Today might be the coming-out party for Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chips and a sizeable number of laptop partners, but Intel wants to remind you that it will reveal its next-gen Core Ultra mobile chips, code-named "Lunar Lake," in roughly a week's time. Intel executives, in what was clearly an effort to distract from the launch of a number of PCs powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite, said that Lunar Lake is currently in production and is on track to ship in the third quarter. Intel's next desktop processor, "Arrow Lake," is on track to ship during the fourth quarter of 2024. Microsoft launched its Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 with Snapdragon X Elite chips inside at a launch in Redmond, Wash., alongside several laptop vendors using Qualcomm's chip running on Windows on Arm, including Lenovo, Dell, and Acer. In response, Intel executives added to what we already know about Lunar Lake on Monday.

AMD today launched its most recent generation of business processors for business PCs, the Ryzen Pro 8000 series, for both desktop and laptops. For now, AMD will be the only CPU vendor offering AI-powered NPUs in business desktop PCs. AMD's launch arrives on the heels of Intel's 14th-gen vPro platform, which also offers desktop and mobile parts. The difference is that Intel launched its vPro refresh based upon the "Raptor Lake Refresh" architecture, which lacks AI; AMD's Ryzen Pro 8000 series is relatively consistent across both its mobile and desktop offerings. However, not every new Ryzen Pro 8000 mobile or desktop chip includes AI support.

AMD may have just launched the Ryzen 8000 series of mobile processors, but company executives confirmed that its next mobile processor, Strix Point, will make the leap to the next-generation Zen 5 architecture. The disclosure was made by Dr. Lisa Su, AMD's chief executive officer, during the company's fourth-quarter 2023 earnings report. They reported a net income of 667 million, up 3,076 percent from 21 million in profits a year ago. Revenue climbed 10 percent to 6.168 billion. AMD launched its Ryzen 8000 mobile lineup in December and Su said Tuesday that the chips will begin shipping in notebooks in February.

AMD was the first company to deliver x86 laptop chips with NPUs for AI acceleration last year -- now, at CES 2024 it's doing the same for desktops. The company's new Ryzen 8000G processors, which debuted today in Las Vegas (but have already been leaked by retailers), are once again NPU pioneers among x86 desktop chips. And on top of that, the company claims its built-in Radeon 700M graphics are the fastest ever seen on a desktop chip. While the Ryzen 8000G chips aren't AMD's most powerful desktop offerings -- the Ryzen 7700X and above all offer higher clock speeds, core counts and onboard cache -- AMD says the new processors could be compelling options for gamers trying to build capable systems on a budget. The fastest model, the Ryzen 7 329 8700G, is an eight-core chip running between 4.2GHz and 5.1GHz, sporting Radeon 780M graphics.

It's not just designed to speed up machine learning tasks on your phone, either. Osterloh said they've also redesigned the image signal processor, or ISP …

Rick Osterloh casually dropped his laptop onto the couch and leaned back, satisfied. It's not a mic, but the effect is about the same. Google's chief of hardware had just shown me a demo of the company's latest feature: computational processing for video that will debut on the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro. The feature was only possible with Google's own mobile processor, which it's announcing today. He's understandably proud and excited to share the news.

As Wednesday draws to a close, so does a grand social experiment: the first-ever online-only CES. In the end, the experience was invariably different. We particularly missed being able to wander The Sands and have learn about smaller, up-and-coming startups. And if seeing is believing, the oddest entries at the show remained locked behind our computer screen, with no chance of getting hands-on time. And yet, we were kept busy this week. Most of the usual tech giants had news to share, and many of those were able to show us their wares in person, ahead of the three-day gadget extravaganza.

The world of computer chips just got a wake-up call. In a recent jam-packed tech keynote, Microsoft unveiled the next generation of its popular Surface Pro line of PCs. The dual announcement was odd. But even odder is what's powering the Surface Pro X: the Microsoft SQ1, a central processing unit that's an entirely different species of computer chip than the typical power-hungry Intel processor found in the vast majority of Windows machines today. This is the first Surface Pro that packs a chip optimized for mobile devices, which Microsoft spent three years designing with smartphone chipmaker Qualcomm.

David Burke says the next wave of Android smartphones will tackle one of the agonies of modern existence: Copying text from one app and pasting into another. Burke is the Google vice president of engineering who oversees Android. This week, at the annual Google I/O conference in Silicon Valley, he unveiled Android O, the latest incarnation of the world's most popular mobile operating system, and part of his pitch was that was that new OS could remove the extreme pain from cut and paste. Android O will automatically recognize and highlight names, places, and addresses in email messages and other text, he said, so you can copy and paste them without struggling to drag those horribly small and ridiculously uncooperative little arrow thingies from word to word. As seen on the big screen behind him, Burke double-tapped on the words "Old Coffee House" in an email, and Android highlighted all three of those words--no more and no less. That feat drew a very real round of applause from the hundreds of coders and other tech heads gathered at the Shoreline Amphitheater.