Two years ago, Tesla’s Optimus prototype was an underwhelming mess of exposed wires that could only operate in a carefully controlled stage presentation. Last night, Tesla’s “We, Robot” event featured much more advanced Optimus prototypes that could walk around without tethers and interact directly with partygoers. It was an impressive demonstration of the advancement of a technology Tesla’s Elon Musk said he thinks “will be the biggest product ever of…

On Thursday, AMD announced its new MI325X AI accelerator chip, which is set to roll out to data center customers in the fourth quarter of this year. At an event hosted in San Francisco, the company claimed the new chip offers “industry-leading” performance compared to Nvidia’s current H200 GPUs, which are widely used in data centers to power AI applications such as ChatGPT. With its new chip, AMD hopes to…

Intel’s 14th-generation desktop processors were a mild update on top of a mild update: a barely faster revision of the 13th-gen Core CPUs, which were themselves a modest tweak to 2021’s 12th-gen Core processors. The new Core Ultra CPUs (and their underlying architectural changes) were exclusive to laptops. Today, that changes: The Core Ultra 200S processors (codenamed Arrow Lake) will bring to desktops many of the changes Intel has made…

Apple TV+ will now be available as an add-on in Amazon Prime Video bundles, and users will be able to watch Apple TV+ films and shows in Prime Video apps and devices without downloading a separate app, the two companies announced. The offering from Amazon promises to give users the option to stick with a familiar app and manage payments through one billing system. Despite considerable media buzz and critical…

After a great event last month in San Jose, Ars is switching coasts for October and descending in force on our nation’s capital. If you’re on the East Coast and want to come hang out with Ars EIC Ken Fisher and me while we talk to some neat speakers and learn some stuff, then read on! Continuing our partnership with IBM, Ars presents “AI in DC: Privacy, Compliance, and Making…

Raspberry Pi owners have always been prone to coming up with elaborate, technically-interesting-but-practically-questionable projects, and Pi enthusiast Jeff Geerling has an exciting new submission to that canon: an old AMD Radeon RX 460 GPU, connected to the Raspberry Pi 5’s PCI Express bus and managing to play demanding titles like Doom 3 (2004) and Tux Racer at a crisp 4K resolution. Geerling’s maze of adapters, software tweaks, and workarounds is a testament…

Thunderbird’s Android app, which is actually the K-9 Mail project reborn, is almost out. You can check it out a bit early in a beta that will feel pretty robust to most users. Thunderbird, maintained by the Mozilla Foundation subsidiary MZLA, acquired the source code and naming rights to K-9 Mail, as announced in June 2022. The group also brought K-9 maintainer Christian Ketterer (or “cketti”) onto the project. Their…

In a rare event, Apple has rolled out substantial updates to the web-based iCloud interface meant to allow users to access Apple services like Mail and Photos when they’re away from a Mac, iPad, or iPhone. The flagship addition is dark mode; it “will automatically match your device settings with a Light Mode or Dark Mode color scheme,” Apple explains as part of the update. There is also now a…