"The company best known for powering the AI boom is coming for the PC," reports Axios.

Nvidia's CEO unveiled a new ARM-based "N1X processor made alongside Microsoft," reports CNBC, that "will be incorporated into a new RTX Spark superchip, debuting in the fall on a fresh line of Windows PCs from Microsoft, Dell, HP, ASUS, Lenovo and MSI."

More details from Engadget: It was only a matter of time before NVIDIA released a powerful system-on-a-chip (SOC) to take on AMD's Ryzen AI Max and Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon X2 chips. At Computex today, NVIDIA unveiled the RTX Spark, a "superchip" meant to give both laptops and small desktops fast AI and graphics performance...

The company says it offers 1 petaflop of AI computing power, and that it has 6,144 Blackwell RTX cores and 20 Mediatek Arm CPU cores. NVIDIA claims it's similar to the RTX 5070 laptop GPU but with much lower power draw. RTX Spark also has an NPU that's fast enough to be part of Microsoft's Copilot+ initiative, which requires a 40 TOPS NPU, but NVIDIA says it's mainly touting the tensor cores as part of the chip's Blackwell GPU for AI performance. RTX Spark's GPU can directly draw on the chip's large pool of unified memory, which can span from 16GB to 128GB, and the chip itself can use anywhere from single-digit wattage up to 80W...

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang positions RTX Spark as a complete reinvention of the PC, eventually turning them more into devices meant for AI agents than manual human input... NVIDIA has been working together with Microsoft for "several years" while designing the RTX Spark, according to NVIDIA representatives... In a blog post provided to media, Microsoft head of Windows and devices, Pavan Davuluri, noted that the company optimized Windows 11's workload profile scheduling for the RTX Spark. "Whether you're checking your email or running an agent locally to debug code, the Windows scheduler on RTX Spark will ensure you get the best performance and efficiency out of your CPU," he wrote.

Dell's stock skyrocketed 32.76% on Friday, "its best day ever," reports CNBC, after Dell "reported its fastest pace for revenue growth for any period since returning to the public market in 2018..."

"Shares are now up 234% in 2026." Dell, which reported first-quarter earnings after the bell on Thursday, saw a flood of artificial intelligence-related demand for its servers, which contain graphics processing units from companies like Nvidia. Quarterly revenue soared nearly 88% year over year, with AI server revenue alone increasing 757% from a year earlier to $16.1 billion...

Ben Reitzes, head of technology research at [research/investment firm] Melius, said he'd "never seen anything like" Dell's latest quarter. "They beat every line in the model, so this wasn't just AI, it was great execution," Reitzes told CNBC's "Squawk on the Street." "They beat whatever we would've thought...."

Morgan Stanley wrote that while they expected a clean beat and raise this quarter, they're "eating our humble pie" off the back of Dell's results. "We got this one wrong, and our model/PT are under review," the analysts wrote. "This was — across the board — one of the most impressive quarters we've seen in our time covering Hardware, especially in the context of what is happening across the component universe."

Nvidia is retiring its classic Control Panel for GeForce Game Ready and Studio Driver users after 20 years, as it pushes users to a newer, more unified "NVIDIA" app. Longtime Slashdot reader BrendaEM first shared the news, commenting: "Nvidia seems to no long want you to have control over your own video card that you paid your hard-earned money for? WTF!?" VideoCardz.com reports: Existing Control Panel installs will remain on users' systems. NVIDIA says the old panel will only disappear after a clean driver installation. Users who still need it can continue to download it from the Microsoft Store, but NVIDIA will no longer add new features, fixes, or other changes.

The retirement currently applies to Game Ready and Studio Drivers. NVIDIA RTX PRO users will continue to receive Control Panel support until the company moves professional features to the NVIDIA app. For GeForce users, NVIDIA says the app now includes the modern functionality previously available through Control Panel. [...] The classic panel is therefore not being removed from every system overnight. It is being moved into maintenance mode for GeForce users...

Google is giving its iconic search box its first major redesign since 2001. The new design incorporates, you guessed it, artificial intelligence, "getting bigger and more interactive so that people can ask even longer questions and upload photographs and videos into queries," reports the New York Times. "In addition, people can ask follow-up questions with a chatbot on Google's main search page." From the report: The company will also offer digital assistants, known as agents, to automate searches so that someone who may be apartment hunting can be notified of a new listing without opening a real estate site like Zillow. The search features will be powered by a new artificial intelligence model, Gemini 3.5 Flash. Google said the model had improved on creating software code and performing autonomous tasks, worked faster and was less expensive to run than comparable models.

[...] Google is also bringing one of A.I.'s biggest breakthroughs -- software coding -- to search. When people research complex topics like astrophysics, Gemini can build interactive graphics and simulations behind the scenes to provide a deeper answer than its previous listing of websites. Google said it was introducing an alternative to the agents powered by Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex. Called Gemini Spark, the service is embedded in Gmail, Docs and other Google products, where it can turn meeting notes spread across emails and chats into a single document. It can also read and draft emails. "The open web is on its way out," says Richard Kramer, a financial analyst with Arete Research. "With A.I., Google is reducing everyone to raw data providers."

AMD says FSR 4.1 will finally bring its newer hardware-accelerated upscaling technology to older Radeon GPUs. "The rollout will begin in July with RDNA3- and 3.5-based GPUs, which include the Radeon RX 7000 series, as well as integrated GPUs like the Radeon 890M and Radeon 8060S," reports Ars Technica. "In 'early 2027,' support will also be extended to the RDNA2 architecture, which includes the Radeon RX 6000 series, integrated GPUs like the Radeon 680M, and the Steam Deck's GPU. This would also open the door to supporting FSR 4 on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S, all of which also use RDNA2-based GPUs." From the report: [AMD Computing and Graphics SVP Jack Huynh's] short video presentation didn't get into performance comparisons, but did mention that AMD had to work to get FSR 4's superior hardware-backed upscaling working on its older graphics architectures. RDNA4 includes AI accelerators that support the FP8 data format in the hardware, and porting FSR 4 to older GPUs meant getting it running on the integer-based INT8 hardware in the RDNA3 and RDNA2-based GPUs.

This may mean that FSR 4.1 running on an RDNA3 or RDNA2-based GPU may come with a larger performance hit relative to RDNA4 cards, or that image quality may differ slightly. Modders have already worked to get FSR4 working on INT8-supporting GPUs, and the older GPUs reportedly see a 10 to 20 percent performance hit relative to FSR 3.1 running on the same hardware. AMD's official implementation may or may not improve on these numbers.

[...] Any games that support FSR 4 should be able to support FSR 4.1 running on Radeon 7000-series cards; users will presumably be able to install a driver update in July that enables the new feature. Games that support the older FSR 3.1 can also be forced to use FSR 4 in the Radeon graphics driver.

Nvidia's real AI moat isn't "a piece of hardware," writes Wired's Sheon Han. It's CUDA: a mature, deeply optimized software ecosystem that keeps machine-learning workloads tied to Nvidia GPUs. An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: What sounds like a chemical compound banned by the FDA may be the one true moat in AI. CUDA technically stands for Compute Unified Device Architecture, but much like laser or scuba, no one bothers to expand the acronym; we just say "KOO-duh." So what is this all-important treasure good for? If forced to give a one-word answer: parallelization. Here's a simple example. Let's say we task a machine with filling out a 9x9 multiplication table. Using a computer with a single core, all 81 operations are executed dutifully one by one. But a GPU with nine cores can assign tasks so that each core takes a different column -- one from 1x1 to 1x9, another from 2x1 to 2x9, and so on -- for a ninefold speed gain. Modern GPUs can be even cleverer. For example, if programmed to recognize commutativity -- 7x9 = 9x7 -- they can avoid duplicate work, reducing 81 operations to 45, nearly halving the workload. When a single training run costs a hundred million dollars, every optimization counts.

Nvidia's GPUs were originally built to render graphics for video games. In the early 2000s, a Stanford PhD student named Ian Buck, who first got into GPUs as a gamer, realized their architecture could be repurposed for general high-performance computing. He created a programming language called Brook, was hired by Nvidia, and, with John Nickolls, led the development of CUDA. If AI ushers in the age of a permanent white-collar underclass and autonomous weapons, just know that it would all be because someone somewhere playing Doom thought a demon's scrotum should jiggle at 60 frames per second. CUDA is not a programming language in itself but a "platform." I use that weasel word because, not unlike how The New York Times is a newspaper that's also a gaming company, CUDA has, over the years, become a nested bundle of software libraries for AI. Each function shaves nanoseconds off single mathematical operations -- added up, they make GPUs, in industry parlance, go brrr.

A modern graphics card is not just a circuit board crammed with chips and memory and fans. It's an elaborate confection of cache hierarchies and specialized units called "tensor cores" and "streaming multiprocessors." In that sense, what chip companies sell is like a professional kitchen, and more cores are akin to more grilling stations. But even a kitchen with 30 grilling stations won't run any faster without a capable head chef deftly assigning tasks -- as CUDA does for GPU cores. To extend the metaphor, hand-tuned CUDA libraries optimized for one matrix operation are the equivalent of kitchen tools designed for a single job and nothing more -- a cherry pitter, a shrimp deveiner -- which are indulgences for home cooks but not if you have 10,000 shrimp guts to yank out. Which brings us back to DeepSeek. Its engineers went below this already deep layer of abstraction to work directly in PTX, a kind of assembly language for Nvidia GPUs. Let's say the task is peeling garlic. An unoptimized GPU would go: "Peel the skin with your fingernails." CUDA can instruct: "Smash the clove with the flat of a knife." PTX lets you dictate every sub-instruction: "Lift the blade 2.35 inches above the cutting board, make it parallel to the clove's equator, and strike downward with your palm at a force of 36.2 newtons." "You can begin to see why CUDA is so valuable to Nvidia -- and so hard for anyone else to touch," writes Han. "Tuning GPU performance is a gnarly problem. You can't just conscript some tender-footed undergrad on Market Street, hand them a Claude Max plan, and expect them to hack GPU kernels. Writing at this level is a grindsome enterprise -- unless you're a cracker-jack programmer at DeepSeek..."

Han goes on to argue that rivals like AMD and Intel offer competitive specs on paper, but their software stacks have struggled with bugs, compatibility issues, and weak adoption. As a result, Nvidia has built an Apple-like moat around AI computing, leaving the industry dependent on its expensive hardware.

In honor of World Password Day, Kaspersky researchers revisited their study on the crackability of real-world passwords and found that 60% of MD5-hashed passwords could be cracked in under an hour with a single Nvidia RTX 5090, and 48% could be cracked in under a minute. "The bottom line is that passwords protected only by fast hashing algorithms such as MD5 are no longer safe if attackers obtain them in a data breach," reports The Register. From the report: Much of the reason password hashes have become so easy to crack is password predictability. Per Kaspersky, its analysis of more than 200 million exposed passwords revealed common patterns that attackers can use to optimize cracking algorithms, significantly reducing the time needed to guess the character combinations that grant access to target accounts.

In case you're wondering whether there's a trend to compare this to, Kaspersky ran a prior iteration of this study in 2024, and bad news: Passwords are actually a bit easier to crack in 2026 than they were a couple of years ago. Not by much, mind you -- only a few percent -- but it's still a move in the wrong direction. "Attackers owe this boost in speed to graphics processors, which grow more powerful every year," Kaspersky explained. "Unfortunately, passwords remain as weak as ever." "This World Password Day, the main message ought not to be to the users, who often have no choice but to use passwords anyway, but to the sites and providers that are requiring them to do so," said senior IEEE member and University of Nottingham cybersecurity professor Steven Furnell. His advice is that providers need to modernize their login systems and enforce stronger protections, because users are often stuck with whatever security options they're given.

jeditobe writes: Developers of ReactOS told Phoronix that the project has introduced a unified BootCD, replacing its previously separate installation media and LiveCD images. The new image combines the traditional text-mode installer with a LiveCD mode in a single medium. Within this unified BootCD, the updated LiveCD mode now includes an option to launch a first-stage GUI installer. The graphical interface is intended to make installation more approachable for new users compared to the long-standing text-based setup process.

In a separate development, the project has also merged a new ATA storage driver that has been in progress since early 2024. The plug-and-play aware storage stack supports SATA, PATA, ATAPI, AHCI, and even SCSI devices, potentially expanding the range of hardware on which ReactOS can successfully boot.

Following recent improvements to graphics driver support, the project continues to make incremental progress across core subsystems, though its long development timeline remains a point of discussion. Will these usability and hardware compatibility improvements be enough to broaden ReactOS adoption beyond its current niche?

Please note that all new features are not present in version 0.4.15 and are available for testing in the latest nightly test builds.

Intel has launched a new budget-focused Core Series 3 processor line for lower-cost laptops -- "Intel's response to budget CPUs that are appearing in laptops like the Apple MacBook Neo," writes PCWorld's Mark Hachman. From the report: Intel unexpectedly launched the Core Series 3, based on its excellent "Panther Lake" (Core Ultra Series 3) architecture and 18A manufacturing, for devices for home consumers and small business on Thursday. Intel announced that a number of partners will launch laptops based upon the chip, including Acer, Asus, HP, Lenovo, and others. Although those laptops will be available beginning today, a number of them will begin shipping later this year, the partners said.

All of it -- from the specifications down to the messaging -- feels extremely aimed at trimming the fat and delivering to users just what they'll want. Intel's new Core Series 3 family just includes two "Cougar Cove" performance cores and four low-power efficiency "Darkmont" cores, with two Xe graphics cores on top of it. Intel isn't really worrying about AI, with an NPU capable of just 17 TOPS, though the company claims the CPU, NPU, and GPU combined reach 40 TOPS of performance. Yes, laptops will use pricey DDR5 memory, but at the lower end: just DDR5-6400 speeds. Support for three external displays will be included, though, maximizing multiple screens for maximum productivity. Intel used the term "all day battery life" without elaboration.

[...] Intel Core Series 3 delivers up to 47 percent better single-thread performance, up to 41 percent better multi thread performance, and up to 2.8x better GPU AI performance, Intel said. Compared against Intel's older Core 7 150U, Intel is saying that the new chip will outperform it by 2.1 times in content-creation and 2.7 times the AI performance. [...] We still don't know what Intel will charge for the chip, nor do we know what you'll be able to buy a Core Series 3 laptop for.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: As the Trump administration seeks to fill a national shortage of air traffic controllers, officials are targeting a new talent pool: gamers. The Federal Aviation Administration on Friday is making a recruiting push aimed at avid players of video games, as the agency strives to fill thousands of vacancies that lawmakers have said leave the traveling public less safe. In a new YouTube ad, the agency is using flashy graphics and the promise of six-figure salaries to convince video game enthusiasts to apply their trigger fingers in service of air safety.

In recent years, video gamers have emerged as a target demographic for recruiters at a number of federal agencies, including the military and the Department of Homeland Security. They are welcomed for their hand-eye coordination, quick decision-making in complex environments and ability to remain focused on screens for hours on end. "To reach the next generation of air traffic controllers, we need to adapt," Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a statement. Focusing recruiting efforts on gamers, he added, "taps into a growing demographic of young adults who have many of the hard skills it takes to be a successful controller."

[...] The F.A.A. plans to begin prioritizing recruiting gamers over more traditional avenues like college fairs, officials said, pointing out that only 25 percent of controllers have a traditional college degree, while the vast majority appear to have logged hours gaming. During the presidential transition in 2024, incoming Trump administration officials polled about 250 new air traffic academy graduates over six weeks. Only two of those interviewed were not gamers, according to F.A.A. officials [...]. Students who failed out of the training academy were not similarly queried, officials said, though they have plans to conduct more comprehensive exit interviews in the future. Still, the overwhelming presence of gaming habits among graduates tracked with what they were hearing anecdotally from controllers already certified to work in towers and other air traffic facilities, the officials said, many of whom liked to play video games during breaks in their shifts.

Nvidia has begun rolling out a beta feature that automatically compiles game shaders while a PC is idle. It won't eliminate shader compilation the first time a game runs, but Ars Technica reports it could help reduce those repeated wait times. From the report: Nvidia's new Auto Shader Compilation system promises to "reduc[e] the frequency of game runtime compilation after driver updates" for users running Nvidia's GeForce Game Ready Driver 595.97 WHQL or later. When the feature is active and your machine is idle, the app will automatically start rebuilding DirectX drivers for your games so they're all set to roll the next time they launch.

While the feature defaults to being turned off when the Nvidia App is first downloaded, users can activate it by going to the Graphics Tab > Global Settings > Shader Cache. There, they can set aside disk space for precompiled shaders and decide how many system resources the compilation process should use. App users can also manually force shader recompilation through the app rather than waiting for the machine to go idle.

Unfortunately, Nvidia warns that users will still have to generate shaders in-game after downloading a title for the first time. The Auto Shader Compiler system only generates the new shaders needed after subsequent driver updates following that first run of a new title.

In many rural areas, America's online shoppers can wait half a week or more for deliveries. But Amazon started a $4 billion "rural delivery push" last year, reports Bloomberg, and has now cut delivery times to under 24 hours for 1 in 5 rural and small-town households, with 48-hour delivery to 62% of rural households. The payoff could be huge. Rural shoppers in the US collectively spend $1 trillion a year on clothing, electronics, household goods and other items, representing about 20% of retail purchases excluding cars and gasoline, according to Morgan Stanley. Amazon aims to recondition those shoppers to expect quick delivery, which would play to its strengths and make the company top-of-mind for online purchases... "Rural America is often overlooked," said Sky Canaves, an analyst at EMarketer Inc. who tracks online sales. "This is the opportunity Amazon is trying to seize because e-commerce growth is getting harder to come by...."

Amazon's rural push will require a lot more rural business owners willing to make deliveries... Today, Amazon delivers more parcels overall than UPS and FedEx, which are both shedding workers and shrinking their delivery networks, including in rural areas. By picking up the slack, Amazon is expected to become the largest parcel carrier in the US — surpassing the postal service — in 2028, according to the shipping software company Pitney Bowes. Amazon currently delivers two of three orders itself. For rural shoppers, the most visible change will be fewer brown UPS trucks, fewer packages delivered by mail carriers and more small business owners pulling up in their minivans.
Amazon's relationship with America's postal service "has become rocky following a dispute over contract terms," notes the Wall Street Journal. But they also share an interesting calculation by Marc Wulfraat, president of MWPVL International, a supply-chain consultancy monitoring the e-commerce company's logistics network. . At Amazon's current pace of constructing 40 to 50 new delivery hubs each year, he estimates Amazon will be able to ship packages to every single U.S. ZIP Code within four years.

Linux gamers are seeing massive performance gains with Wine's new NTSYNC support, "which is a feature that has been years in the making and rewrites how Wine handles one of the most performance-sensitive operations in modern gaming," reports XDA Developers. Not every game will see a night-and-day difference, but for the games that do benefit from these changes, "the improvements range from noticeable to absurd." Combined with improvements to Wayland, graphics, and compatibility, as well as a major WoW64 architecture overhaul, the release looks less like an incremental update and more like one of Wine's most important upgrades in years. From the report: The numbers are wild. In developer benchmarks, Dirt 3 went from 110.6 FPS to 860.7 FPS, which is an impressive 678% improvement. Resident Evil 2 jumped from 26 FPS to 77 FPS. Call of Juarez went from 99.8 FPS to 224.1 FPS. Tiny Tina's Wonderlands saw gains from 130 FPS to 360 FPS. As well, Call of Duty: Black Ops I is now actually playable on Linux, too. Those benchmarks compare Wine NTSYNC against upstream vanilla Wine, which means there's no fsync or esync either. Gamers who use fsync are not going to see such a leap in performance in most games.

The games that benefit most from NTSYNC are the ones that were struggling before, such as titles with heavy multi-threaded workloads where the synchronization overhead was a genuine bottleneck. For those games, the difference is night and day. And unlike fsync, NTSYNC is in the mainline kernel, meaning you don't need any custom patches or out-of-tree modules for it work. Any distro shipping kernel 6.14 or later, which at this point includes Fedora 42, Ubuntu 25.04, and more recent releases, will support it. Valve has already added the NTSYNC kernel driver to SteamOS 3.7.20 beta, loading the module by default, and an unofficial Proton fork, Proton GE, already has it enabled. When Valve's official Proton rebases on Wine 11, every Steam Deck owner gets this for free.

All of this is what makes NTSYNC such a big deal, as it's not simply a run-of-the-mill performance patch. Instead, it's something much bigger: this is the first time Wine's synchronization has been correct at the kernel level, implemented in the mainline Linux kernel, and available to everyone without jumping through hoops.

ReactOS aims to be compatible with programs and drivers developed for Windows Server 2003 and later versions of Microsoft Windows. And Slashdot reader jeditobe reports that the project has now "announced significant progress in achieving compatibility with proprietary graphics drivers." ReactOS now supports roughly 90% of GPU drivers for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, thanks to a series of fixes and the implementation of the KMDF (Kernel-Mode Driver Framework) and WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model) subsystems. Prior to these changes, many proprietary drivers either failed to launch or exhibited unstable behavior. In the latest nightly builds of the 0.4.16 branch, drivers from a variety of manufacturers — including Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD — are running reliably.

The project demonstrated ReactOS running on real hardware, including booting with installed drivers for graphics cards such as Intel GMA 945, NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS and GTX 750 Ti, and AMD Radeon HD 7530G. They also highlighted successful operation on mobile GPUs like the NVIDIA Quadro 1000M, with 2D/3D acceleration, audio, and network connectivity all functioning correctly. Further tests confirmed support on less common or older configurations, including a laptop with a Radeon Xpress 1100, as well as high-performance cards like the NVIDIA GTX Titan X.

A key contribution came from a patch merged into the main branch for the memory management subsystem, which improved driver stability and reduced crashes during graphics adapter initialization.

Kyle Orland writes via Ars Technica: Since deep-learning super-sampling (DLSS) launched on 2018's RTX 2080 cards, gamers have been generally bullish on the technology as a way to effectively use machine-learning upscaling techniques to increase resolutions or juice frame rates in games. With yesterday's tease of the upcoming DLSS 5, though, Nvidia has crossed a line from mere upscaling into complete lighting and texture overhauls influenced by "generative AI." The result is a bland, uncanny gloss that has received an instant and overwhelmingly negative reaction from large swaths of gamers and the industry at large.

While previous DLSS releases rendered upscaled frames or created entirely new ones to smooth out gaps, Nvidia calls DLSS 5 -- which it plans to launch in Autumn -- "a real-time neural rendering model" that can "deliver a new level of photoreal computer graphics previously only achieved in Hollywood visual effects." Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said explicitly that the technology melds "generative AI" with "handcrafted rendering" for "a dramatic leap in visual realism while preserving the control artists need for creative expression."

Unlike existing generative video models, which Nvidia notes are "difficult to precisely control and often lack predictability," DLSS 5 uses a game's internal color and motion vectors "to infuse the scene with photoreal lighting and materials that are anchored to source 3D content and consistent from frame to frame." That underlying game data helps the system "understand complex scene semantics such as characters, hair, fabric and translucent skin, along with environmental lighting conditions like front-lit, back-lit or overcast," the company says. Nvidia's announcement video and detailed Digital Foundry breakdown can be found at their respective links.

"Reactions have compared the effect to air-brushed pornography, 'yassified, looks-maxed freaks,' or those uncanny, unavoidable Evony ads," writes Orland. "Others have noted how DLSS 5 seems to mangle the intended art direction by dampening shadows in favor of a homogenized look."

Thomas Was Alone developer Mike Bithell said the technology seems designed "for when you absolutely, positively, don't want any art direction in your gaming experience."

Gunfire Games Senior Concept Artist Jeff Talbot added that "in every shot the art direction was taken away for the senseless addition of 'details.' Each DLSS 5 shot looked worse and had less character than the original. This is just a garbage AI Filter."

DLSS 5's "AI dogshit is actually depressing," said New Blood Interactive founder and CEO Dave Oshry, adding that future generations "won't even know this looks 'bad' or 'wrong' because to them it'll be normal."

Asian governments are implementing emergency measures like four-day workweeks and work-from-home mandates to cope with a fuel shortage triggered by the Iran conflict and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. "Asia is particularly dependent on oil exports from the Middle East; Japan and South Korea respectively source 90% and 70% of their oil from the region," notes Fortune. From the report: On March 10, Thailand ordered civil servants to take the stairs rather than the elevator, and to work-from-home for the duration of the crisis. It increased the air-conditioning temperature to 27 degrees Celsius, and will tell government employees to wear short-sleeved shirts over suits. (Thailand has about 95 days of energy reserves left, according to Reuters).

Vietnam also called on businesses to let people work-from-home to "reduce the need for travel and transportation." The Philippines is pushing for a four-day work week, and has ordered officials to limit travel "to essential functions only."

South Asia is getting hit hard too. Bangladesh brought forward the Eid-al-fitr holiday, allowing universities to close early in a bid to save fuel. Pakistan also instituted a four-day week for government offices and closed schools. India suspended shipments of liquefied petroleum gas to commercial operators to prioritize supplies for households, leading to worries from hotels and restaurants that they may be forced to close without fuel supplies. Countries across the region are also considering price caps, subsidies, and tapping strategic oil reserves. On Wednesday, the International Energy Agency "unanimously" agreed to release 400 million barrels of oil and refined products from its reserves.

The Associated Press offers a look at the energy supplies that countries hold and when they tap them.

OpenAI is reportedly backing away from expanding its AI data center partnership with Oracle because newer generations of Nvidia GPUs may arrive before the facility is even operational. CNBC reports: Artificial intelligence chips are getting upgraded more quickly than data centers can be built, a market reality that exposes a key risk to the AI trade and Oracle's debt-fueled expansion. OpenAI is no longer planning to expand its partnership with Oracle in Abilene, Texas, home to the Stargate data center, because it wants clusters with newer generations of Nvidia graphics processing units, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The current Abilene site is expected to use Nvidia's Blackwell processors, and the power isn't projected to come online for a year. By then, OpenAI is hoping to have expanded access to Nvidia's next-generation chips in bigger clusters elsewhere, said the person, who asked not to be named due to confidentiality. In a post on X, Oracle called the reports "false and incorrect." However, it only said existing projects are on track and didn't address expansion plans.

CNBC notes: "Oracle secured the site, ordered the hardware, and spent billions of dollars on construction and staff, with the expectation of going bigger."

Steven Spielberg directed his last Jurassic Park movie nearly 30 years ago, notes ScreenRant. But the 79-year-old filmmaker now brings us The Dinosaurs, a four-part documentary on Netflix where he's executive producer: The first few reviews are in, and the results lead to a perfect 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes. It's worth noting that the rating will likely fluctuate since there are only six reviews. So far, critics all agree that the new Netflix docuseries is a breathtaking visual of history's most majestic creatures, and Morgan Freeman's soothing narration elevates the experience. Most importantly, the reviews note that the story is intimate, making the dinosaurs feel real with their personalities.
"Audience" reviewers gave it a lower score of 67%.

• "There is a sense of drama and emotional weight which permeates through the entire series as it tells the story of the dinosaurs from start to the present day. The ending brought tears to my eyes..."

• "Wow, what a sleeper! Flat graphics, looks like video game animations. Unrelatable story lines. Don't waste your time. Honestly would you even look twice if Spielberg's name wasn't on it?"

• "This show was honestly incredible... It was a 10/10 series that I absolutely adored highly recommended to anyone who loves and has an interest of the ancient world."

• "I'm sorry, but the dinos of Prehistoric Planet are far superior, and were achieved on a much smaller budget. Their dinos look absolutely real, and you are convinced you're watching a documentary with real animals"

ScreenRant notes Netflix's debut of The Dinosaurs' "aligns perfectly" with the arrival of all four Jurassic World movies on Netflix, where they're already dominating Netflix's "Top 10" charts for the U.S.

"Witness the rise and the fall of nature's greatest empire," narrator Morgan Freeman says in the trailer...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AMD has been selling "Ryzen AI"-branded laptop processors for around a year and a half at this point. In addition to including modern CPU and GPU architectures, these are attempting to capitalize on the generative AI craze by offering chips with neural processing units (NPUs) suitable for running language and image-generation models locally, rather than on some company's server. But so far, AMD's desktop chips have lacked both these higher-performance NPUs and the Ryzen AI label. That changes today, at least a little: AMD is announcing its first three Ryzen AI chips for desktops using its AM5 CPU socket. These Ryzen AI 400-series CPUs are direct replacements for the Ryzen 8000G processors, rather than the Ryzen 9000-series, and they combine Zen 5-based CPU cores, RDNA 3.5 GPU cores, and an NPU capable of 50 trillion operations per second (TOPS). This makes them AMD's first desktop chips to qualify for Microsoft's Copilot+ PC label, which enables a handful of unique Windows 11 features like Recall and Click to Do.

The six chips AMD is announcing today -- the 65 W Ryzen AI 7 Pro 450G, Ryzen AI 5 Pro 440G, and Ryzen AI 5 Pro 435G, along with low-power 35 W "GE" variants -- all bear AMD's "Ryzen Pro" branding as well, which means they support a handful of device management capabilities that are important for business PCs managed by IT departments. At this point, it doesn't seem as though AMD will be offering boxed versions to regular consumers; the Ryzen AI desktop chips will appear mainly in business PCs that don't need a dedicated graphics card but still benefit from more robust graphics than AMD offers in regular Ryzen desktop CPUs. Like past G-series Ryzen chips, these are essentially laptop silicon repackaged for desktop systems. They share most of their specs in common with Ryzen AI 300 laptop processors, despite their Ryzen AI 400-series branding. The two chip generations are extremely similar overall, but the Ryzen AI 400-series laptop CPUs include slightly faster 55 TOPS NPUs.

Today, Apple updated the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air with support for its new M5 chips. It also unveiled a pair of all-new Studio Display XDR monitors. Longtime Slashdot reader jizmonkey shares details about the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, which look to be fairly major updates from the previous generation: Apple announced its newest CPUs today, which it claims has the fastest single-threaded performance in the world. Both the M5 Pro and M5 Max have eighteen-core designs, versus twelve or fourteen in the M4 Pro and fourteen or sixteen in the M4 Max. However, the number of higher-performing cores has been reduced significantly. In the older M4 designs, the chips had eight, ten, or twelve "performance" cores and four "efficiency" cores. In the M5 design, there are now only six higher-performing cores (now called "super" cores) and twelve lower-performing cores (now called "performance" cores). [Apple positions this "reduction" as a redesigned architecture with new core types.] The maximum amount of RAM remains the same at 128GB for the M5 Max (64GB for the M5 Pro), and GPU performance has increased. [The M5 Pro features up to a 20-core GPU, while the M5 Max scales up to 40 cores, each equipped with a Neural Accelerator. Apple also says the new architecture delivers over 4x peak GPU compute for AI compared to the previous generation, along with up to 35 percent faster performance in ray-traced graphics workloads.] Laptops with the new chips are available to order starting tomorrow and will be delivered starting March 11. As for the new XDR monitors, MacRumors highlights some of the key features in its reporting: Apple today introduced an all-new Studio Display XDR monitor with a 27-inch screen, mini-LED backlighting, 5K resolution, peak brightness of 2,000 nits for HDR content, up to a 120Hz refresh rate, Thunderbolt 5, and more. The new Studio Display XDR replaces Apple's former Pro Display XDR, which has been discontinued. Going forward, there are now two Studio Display models.

Both new Studio Display models have the same overall design as the original model. Both models have a 12-megapixel Center Stage camera, but it now supports Desk View on the new models. Both models also feature an upgraded six-speaker system, with Apple advertising "30 percent deeper bass" compared to the previous model. Only the higher-end Studio Display XDR received a 120Hz refresh rate, mini-LED backlighting, increased brightness, and faster 140W pass-through charging. The regular Studio Display still has a 60Hz refresh rate and up to 600 nits of brightness. Both models have 27-inch displays with a 5K resolution.

The new Studio Displays can be pre-ordered starting Wednesday, March 4, ahead of a Wednesday, March 11 launch. In the U.S., the regular Studio Display continues to start at $1,599, while the Studio Display XDR starts at $3,299.