General Javier Marcano Tábata was the commander of the inner circle of guards tasked with protecting Maduro. Read...

A day after AMD announced the Ryzen AI 400 (Gorgon Point) processor for laptops, PCWorld and a handful of other reporters sat down with Rahul Tikoo, senior vice president and general manager of the client business at AMD, to ask about AMD’s client processors: its mobile Ryzen processors, the Ryzen AI Max, desktop processors, and more. Below are excerpts of the interview, edited for space and clarity. Client played a very minimal role in Lisa Su’s keynote last night. What does that mean? Tikoo: It was supposed to be about a 75-minute keynote, and client was about 15 of the 75 minutes, right? So if that gives you a clue, it’s roughly 25% to 30% of the time, and client business is roughly 30% of our revenue right now, right? I mean, so it’s an important part of our revenue profile, and it’s very, very important to us. This is just my characterization, but it appears that the Ryzen AI 400 is a modest upgrade to the Ryzen AI 300, which was a very good chip. How do you see it? I mean Qualcomm, kudos to them for continuing to fight the good fight. But you know, Arm is a big challenge in this marketplace, just because of the application compatibility, I feel really good about our [Gorgon Point] portfolio. Of course, we haven’t had a chance to get our hands on the competitive products yet, but everything that we heard yesterday did not surprise us, because, you know, we have our own market intelligence and what’s happening and what the competitive landscape look like, and so we didn’t see any surprises there. Based on that, what I would say is we have a pretty good head [of steam]. You had a certain number of design wins heading into the Ryzen AI 300, and a number of wins with the Ryzen AI 400. If you can’t give us specifics, which are larger? It’s about the same. What we’re going to see is about between the Ryzen AI 300 and 400 product, and the Ryzen Halo product, we have roughly a little over 250 designs that will be in the market. That’s all three chips. All three chips, yeah, roughly a little over 250 designs, give or take, that will be in the marketplace by the middle of this year, right? Because we just have notebooks that are coming out this month. Desktops will come out in early Q2. [The additional] Strix Halo is also coming out this month. Pro is March. So let’s just call it, the first three-to-four months of the year are going to be busy for us launching the portfolio. You mentioned the AI 400 desktop. It’s going to be a socketed AM5 part? Yeah. It’s a socketed AM5 part. I think the interesting thing about the desktop Gorgon part is that it’s going to be the first Copilot+ part, so the first part with a 60 TOPS NPU. We’ve been working with Microsoft and our partners on optimizing for desktop, because you can imagine desktop has a different set of challenges, right? I think we have a lot of opportunity in that space, and we weren’t there two years ago. We weren’t playing as heavily. We didn’t have enough of a portfolio last year, we had a really reasonable portfolio. This year, we’re going to have even better portfolio. What we’re seeing is a lot of interest in mobile on desktop, even small desktops and even in large desktops, they’re actually putting mobile on because the socket infrastructure is cheaper on mobile. Even traditional desktops? Okay, yeah, even traditional desktops, we’re seeing mobile on desktop now. It’s more relevant in the smaller form factors, like, you know, you have the one liter boxes, the eight liter boxes, the small form factor. So that’s where it’s more relevant, right? But we’ve seen all kinds of desktops use mobile parts. There was a time a few years back where mobile shifted into two categories, high performance and thin-and-light, right? And it’s sort of the same inflection that you see in desktops. Let’s talk about what the prices of RAM and storage are doing, and the effects they’ll have. What are your customers telling you about how they’re going to configure their systems? Are they going to continue on pushing upwards to 2TB SSDs or 16GB of RAM? It depends on the market segment. If you think about creators, they want all the capabilities they can get. Let’s talk about a car company. They’re designing a car. They’re running wind tunnel simulations on a car. Are they going to sweat a 20% or 30% increase in price and say, well, you know, my seven-year research on the car is going to have to be slower? No, they’re going to invest. Now, consumers, on the other hand, you and I, you know, when we sit at home and we’re using the laptop for basic internet, web browsing, or email, we’re going to have to make a choice, right? Do we really need the highest end components in the laptop, or not? Now, we do know there’s a floor. A floor has been set where people like 1TB SSDs are the norm. Nobody buys anything smaller, you know? I mean, even phones, nobody tends to buy anything smaller than a certain capacity, right? So, I think consumers will have to make a choice based on that. But I do expect gamers will continue to invest. Creators will continue to invest. There’s a rumor that AMD was going to launch a Ryzen X3DX2, which didn’t materialize. What’s going on there? X3D dual-cache, right? Stay tuned. Stay tuned. I just came back from Intel, where they planned to invest heavily into the handheld space, which you’ve dominated. They claim that you’re selling “ancient silicon.” What’s your strategy going forward in the handheld space? We’re very committed to the handheld [space]. I mean, we created the space, so it’s a space that we’re very committed to. Here’s the beauty, though, of AMD and why we have a much higher chance of success in that space: because of our console business, or how we develop semi-custom silicon for the console business. You can’t just use mobile silicon and put it in the handheld. You can, but the handheld or the consoles, they care about high graphics. They don’t care about as much compute, and they don’t care about the I/O. So, if you’re putting a notebook chip like Panther Lake in there, and you’re not purpose building it, you have all this baggage that Panther Lake is going to carry around their chiplet architecture. You know, the interconnects of the chiplet architecture, the I/O that they have in there. I mean, it’s a Swiss army knife, and it’s good for certain things. We can do that, too. In fact, we do that in the handheld space in some segments. But when you think about the core of the handheld space, they want purpose-designed, purpose-built chips that have great graphics technology, great software like FSR, integration with game developers on Xbox, PlayStation, etc. We can have high battery life, good fidelity of content, high frame rate, and we do that very well. Intel believes their low-power E-cores give them an advantage, as they extend battery life. Does AMD have a response to that? We haven’t seen any issues there. I’ll tell you this, Intel does play games sometimes, and it’s very interesting. We had a customer. They said the same thing. They’re like, hey, I can get more battery life with Lunar Lake against the 300 series. So, we’re like, okay, let’s do a quick experiment. And we did this in the lab. And actually, Qualcomm did a video on this too, because we didn’t want to go out and do a video and everything. Qualcomm did a video on this: Lunar Lake has great battery life when measured with MobileMark with the power connected. As soon as you go in DC Mode, battery life climbs and performance drops. The Core i7 performs like a Core i3. So, the E-cores are very good for efficiency, very bad for performance. We balance the two, and we’re already making those choices for our customers and saying, hey, you don’t have to worry about it. Can you talk about the desktop X3D processor and the direction that it’s going? It’s a very critical part of our portfolio. I mean, the channel market overall. If you look at IDC, the DIY market is about 30, 35 million units. And give or take, we’re close to 60 points of share in that market, right? We’re pretty high. And then as you look at X3D, which is the top of that market, we have over 80 points of share in that market, and it’s driven by the fact that there’s really nothing else that comes even close in terms of performance. And then with the new X3D part that we just announced, the new part to the stack that, with that boost clock you see on it, it now separates us even more, right? We used to be about 20% better now, or 27% better, when you look at average game performance, and so we’re very committed to that space. That customer base is very demanding, as you can imagine, right? And they’re very vocal. Do you have anything to say about AMD’s ability to supply chips to its customers? We’re using the biggest and the best supplier in the world, TSMC. And our Gorgon portfolio is based on four nanometer technology and is a fully ramped, highly yielding, very proven technology. So, we don’t have the same challenges our competition has where they’re bringing up a new technology. We feel very good about it. No challenges. Threadripper, X3D, and the Ryzen AI Max: these are all innovative though niche products. Does AMD remain committed to all three? We are very committed to those spaces. We’re very, very committed to those spaces. How do you see the Ryzen AI Max going forward? First of all, we will continue to invest in that space. That’s an important space for us. Stay tuned. There will be more announcements in that space over the course of this year. Our focus has been in ramping developers and gamers around that product. You know, thin-and-light gaming is a space where that product has done well. Creative users is another space that product has done well, and now AI. Read...

Chamberlain, best known for its smart garage door openers, is making its most ambitious move into home security with the launch of its first smart lock. Unveiled at CES, the myQ Secure View 3-in-1 Smart Lock combines a smart lock, a 2K HDR video doorbell, and a camera into a single device, expanding the company’s home-access ambitions from the garage to the front door. The $279.99 device offers five methods of entry: fingerprint recognition, facial recognition, a PIN code, smartphone app control, and a physical key. It’s designed to work within the myQ ecosystem, which includes garage door controllers, indoor and outdoor cameras, and accessories like the myQ Smart Garage Video Keypad. The company hasn’t disclosed a BHMA or ANSI grade for he lock. According to Chamberlain, the lock is among the fastest on the market, with an unlock time of just two seconds. It also includes AI-powered detection that identifies people, vehicles, packages, and animals, and can trigger automatic actions like locking or unlocking the door based on whether a recognized individual is detected. The myQ Secure View 3-in-1 Smart Lock combines a smart lock, a 2K HDR video doorbell, and a camera into a single device, Chamberlain The device operates in temperatures ranging from -4°F to 140°F and is powered by a rechargeable lithium battery that lasts up to six months. A fully charged backup battery (sold separately) can be swapped in to avoid downtime. For homes without a wired chime, Chamberlain also offers an optional myQ Chime accessory. The lock is available to myQ users starting January 6, with general availability on January 13 via myQ.com and select retailers. While the product represents a significant step forward for Chamberlain’s home security lineup, it arrives against the backdrop of growing consumer skepticism about the company’s business practices. In recent years, Chamberlain has been criticized for locking key features behind subscription paywalls after product launch, and for disabling support for popular third-party platforms. In late 2023, the company blocked access to its API for Homebridge and Home Assistant, effectively cutting off users who had relied on those platforms to integrate Chamberlain devices with Apple HomeKit and other smart home ecosystems. Chamberlain framed the move as a necessary step to protect performance and security, but it left many users frustrated and without the integrations they had come to depend on. Even before that, the company had phased out Google Assistant integration and stopped selling its own HomeKit-enabling accessory, the myQ Home Bridge, though it still supports devices that are already in use. Chamberlain has not said whether the new Secure View Smart Lock will require a subscription to access features like video storage or advanced automation. That detail may be crucial for consumers already wary of the company’s history of rolling out fees post-purchase. Whether the Secure View lock will overcome that history remains to be seen. But with deep integration into Chamberlain’s expanding myQ ecosystem, it may appeal to existing users looking for a unified approach to home access control. This story is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best smart locks. Read...

Intel’s Core Ultra Series 3 chips, aka “Panther Lake,” have entered the market, backed by dozens of PC makers. “We’ve beeen out there shaping what it means for fundamental computing, said Jim Johnson, senior vice president and general manager of the Intel Client Computing Group, in a launch event at CES 2026. Lip-Bu Tan, Intel’s chief executive, said he was “proud” to highlight that Intel has shipped its first Intel 18A processors, the production technology upon which Panther Lake is built upon. The technology uses RibbonFET gate-all-around to manage current and energy efficiency, while PowerVia is Intel’s name for backside power delivery, enabling 15 percent better performance per watt. What is Intel’s Core Ultra 300 ‘Panther Lake’? Intel showed off what was simply known as “Panther Lake” in October, when Intel announced the Panther Lake technology along with some of its implementations. Intel’s Core Ultra Series 3 chips return to the era of performance cores (P-cores), efficiency cores (E-cores,) and low-power efficiency cores (LP E-cores) of Intel’s Core Ultra 100 chip, aka Meteor Lake. Those are paired with an NPU capable of 50 TOPS worth of AI processing as well as Intel’s Xe3 GPU, which should improve Intel’s 3D capabilities. Foundry / Mark Hachman Intel said then that Panther Lake’s single-threaded performance should be 10 percent higher than Lunar Lake at the same power. Compared to both Lunar Lake and Meteor Lake, Intel’s Panther Lake offers more than 50 percent better multithreaded performance, Intel said in October. But the power should be 10 percent less than Lunar Lake. Anecdotally, Intel representatives have been characterizing Panther Lake as the performance of Arrow Lake — an architecture which struggled on the desktop but performed surprisingly well in Arrow Lake laptops — with the power consumption of Lunar Lake. Panther Lake consists of three different organizations of the P-cores, E-cores, and LP-cores: An 8-core chip, with 4 P-cores, 4 low-power (LP) E-cores; 4 Xe3 GPU cores and 4 ray-tracing units; and memory interfaces to either 6800 MT/s LPDDR5x or 6400 MT/s DDR5. A 16-core chip, with 4 P-cores, 8 E-cores, and 4 LP E-cores; 4 Xe3 GPU cores and 4 ray-tracing units; and memory interfaces to either 8533 MTs/ LPDDR5x or 7200 MT/s DDR5. A 16-core chip, with 4 P-cores, 8 E-cores, and 4 LP E-cores, 12 Xe3 GPU cores and 12 ray-tracing units; and memory interfaces to 9600MT/s LPDDR5x, period. At CES 2026, Johnson said that the Panther Lake delivers about 60 percent more power than the Core Ultra 200 series, or Lunar Lake, using the Cinebench 2024 mujlticore benchmark. Depending upon the banchmark, Intel cut the power by about 2.8X. Foundry / Mark Hachman Somewhat like AMD’s Ryzen AI Max (“Strix Halo”) or the Ryzen 9000X3D family, both of which concentrate large amounts of cache memory to improve performance, it’s the final “12Xe” configuration that will form the premium lineup on many laptops. The GPU will be called the Intel Arc B390 graphics, said Intel’s Dan Rogers, the vice president in charge of PC products at Intel. On average, gaming performance will be about 73 percent more than Lunar Lake, Rogers said. The B390 GPU can also take advantage of frame generation to improve frame rates further, he said. XeSS3 can render three AI-generated frames for every GPU-rendered frame, Rogers said. How good does Intel think Panther Lake is? Intel will launchn an entire handheld platform, based on Panther Lake, later this year, Rogers said, taking on AMD’s leadership in the space, Rogers said. Read...

US Attorney General Pam Bondi has said Maduro was brought to the US to `face justice`. Some experts have concerns. Read...

AMD is launching the Ryzen AI 400 at CES 2026 as the next chip in the company’s CPU roadmap, with what appears to be a similar goal as the current Ryzen AI 300: Aim high on CPU performance, but with sufficient AI TOPS and battery life to attract mainstream laptop buyers, too. AMD said that the Ryzen AI 400 chips will power both Copilot+ laptops as well as “socketed desktops,” bringing their AI capabilities to desktop PCs as well. AMD also announced “Pro” configurations of most of the chips, designed to power enterprise PCs. AMD executives didn’t refer to the AI 400 by its expected codename, Gorgon Point, but the chip’s specs matched up with a leak inadvertently published last year: up to 12 cores and 24 threads using the Zen 5 architecture, with a boost clock that can hit 5.2GHz. The Ryzen AI 400 will achieve 60 AI TOPS, AMD promises, with 16 RDNA 3.5 GPU cores. On paper, that’s very similar to the current Ryzen AI 300 chip, which in PCWorld testing of the Ryzen AI 300 emerged as a surprisingly powerful competitor to the Intel Core Ultra 200 “Lunar Lake” as well as the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite: somewhat comparable in battery life, but at the top of the heap in CPU benchmarks. Rahul Tikoo, senior vice president and general manager of AMD’s client business, said in a call with reporters that AMD aimed for “leadership performance across the CPU, the GPU, and the NPU,” plus “multi-day mobility” as well as “AI performance to enable the next wave of experiences.” The new Ryzen AI 400 series has higher CPU and GPU boost clocks, a higher supported memory speed, and extra TOPS. Still, it’s close enough to the Ryzen AI 300 that reporters asked if it was just “rebadged” silicon. It’s not, according to Rakesh Anigundi, director of product management at AMD, though improved performance arrives via improved firmware as well as manufacturing changes. The process technology used in the AI 400 is 4nm, or basically the same process technology used in the Ryzen AI 300. AMD is launching a total of seven Ryzen AI 400-series chips, ranging from a specialized Ryzen AI 9 HX 475 processor at the top of the stack, designed for gaming, down to the Ryzen AI 5 430 at the low end. The cores will be a mix of the full-fledged Zen 5 cores as well as the more efficient Zen 5c cores, in various configurations differentiated by core count, clock speed, and the number of graphics CUs as well as their speed. All of the Ryzen AI 400 chips tolerate anywhere from 15 to 54 watts of thermal design power, or TDP. AMD’s new Ryzen AI 400 chips include substantially more offerings than the original AI 300 series, which didn’t reveal the base clock speed at launch. It’s also interesting that all of the processors run at 2.0 GHz, but boost to different speeds. And yes, the Ryzen AI 9 HX 475 and 470 are nearly identical, save for the difference in NPU TOPS: 60 versus 55 TOPS. Ryzen AI 9 HX 475: 12 cores/ 24 threads, 2.0GHZ base clock/5.2GHz boost clock; Radeon 890M/16 CUs/3.1GHz Ryzen AI 9 HX 470: 12 cores/ 24 threads, 2.0GHZ base clock/5.2GHz boost clock; Radeon 890M/16 CUs/3.1GHz Ryzen AI 9 465: 10 cores/ 20 threads, 2.0GHZ base clock/5.0GHz boost clock; Radeon 880M/12 CUs/2.9GHz Ryzen AI 7 450: 8 cores/ 16 threads, 2.0GHZ base clock/5.1GHz boost clock; Radeon 860M/8 CUs/3.1GHz Ryzen AI 7 445: 6 cores/ 12 threads, 2.0GHZ base clock/4.6GHz boost clock; Radeon 840M/4 CUs/2.9GHz Ryzen AI 5 435: 6 cores/ 12 threads, 2.0GHZ base clock/4.5GHz boost clock; Radeon 840M/4 CUs/2.8GHz Ryzen AI 5 430: 4 cores/ 8 threads, 2.0GHZ base clock/4.5GHz boost clock; Radeon 840M/4 CUs/2.8GHz The question is whether the Ryzen AI 400 will remain at the top of the heap in terms of performance. In this, AMD was somewhat vague, claiming that in “responsive multitasking,” such as running a Microsoft Teams call with background blur enabled, the Ryzen AI 400 was 1.3X faster than the competition, or 1.7X faster in content creation. In this, AMD can only compare to the silicon its competitors have shipped; in this case, it refers to Intel’s Lunar Lake or Core Ultra 200 silicon. Head-to-head comparisons will have to wait until both companies ship their silicon in early 2026; AMD is claiming that Asus, Acer, Dell, HP and Lenovo, among others, have signed up. AMD said laptops from its customers would be available beginning in the first quarter, from thin-and-light laptops to gaming and content-creation PCs to, yes, desktops. Still, AMD’s benchmarks are impressive, both in content creation and in gaming. In gaming, however, AMD isn’t saying whether the games listed are technically “playable” (over 60 frames per second, generally) or whether any frame enhancement technologies were used. In a sense, however, its a win for gamers just to be able play some of these games on integrated graphics. (AMD’s configuration notes say that the Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 was used, with its integrated Radeon 890M GPU.) Clearly, the increased clock speed and NPU TOPS will be of benefit to consumers. However, the support for faster DRAM — 8533 MT/s — will be dependent on PC makers actually finding and buying that high-speed DRAM to add to customer devices. What’s not clear is whether AMD will be able to increase its market share in mobile, as it has done in desktops with its superb Ryzen X3D parts. Traditionally, AMD has held on to about 20 percent of the mobile market, according to analysts. “With this range of processors, OEMs can deliver AI PCs that are tailored to your specific need, while offering the best performance and robust on-device AI,” AMD’s Tikoo said. Read...

Google thinks AI can solve the problem of needing to wade through complicated TV settings menus. With a forthcoming update to its Gemini AI assistant on Google TV, you’ll be able to adjust TV settings with voice commands. For instance, you can say things like “the screen is too dim” to increase brightness, or “the dialog is lost” to turn on subtitles. That’s one of several new AI features that Google plans to roll out to its TV platform in the months ahead. The company also announced more image-driven responses to basic queries, a “Deep Dives” feature that provides a narrated summary of complex topics, and some new ways to look up and interact with Google Photos libraries. Google says these features will arrive on “select TCL devices” first, followed by other Google TV devices in the coming months. Tweaking TV settings The big question with Gemini’s settings controls will be how deep they’ll go. If all you can do is control basic things like brightness or volume, that’ll only be of marginal use. On the other hand, imagine asking to turn off motion smoothing on your TV (or your parents’ TV), or to turn off the ACR features that monitor what you watch and then sell the data to marketers. I’ll be asking Google about these possibilities and others in an upcoming interview. Other AI features Google The other Gemini TV features that Google is announcing at CES 2026 range from useful to gimmicky. If you ask what to watch next based on a show you liked, for instance, Google will now show cover art for its recommendations instead of just answering with text. (It’s unclear, however, if you’ll be able to click on the art to load the recommendations directly.) Google Gemini will also provide visual responses for more general queries, so you can ask about things like Van Gogh paintings or the Northern Lights and get images in return. For more complex queries, Gemini will also show example follow-up questions to dive deeper into the topic. Google Gemini will be able look up pictures from Google Photos in response to voice commands (something the previous Google Assistant was already able to do) and turn images into slideshows on the fly. Google seems to think you’ll want to create content on your TV as well, as it’s adding a way to make AI-generated images and videos with its Nano Banana and Veo AI models. Some of this stuff feels a bit forced, as if there’s a mandate to stuff AI features onto TVs regardless of whether users are asking for it. But Google does believe that the TV will evolve from just a place to watch videos into an AI-driven hub for information. I still have my doubts about that, but at least it’ll make controlling your TV settings a little easier in the meantime. Read...

MMH, a privately run patient portal used by some general practices, detected the breach in the early hours of 31 December 2025. Read...

Poutasi was director-general of health from 1995 to 2006, and briefly chaired Health New Zealand in 2023/4. Read...

Poutasi was made a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2020 for her services to education and the state. Read...