It's day one of our CES 2025 coverage.
We'll be giving you five episodes this week instead of three,
so prepare yourself for a deluge of tech news that won't let up until we're all lying face down
in a pool of hypey buzzwords. At least we'll go out knowing all about smart toilets.
NVIDIA finally unveiled their RTX 50 series graphics cards at their keynote today as a treat
for the audience members who first had to sit through a supposedly inspiring montage about
how AI tokens are enabling a borderline dystopia and then Jensen Huang burst onto stage wearing
alligator skin and roared at the audience. Do you like my jacket? Worship me?
After reminding us that GPUs just didn't pop out of the ground fully formed,
Jensen finally got to the good stuff and it looks good. NVIDIA's claiming the RTX 5070 is
on par with the RTX 4090 and will launch at 550 bucks. Huh? Then we got the RTX 5070 Ti at 750,
RTX 5080 at 1000 and RTX 5090 at 2000 US dollars. That is quite the spread and I'm inclined to think
the Intel ARC B580 had to have something to do with the 5070 being priced that aggressively.
And if NVIDIA's numbers are anywhere close to accurate, this is not an iterative upgrade.
With the help of the newly announced DLSS4, NVIDIA's claiming that all of these 50 series cards
are twice as fast as their predecessors in some pretty demanding games. All that while
using a two-slot design with double flow through fans on the 5090 where the 4090 was a three-slot
and many third-party designs used three and a half slots. This less beefy design might have
something to do with all of the AI gobbledygook Jensen was going on about. I'm gonna be honest,
I wasn't paying attention, but DLSS4 and the new NVIDIA Reflex 2 are leaning even more heavily
into generating frames on the fly with AI instead of rasterizing. There's actually a
bunch more interesting stuff than NVIDIA talked about and not just the AI you can interrupt your
game to ask about how many pixels are on your character's butt or something, but Mark and I
would prefer to go home at some point, so I'll talk about that tomorrow. AMD also had gifts for
the tech world, ridiculous new naming schemes for their products, and an aneurysm for Linus.
Yeah, as detailed in the LTT video, AMD confirmed that in the next few months GPUs would launch
based on the new R-DNA4 architecture, which is optimized and better. This is literally just
a list of synonyms. They gave no details on the new graphics cards other than confirming that yes,
they will be called the RX9070 and 9070XT, and yes, they explicitly did that to
match direct competitor compare, which is robot speak for we copy NVIDIA because we
don't know who we are without them. Shhh, AMD, it's okay. I know who you are. You're chicken
shit. I don't know who those people on stage were, but if Dr. Lisa Sue were here, she wouldn't allow
this. I take it back. AMD had the bravery to announce that their new FSR upscaling tech would be
exclusive to RX9000 GPUs, and they also announced new versions of the world's best gaming processors,
the Ryzen 9900X3D and 9950X3D, which beat Intel's latest flagship even worse than the 9800X3D.
That X3D stuff is good. So for the first time, AMD is putting it in a laptop processor, the
Fire Range Ryzen 9955HX3D. Please, please, can we simplify this branding? If Dr. Lisa Sue was here,
she'd say no. Because joining last year's Ryzen AI 300 series laptop chips is another tier of CPUs
above Ryzen 9. That's right, it's the Ryzen AI Max and AI Max Plus 300 series followed by more
Ryzen AI 9, 7, and 5 300 series chips. And then just to make things more confusing, because at this
point, why not, later this year, after the 300 series launches, we're going to get the Ryzen
200 series mobile chips. There's also the new Ryzen Z2 Extreme, Z2 Normal, and Z2 Go.
One of the Steam Deck team members had to correct people who thought a Z2 chip would
power the next gen Steam Deck. A wacky idea they had no reason to believe except for this
AMD slide featuring two Ryzen Z1 powered handhelds and the Steam Deck. AMD, listen,
it's okay to ask for help with marketing. There are people who do this professionally.
Heck, just email me, I'll help you. Just, just stop. Intel CES keynote was opened up by Interim
co-CEO Michelle Johnston Holt House, which is too many syllables for me to say all the time.
Where's Pat? I need to know he's alive. After digging through a maze of AI client edge scalability
type jargon, I figured out that Intel was announcing more Core Ultra 200 series laptop chips,
the 200U series for Thinnenlites, 200H for some more beef, and 200HX for extra beef. Hold the
mayo. These all use the same Aero Lake architecture as the desktop Core Ultra 200S series, not the
Lunar Lake architecture in the 200V series, which had on-package memory. That kind of design
has been killed off, but not Team Blue's Arc graphics cards. We are very committed to the
discrete graphics market, says Michelle Johnston Holt House. It takes too long to say all that.
Please have a shorter name. Hey, believe it or not, there's even more tech news. Enough for
quick bits. Enough to drive you mad. Dell is chucking out its laptop and desktop brands, swapping
XPS in Spiron, Latitude, and Precision for the much simpler and Apple flavored Dell, Dell Pro,
and Dell Pro Max. I can see the appeal. Dell executives were probably hoping teens with
frosted tips would once again exclaim, dude, you're getting Dell. As they did in 2001,
but that was before Dell's debuted album in 2008. Whoa, uh-oh. Also, each form of Dell will be
further divided into plus and premium variants, which kind of messes up the whole simplicity
angle. But hey, at least some of them will come with swappable USB-C ports, so you can fidget
with those if you're bored. Qualcomm announced a new entry in its Snapdragon X series of laptop CPUs,
and just like the last time they did this with the X plus, the new chip called simply
Snapdragon X is slotting in at the bottom of the list. I mean, the flagship X Elite went from
extremely overhyped to extremely medium hyped, so you might as well go with that flow. For that
reason, I'm a little skeptical of Qualcomm's benchmarks when they say the X is up to 1.6
times faster than an Intel Core 5 120U, which I don't even know what that is, so
happy for you, or I'm sorry that happened. The HDMI forum has announced HDMI 2.2, which will
double the bandwidth of HDMI 2.1 to support 96 gigabits per second, so you can play games on
the PlayStation 6 at 8K and 240Hz. I'm sorry, that's ridiculous. 10K at 120Hz. But watch out,
because Vesa is answering with an updated DisplayPort 2.1 spec that allows for 80 gigabits per
second transmission over cables three times the length they previously allowed, which was 1 meter.
So make sure your video data has enough snacks for the road trip it's about to go on. I'll see
you on the other side of this small room. The greatest trick Microsoft ever pulled was apparently
convincing users they're using Google when they're using Bing instead. As spotted by Windows
latest, when users searched for Google through Bing, they're now served with a very Google Doodle
looking graphic above a search bar on a page that has been scrolled down slightly to hide the Bing
logo at the top. What's the end game here? Gaslight people until they discover they've
been using Bing the whole time, and maybe they'll be like, hmm, I guess Bing's not so bad after all.
It's literally search engine Stockholm syndrome. And new leaks have led Nintendo fans to become
possessed of the idea that you might be able to use the Switch 2's Joy-Con as a mouse.
First off, new images of the Joy-Con leaked on Baidu with a serial number that is valid on
Nintendo's check warranty page, so those look legit, and they appear to have a laser sensor on
the connector side. Combine that with shipping data mentioning adhesive tape to be used as a mouse
sole, which got people thinking about how you can do something similar with the Lenovo Legion Go
controllers. But instead of the controller sitting upright, you put the rail side down and use the
trigger as a left click. I hope this is true, if only to strike fear into Xbox and PS5 owners
in games that support cross-play once Switch players join the lobby. Oh no, the children are here.
And why don't you join me again tomorrow for more tech news, because I have to do something with
all the extras. It's piling up in here. It's getting hard to breathe.