A woman and her relatives look at her home, which was damaged during a night of Russian missile and drone strikes, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Novi Petrivtsi, outside Kyiv, on Saturday. Microchip manufacturers Intel, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Texas Instruments were accused in a series of lawsuits of failing to keep their technology out of Russian-made weapons used to kill and wound civilians in Ukraine. Those companies -- along with a company owned by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway -- demonstrated willful ignorance" as third parties resold restricted chips to Russia to power drones and missiles in violation of U.S. sanctions, according to one of the five suits, filed Wednesday in state court in Texas. The lawsuits, filed on behalf of dozens of Ukrainian civilians by Mikal Watts and prominent law firm Baker & Hostetler, cite five attacks between 2023 and 2025 that killed dozens of people. One attack allegedly involved Iranian-made drones with components associated with Intel and AMD, while the others involved Russian-made KH-101 cruise missiles and Iskander ballistic missiles.

In recent years, reflecting on the past 12 months has seemed to bring back nothing but woe. Surprisingly, though, 2024 saw a higher number of candidates for good things in tech than bad. In spite of the continued AI onslaught, widespread dissatisfaction and worldwide political conflict, there were some bright spots this year that put smiles on faces and took minds off things. As we get ready to start saying "2025" when making plans, here's hoping that reminiscing about the best things in tech in 2024 can help us remember joyful times. You likely don't know the name LocalThunk, which is the handle of a Canadian game developer who has yet to share his real identity.

Qualcomm's exclusivity period on Copilot PCs is winding down. Microsoft confirmed on Tuesday that Intel's new 200V processors and AMD's Ryzen AI 300 series chips will add Copilot AI capabilities beginning in November. Copilot PCs include features like Live Captions (real-time subtitle generation, including translations), Cocreator in Paint (prompt-based image generation), Windows Studio Effects image editing (background blurring, eye contact adjustment and auto-framing) and AI tools in Photos. Of particular interest to gamers is Auto Super Resolution, an Nvidia DLSS competitor that upscales graphical resolution and refresh rates in real time without stunting performance. The AI PCs will also eventually include Recall, Microsoft's searchable timeline of PC activity.

At Computex 2024, everyone was talking about AI again. Intel's Lunar Lake hardware and AMD's Strix Point chips will deliver faster AI performance, with upgraded neural processing units (NPUs) that meet and exceed Microsoft's Copilot PC requirements. But the big promise of Qualcomm's soon-to-be-released line of Snapdragon X Elite-powered laptops is the huge battery life numbers we're being promised over Intel and AMD-powered laptops. "We know we haven't necessarily been the highest battery life design point," said Intel's Dan Rogers in an interview with PCWorld's Mark Hachman at Computex. Intel is talking like it's solved the problem -- but we haven't heard any concrete numbers yet. Now, the race is on.

For years, AMD and especially Intel have dominated the PC industry, even after Qualcomm introduced its first Snapdragon processors for laptops. Now, Microsoft may be giving pride of place to Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite processor with an upcoming Windows feature -- and leaving AMD and Intel out in the cold. In May, Microsoft will host its annual Build conference in Seattle. Microsoft will open that conference with a presentation from chief executive Satya Nadella to "share our AI vision across hardware and software," according to Microsoft. That presentation is expected to introduce the Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 5 for consumers, both featuring Qualcomm's surprisingly powerful Snapdragon X Elite processor, based on the Arm architecture.

Laptop hardware has come a long way in recent years, with the most expensive models featuring CPU and GPU specs similar to what you'd expect from a beefy gaming desktop PC. If a laptop isn't aimed squarely at gamers, odds are it lacks a discrete GPU for gaming. With an integrated GPU (iGPU), you'll never get to explore futuristic ray traced cityscapes or the ultra-detailed surface of an alien world, but that doesn't mean your computer time has to be totally about productivity. If you temper your expectations, you can still get some gaming done with integrated graphics. Looking to pick up a gaming laptop?