Whoa. Computex, Google IO, Microsoft Build, somehow even more stuff. You
know, it's a good thing I had a nice relaxing long weekend because it turns
out what I was coming back to is tech news. Hell, there's nashing of teeth and
magic smoke. Let's start with the biggest news out of Computex, new GPUs.
AMD finally officially revealed the RX960 XT will launch on June 5th with an
8 GB variant for 300 USD and a 16 GB
version for 350. That places the 16 gig
one quite favorably compared to NVIDIA's $380 RTX 560Ti 8 GB. I just hope AMD
isn't lying about it having 15% more gaming performance per dollar because
CEO Lisa Sue is a doctor and that would be medical malpractice. AMD also
announced new professional Threadripper 9000 series CPUs with up to 96 cores and
a Radeon AI Pro R9700 GPU with 32 GB of
RAM. RAM, that is. Let's hope AMD
provides drivers for their new GPUs ahead of time so reviewers can do their
job, which, you know, is normally what happens, but you never know in these
wacky times when, according to myriad
tech reviewers, NVIDIA only allowed some outlets to publish previews ahead of the
RTX 5060's launch on Monday under strict
conditions, including being limited to testing certain games and capping every
email back to NVIDIA with, "Hail Jensen." Despite being at Computex once
the public drivers dropped, hardware unboxed, stayed up through the night
like champions to test the 5060 with some loaned parts from MSI and some
other proper reviews are starting to trickle out as well, which well actually
they don't make the $300 card look too
bad in terms of price to performance. Although the 8 gigs of VRAM trips it up
in places and MSRP is a social construct
with no inherent meaning. just like the concept of outside. Meanwhile, Intel
didn't reveal more gaming cards, instead unveiling the Ark Pro B50 and B60 at
around $300 and $500, respectively.
That's a ballpark because they'll only be available inside pre-built
workstations in a variety of fun third-party designs like the dual GPU
version from Maxon. So cool. What's even cooler
though is Intel's name for their new multi-GPU feature, Project Battle
Matrix. Just yeah. It'll allow up
to eight Arc Pro GPUs to link together to make up to 192 GB of pulled VRAM
available for AI workloads. On paper,
that's actually more capable than an NVIDIA RTX Pro 6000, which would still
be much more expensive. So, watch out NVIDIA. You're going down any day now. I
I feel it. Now it's Google's turn on the mic, which is an appropriate thing to
say because at their IO conference, the tech giant showed off another
existential crisis generator. I mean AI video generator. Their newest model V3
can generate photorealistic video and sound effects and lip-sync spoken
dialogue from a single prompt.
I am an idiot sandwich. I'm not sure I
can go on. I am also not sure I can go on, but at
least it's all marked right in the metadata with Google's synth ID. Now,
that might make it easier to identify non-consensual intimate images,
including deep fakes, which were just made illegal with the passing of the
Take It Down Act, a seemingly well-intentioned law that privacy groups
are concerned could be used for censorship. There's lots to talk about
there, but there's no time. Google V3 is
available in the Gemini app or in the new Google Flow AI video editing tool
for subscribers to Google AI Ultra, a
brand new all you can slop $250 plan
that also has YouTube Premium in there just for fun. Google did their usual
thing where they mixed together a whack ton of announcements for things you can
try now along with things that exist in a liinal non-real dimension known as the
coming months. So here's the stuff that's available nowish for AI
subscribers. Gemini is finally getting baked into Chrome, and Gemini is going
to start adapting its responses using your personal context, just like Apple
said Siri would do before they scrubbed most of their online references to it.
Google said this will allow you to generate more personalized replies in
Gmail, so you can be a better friend who
tricks your loved ones into thinking you took the time to write a reply when you
didn't. They look so dumb right now. This is friendship. Gemini Live with
camera and screen sharing is now available for everyone, which is cool.
While AI mode is getting a wider roll out to infect more search queries in the
US only. That's good. Keep it contained. A beta for real-time speech translation
is available in Google Meet. And developers are getting new coding agents
and tools, including Jewels, Stitch, and
the very literally named Gemini Code Assist. You didn't get a nickname. Not
cool enough yet. Google also updated the Gemini API and SDK with support for
anthropics model context protocol which is catching on as a kind of USBC of AI
allowing models and systems to speak politely with each other helping
Google's AI ultra exclusive project Mariner computer use agent use computers
which is it needs to do now for the coming later stuff when Mariner is less
experimental it'll roll out more widely in the Gemini app as agent mode, not to
be confused with AI mode in search, which will be updated with a lighter
version of deep research called deep search and also with search live, which
is just Gemini Live, but in search. I swear they are trying to annoy us. But
look, let's not let them, okay? Because there are a couple actually cool things
shown off. Google's hyperrealistic video call tech that makes it feel like you're
in the same room as the other person known as Project Starline is now Google
Beam and will be rolling out in some form later this year. And also Google
confirmed they're working on an enhanced desktop mode in Android 16, which still
makes me happy despite Android desktop modes never really working out for
anyone. But it might work for
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description. All right, you're not quite caught up in everything yet. There's
still the quick bits. Just hold on. At their build dev conference, Microsoft
also announced a whack ton of stuff, but thankfully most of it is too niche, and
I could safely skip some of it, except for Windows 11 getting MCP support,
which will make it much easier to let AI assistants actually control your
PC when you want them to. Did they put that in the code? That's seems
important. MCP is also a big part of Microsoft's NL web initiative, which
will make it easier for AIS and websites to all talk to each other. It's
described as kind of the HTML for the agentic web, which sounds like a
Spiderverse plot element. Also, the Windows subsystem for Linux is now open
source. And see, I probably could have skipped that, too. It's really niche.
Linux people, yes, it is. I can't
believe this story is way down here, but Fortnite is back on the iOS App Store in
the US with support for external payment options with no Apple fees. This is
crazy. 5 years after intentionally getting kicked off the App Store and
suing Apple over it, Epic Games actually
won uh for now, although it seems like this might stick just because everyone's
just fed up with Apple at this point. In their letter to Epic last week, Certino
said they were denying Epic's Fortnite app submission until after their request
for a stay on the judge's order was reviewed. And when the judge saw it, she
was like, "No, do it now, you turds." If
you're curious about the history of all of this, I made a big old techer video
somewhere about 3 years ago. I'm just saying. We've seen laptop tablet things
with one big foldable display before, but Huawei's looks real fancy. The
MateBook Fold Ultimate Design is a
13-inch foldable tablet that when unfolded is just 7.3 mm thick, thinner
than an iPhone 16. It runs Huawei's Harmony OS and is only available in
China for the equivalent of $3,300, but
I just like knowing it's out there. And Noctua has teamed up with Pulsar to
build a version of the second company's Fineman FO1 with a built-in Noctua fan.
It's a mouse, by the way. I probably should have said that. It's not the first mouse with a fan. The Marsback
Zephyr Pro has been around for a few years, cooling the sweaty hands of many
a thankful gamer. But it is the first one with a fan the color of old hospital
walls. I mean, how could you say no? And how could you say no to coming back for
more tech news on Friday? Was that too rude to Noctua? I don't. There's a ton
of Computex stuff, at least that we didn't cover today. So, don't go online
for a couple days and then come watch my show. It's a reasonable request.