about NVIDIA’s consumer GPUs, but we may get something later during CES.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/everything-nvidia-announced-at-ces-2026-225653684.html?src=rss