When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. The GMKtec NucBox K17 combines a Core Ultra 5 CPU, Arc 130V graphics, and a fast SSD into a gaming-suitable mini PC with great performance. Two HDMI 2.1 outputs, one of which supports 8K at 60Hz The NucBox K17 brings Intel's Lunar Lake technology to the under-$700 price bracket, provided the mini-PC is on offer. The Arc 130V graphics deliver adequate performance for an integrated GPU, the SSD is fast, and the range of ports is extensive. The limitations lie in the integrated 16GB of RAM and the processor's eight threads.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. The Geekom IT13 Max is an unusually powerful workstation in a mini format. Although the Core Ultra 9 185H is no longer part of the current processor generation, it still delivers plenty of computing power. In 2026, mini-PCs no longer need to be limited to office work and streaming. Models featuring Ryzen AI or Core Ultra now offer enough performance for many tasks that were previously reserved for high-performance desktop PCs. The Geekom IT13 Max relies less on a new generation of processors and more on high-performance hardware centered on Intel's Core Ultra 9 185H. Nevertheless, the computer remains compact on the desk.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. The GMKtec EVO-T2S packs Intel's new Panther Lake CPU, complete with an Arc B390 graphics unit, into a compact mini-PC case. We tested the computer with 64GB of RAM. The GMKtec EVO-T2S demonstrates what Intel's new Panther Lake platform is capable of. The CPU, graphics unit, and memory work well together, and even games run smoothly at reduced settings.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP have yielded unprecedented performances for zero-shot image classification, yet their generalization capability may still be seriously challenged when confronted to domain shifts.

Should You Leave Your Phone Charging Overnight? It used to be common wisdom that leaving your phone charging overnight degrades the battery. But handset design has evolved to mitigate the harm caused by constant charging. You may have heard that leaving your smartphone charging overnight--either plugged in or atop a wireless charger --can damage your battery. But is it actually harmful or dangerous to do that?

Could AI Data Centers Be Moved to Outer Space? Massive data centers for generative AI are bad for the Earth. Data centers are being built at a frantic pace all over the world, driven by the AI boom. These facilities consume staggering amounts of electricity. By 2028, AI servers alone may use as much energy as 22 percent of US households.

Large language model (LLM) queries are predominantly processed by frontier models in centralized cloud infrastructure. Rapidly growing demand strains this paradigm, and cloud providers struggle to scale infrastructure at pace. Two advances enable us to rethink this paradigm: small LMs (<=20B active parameters) now achieve competitive performance to frontier models on many tasks, and local accelerators (e.g., Apple M4 Max) run these models at interactive latencies. This raises the question: can local inference viably redistribute demand from centralized infrastructure? Answering this requires measuring whether local LMs can accurately answer real-world queries and whether they can do so efficiently enough to be practical on power-constrained devices (i.e., laptops). We propose intelligence per watt (IPW), task accuracy divided by unit of power, as a metric for assessing capability and efficiency of local inference across model-accelerator pairs. We conduct a large-scale empirical study across 20+ state-of-the-art local LMs, 8 accelerators, and a representative subset of LLM traffic: 1M real-world single-turn chat and reasoning queries. For each query, we measure accuracy, energy, latency, and power. Our analysis reveals $3$ findings. First, local LMs can accurately answer 88.7% of single-turn chat and reasoning queries with accuracy varying by domain. Second, from 2023-2025, IPW improved 5.3x and local query coverage rose from 23.2% to 71.3%. Third, local accelerators achieve at least 1.4x lower IPW than cloud accelerators running identical models, revealing significant headroom for optimization. These findings demonstrate that local inference can meaningfully redistribute demand from centralized infrastructure, with IPW serving as the critical metric for tracking this transition. We release our IPW profiling harness for systematic intelligence-per-watt benchmarking.

These innovative pavings convert the kinetic energy of footsteps into clean electric energy. We walk here, we walk there, we walk everywhere. Maybe you're headed to work or to lunch in a busy city. You're expending energy, and the exercise is good for you. But what if, on top of that, we could recapture all that freely supplied energy and convert it to usable electricity?

Amazon Prime Day 2025 is fast approaching, and the sale is already underway on some items. To help you find the best early Prime Day deals, we've scoured Amazon for deals on the tech we love. As always, every deal we recommend here is on a product our reviewers have personally tested and approved--you won't find any shoddy dupes or mystery brands here. This year Prime Day runs for four days, July 8-11, rather than the usual two. That means there's twice as long to suffer save. Be sure to read our explainer on all the Amazon Prime perks you should be taking advantage of.