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Photo: Stephanie Lindgren

Evo 2024 starts Friday, July 19th, kicking off a weekend full of one of the most intense fighting game competitions in the world. This year, over 10,000 players will participate in a host of games, making this the largest Evo ever while also setting the record for the largest esports tournament.
Evo has been getting bigger and bigger, with participation bolstered by the release of new versions of the tournament’s most popular games. Street Fighter 6 made its Evo debut last year and boasted the largest number of entrants in the franchise’s history. This year, both Mortal Kombat 1 and Tekken 8 will make their first Evo appearances. In addition to those heavy hitters, Evo 2024’s other featured games include Guilty Gear Strive, Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising, Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike, The King of Fighters XV, and Under Night In-Birth II Sys: Celes. (Listen… I don’t understand, either, but it’s an anime fighting game, and those make for excellent watching.)
Here’s a breakdown of all the featured games and their number of participants.

Image: EVO

Competition kicks off at 10AM PT/ 1PM ET across Evo’s seven Twitch channels. Some games like The King of Fighters XV and Mortal Kombat 1 will have their grand finals on Saturday, July 20th, while the bigger tournaments like Street Fighter 6 and Tekken 8 will conclude on Sunday. You can see the full schedule of events here.

In addition to the featured games, Evo 2024 will also host community showcase tournaments featuring games that are much beloved but don’t necessarily have the popularity of the big guys like Street Fighter and Tekken. There are over 17 tournaments featuring games like Skull Girls, Dragon Ball FighterZ, Soulcaliber VI, and Killer Instinct. While these games won’t be broadcast on the main Evo channels, you can check out the community showcase watch guide here to see when and where to watch these tournaments.
It’s never been a better time to be a fighting game fan. The crowds at events like Evo are large and loud, and the action is easy to understand — something other esports like League of Legends and Overwatch 2 cannot claim. Even if you’re not big into fighting games or esports in general, Evo is still one of the most entertaining events to watch.

Photo: Stephanie Lindgren

Evo 2024 starts Friday, July 19th, kicking off a weekend full of one of the most intense fighting game competitions in the world. This year, over 10,000 players will participate in a host of games, making this the largest Evo ever while also setting the record for the largest esports tournament.

Evo has been getting bigger and bigger, with participation bolstered by the release of new versions of the tournament’s most popular games. Street Fighter 6 made its Evo debut last year and boasted the largest number of entrants in the franchise’s history. This year, both Mortal Kombat 1 and Tekken 8 will make their first Evo appearances. In addition to those heavy hitters, Evo 2024’s other featured games include Guilty Gear Strive, Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising, Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike, The King of Fighters XV, and Under Night In-Birth II Sys: Celes. (Listen… I don’t understand, either, but it’s an anime fighting game, and those make for excellent watching.)

Here’s a breakdown of all the featured games and their number of participants.

Image: EVO

Competition kicks off at 10AM PT/ 1PM ET across Evo’s seven Twitch channels. Some games like The King of Fighters XV and Mortal Kombat 1 will have their grand finals on Saturday, July 20th, while the bigger tournaments like Street Fighter 6 and Tekken 8 will conclude on Sunday. You can see the full schedule of events here.

In addition to the featured games, Evo 2024 will also host community showcase tournaments featuring games that are much beloved but don’t necessarily have the popularity of the big guys like Street Fighter and Tekken. There are over 17 tournaments featuring games like Skull Girls, Dragon Ball FighterZ, Soulcaliber VI, and Killer Instinct. While these games won’t be broadcast on the main Evo channels, you can check out the community showcase watch guide here to see when and where to watch these tournaments.

It’s never been a better time to be a fighting game fan. The crowds at events like Evo are large and loud, and the action is easy to understand — something other esports like League of Legends and Overwatch 2 cannot claim. Even if you’re not big into fighting games or esports in general, Evo is still one of the most entertaining events to watch.

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Image: Kristen Radtke / The Verge

The FBI used an unreleased tool from the Israeli mobile forensics company Cellebrite to unlock the Trump rally shooter’s phone — and opened it in less than an hour, according to reports from Bloomberg and The Washington Post.
Investigators at the FBI’s Pittsburgh field office first tried to open Thomas Matthew Crooks’ phone with a Cellebrite tool but weren’t able to break into it. The phone was sent to the FBI lab in Quantico, Virginia, on Sunday, where agents called Cellebrite’s federal team, people familiar with the investigation told Bloomberg. Cellebrite sent the FBI an unreleased tool that’s still in development, which was able to unlock Crooks’ phone in 40 minutes.
The Verge has reached out to Cellebrite for comment. The FBI declined to comment.
The speed with which the FBI was able to unlock Crooks’ phone is illustrative of the advancements in mobile device forensic tools (MDTFs) in recent years — but the fact that investigators couldn’t crack the phone using tools currently on the market shows how developments in operating systems can quickly render these tools obsolete.
Crooks had a newer Samsung phone that runs on an Android operating system. Internal Cellebrite documents obtained by 404 Media show that the Cellebrite tools currently on the market have failed to unlock many phones running iOS 17.4 or newer, as well as Google Pixel 6, 7, and 8 phones that have been turned off.
In a briefing with members of Congress on Wednesday, the FBI said Crooks had searched for the dates of former President Donald Trump’s public appearances, as well as the dates of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, according to various media reports. Crooks also reportedly looked up prominent figures, including FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland.
According to media sources, FBI officials also said they found a Steam profile they believed belonged to Crooks and that Crooks posted an ominous warning message ahead of the shooting that read, “July 13 will be my premiere, watch as it unfolds.” CNN later reported that investigators now believe the account is fake.

Image: Kristen Radtke / The Verge

The FBI used an unreleased tool from the Israeli mobile forensics company Cellebrite to unlock the Trump rally shooter’s phone — and opened it in less than an hour, according to reports from Bloomberg and The Washington Post.

Investigators at the FBI’s Pittsburgh field office first tried to open Thomas Matthew Crooks’ phone with a Cellebrite tool but weren’t able to break into it. The phone was sent to the FBI lab in Quantico, Virginia, on Sunday, where agents called Cellebrite’s federal team, people familiar with the investigation told Bloomberg. Cellebrite sent the FBI an unreleased tool that’s still in development, which was able to unlock Crooks’ phone in 40 minutes.

The Verge has reached out to Cellebrite for comment. The FBI declined to comment.

The speed with which the FBI was able to unlock Crooks’ phone is illustrative of the advancements in mobile device forensic tools (MDTFs) in recent years — but the fact that investigators couldn’t crack the phone using tools currently on the market shows how developments in operating systems can quickly render these tools obsolete.

Crooks had a newer Samsung phone that runs on an Android operating system. Internal Cellebrite documents obtained by 404 Media show that the Cellebrite tools currently on the market have failed to unlock many phones running iOS 17.4 or newer, as well as Google Pixel 6, 7, and 8 phones that have been turned off.

In a briefing with members of Congress on Wednesday, the FBI said Crooks had searched for the dates of former President Donald Trump’s public appearances, as well as the dates of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, according to various media reports. Crooks also reportedly looked up prominent figures, including FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland.

According to media sources, FBI officials also said they found a Steam profile they believed belonged to Crooks and that Crooks posted an ominous warning message ahead of the shooting that read, “July 13 will be my premiere, watch as it unfolds.” CNN later reported that investigators now believe the account is fake.

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Image: Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

Just days after former President Donald Trump vowed to send Mark Zuckerberg to prison for “long periods of time,” the CEO of Meta is returning the favor — by complimenting Trump.
In an interview with Bloomberg that’s set to air on Tuesday, Zuckerberg was asked about what’s at stake in the upcoming US presidential election. Zuckerberg first spoke about how Meta is focusing less on politics across its platforms by allowing users to tweak their settings to see less political content and recommending less content of that kind to users. Zuckerberg also says he will not personally “endorse” either president Joe Biden or Trump — before offering, unprompted, his take on the Trump rally shooting.
“Seeing Donald Trump get up after getting shot in the face and pump his fist in the air with the American flag is one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life,” Zuckerberg told Bloomberg. “On some level as an American, it’s like hard to not get kind of emotional about that spirit and that fight, and I think that that’s why a lot of people like the guy.”
Though Zuckerberg didn’t explicitly endorse Trump, his comments may help to soothe the former president’s anger towards the Facebook founder, whom he has previously referred to as an “Election Fraudster.”
“All I can say is that if I’m elected President, we will pursue Election Fraudsters at levels never seen before, and they will be sent to prison for long periods of time,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “We already know who you are. DON’T DO IT! ZUCKERBUCKS, be careful!”

Image: Truth Social

Trump and other Republican politicians have rallied against “the elite,” even while members of that very class in the tech world raise millions of dollars in support of his campaign.
Billionaire Elon Musk endorsed Trump shortly after the assassination attempt at a campaign rally last week, and he reportedly plans to send $45 million a month to the pro-Trump America PAC, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Other individuals throwing money into the super PAC include venture capitalist David Sacks (who spoke at the Republican National Convention this week); Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale; and Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, of the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, told employees this week that they plan to follow suit. Andreessen serves on the Meta board of directors.
To get a sense of the relationship between Trump and Silicon Valley, look no further than the person selected as his running mate: Ohio Senator JD Vance, whose successful 2022 campaign was bankrolled by PayPal cofounder and right wing booster Peter Thiel. Vance is a former employee of Thiel’s and a friend — and now, perhaps, a direct line into policy for the tech elites, who are increasingly under government scrutiny from both the right and the left.

Image: Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

Just days after former President Donald Trump vowed to send Mark Zuckerberg to prison for “long periods of time,” the CEO of Meta is returning the favor — by complimenting Trump.

In an interview with Bloomberg that’s set to air on Tuesday, Zuckerberg was asked about what’s at stake in the upcoming US presidential election. Zuckerberg first spoke about how Meta is focusing less on politics across its platforms by allowing users to tweak their settings to see less political content and recommending less content of that kind to users. Zuckerberg also says he will not personally “endorse” either president Joe Biden or Trump — before offering, unprompted, his take on the Trump rally shooting.

“Seeing Donald Trump get up after getting shot in the face and pump his fist in the air with the American flag is one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life,” Zuckerberg told Bloomberg. “On some level as an American, it’s like hard to not get kind of emotional about that spirit and that fight, and I think that that’s why a lot of people like the guy.”

Though Zuckerberg didn’t explicitly endorse Trump, his comments may help to soothe the former president’s anger towards the Facebook founder, whom he has previously referred to as an “Election Fraudster.”

“All I can say is that if I’m elected President, we will pursue Election Fraudsters at levels never seen before, and they will be sent to prison for long periods of time,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “We already know who you are. DON’T DO IT! ZUCKERBUCKS, be careful!”

Image: Truth Social

Trump and other Republican politicians have rallied against “the elite,” even while members of that very class in the tech world raise millions of dollars in support of his campaign.

Billionaire Elon Musk endorsed Trump shortly after the assassination attempt at a campaign rally last week, and he reportedly plans to send $45 million a month to the pro-Trump America PAC, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Other individuals throwing money into the super PAC include venture capitalist David Sacks (who spoke at the Republican National Convention this week); Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale; and Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, of the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, told employees this week that they plan to follow suit. Andreessen serves on the Meta board of directors.

To get a sense of the relationship between Trump and Silicon Valley, look no further than the person selected as his running mate: Ohio Senator JD Vance, whose successful 2022 campaign was bankrolled by PayPal cofounder and right wing booster Peter Thiel. Vance is a former employee of Thiel’s and a friend — and now, perhaps, a direct line into policy for the tech elites, who are increasingly under government scrutiny from both the right and the left.

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AMD touts its new Ryzen AI chips, aka Strix Point, on stage. | Image: Paul Sakuma for AMD

2024 will go down in tech history as the year Microsoft was finally able to make Windows laptops into serious competitors to the MacBook. So far, that’s thanks to Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon chips, which switched to a homogeneous chip architecture, increased clock speeds, and caught up to Apple’s speedy and power-efficient processors. But now, AMD says it has chips that can take on the MacBook, too — and keep the company’s processors in the mix.
Last week, AMD held a two-day event in Los Angeles to reveal in-depth information about its new Strix Point Ryzen AI chips built on its brand-new Zen 5 architecture. Zen 5 is supposed to be a major leap from AMD’s last-gen chip architecture, delivering more instructions per clock cycle and higher gaming frame rates with just 15W of power.
At that event, I heard AMD brag about beating the MacBook more than I’ve ever heard a company directly target a competitor before. AMD claimed its new Ryzen chip “exceeds the performance of what MacBook Air has to offer in multitasking, image processing, 3D rendering, and gaming”; “is 15 percent faster than the M3 Pro” in Cinebench; and is capable of powering up to four displays, “unlike the MacBook Air, which limits you to two displays only.”
But not only did AMD tell reporters its upcoming Ryzen AI chips are faster than Apple’s M3 and M3 Pro, it also said its new integrated graphics beat Qualcomm’s current-gen and Intel’s last-gen while pointedly remarking that it can power “triple-A games in full HD,” including titles that simply “don’t work on some of our competitors.” AMD also claimed its NPU performs 50 trillion floating point operations per second, more than any of its Microsoft Copilot Plus laptop competitors will offer this year.
But if they’re faster, AMD has yet to really prove it.
Games that AMD said ran faster on its new iGPU were not available for me to test at the event. Most of AMD’s AI demos weren’t actually running on AMD’s NPU, and the ones that were weren’t responsive. The most interesting of AMD’s AI demos — Asus’ automatic file consolidation and organization program — wasn’t available to try at all, and AMD’s most powerful gaming laptop on display was running its games on Nvidia graphics with Nvidia upscaling, not its own integrated graphics.
Various AMD spokespeople gave me various answers as to why none of that was available: the demo laptops are not representative of the final product; Asus might be working on some final BIOS adjustments; the hotel Wi-Fi is too slow to install other games; they were not sure why some of the AI-powered apps were not running on the NPU.
While I wasn’t able to actually see these Ryzen AI chips in action, here’s what I was able to find out at the event.
Architectural improvements
It does sound like Ryzen AI could be notably faster than AMD’s previous generation of laptop chips. AMD says the new Zen 5 CPU architecture delivers 16 percent more instructions per clock cycle (IPC) on average, performing tasks that much faster without having to increase the chip’s clock speed.
And while its CPU cores only offer 10 percent IPC uplift in an example game (Far Cry 6), AMD says its new RDNA 3.5 GPU architecture gives these chips between 19 percent and 32 percent more graphics performance per watt at 15 watts, which is the wattage that the thinnest laptops and handheld gaming systems typically use by default. Compared to the previous generation, the integrated graphics should theoretically be able to generate more frames per second or use less power or some of each.
Next-to-no mentions of battery life
Even though AMD’s chips are theoretically more efficient than before, it wouldn’t confirm if these machines will have any further improvement in battery life. During the event, AMD would only say that battery life would last “all day,” which the company defines as “eight hours or more.” I was unable to speak to an Asus representative at the event to get an actual number for the laptops it demoed, and AMD seemed hesitant about giving me an answer beyond “checking with my Asus representative.”
Thin and light productivity laptops have been able to get well over eight hours of battery life for a while. So, it stands to reason that these Ryzen AI laptops could probably do the same based on the numerous improvements AMD has made to its architecture. But laptop manufacturers generally overpromise yet underdeliver on battery life. An Asus representative on this Best Buy page said the Ryzen AI Zenbook S16 gets about 12 hours of battery life, while the Qualcomm Vivobook S15 gets 18 hours — meaning Asus’ flagship AMD laptop offers six hours fewer than its Qualcomm flagship. Twelve hours is also about six hours less than the MacBook Air M3 achieved in my testing.
At least one AMD laptop is thin and light as Air
“I wanted to build notebooks that are faster than MacBook Pro, thinner and lighter than MacBook Air,” said AMD’s Jack Huynh, senior vice president and GM of computing and graphics, as he introduced Asus’ Zenbook S16 onstage. But when I finally got to hold the Zenbook S16 in the demo area, it didn’t feel lighter and thinner, because it apparently wasn’t.
According to the companies’ spec sheets, the 16-inch Zenbook is the same weight and thickness as the 15-inch Air: 3.3lbs (1.5kg or 1.51kg) and 0.43in or 0.45in (1.1cm or 1.15cm) thick. (It’s also 0.52 inches wider and 0.32 inches longer.) That’s not to say it wasn’t impressively thin and lightweight, because it was — but for me to be truly impressed, I will need to see Ryzen AI beat its competitors with my own eyes.
World’s fastest mobile NPU
During one of the two-hour general presentations, AMD bragged that its 50 TOPS NPU is over five times faster than Intel’s Meteor Lake. (Never mind that Intel’s Lunar Lake NPU, coming this fall, offers up to 48 TOPS.) But I couldn’t get a good sense of how much faster AMD’s NPU really was compared to its competitors’ chips I’ve tested previously because the available demos weren’t running on the NPU.
I demoed two AI programs that generated images from typed prompts on the Zenbook S16 and the 13-inch ProArt, but neither of those programs were using AMD’s NPU to run the applications. Windows Task Manager showed either the CPU or the integrated graphics doing most or all of the image generation.
There was also an MSI Prestige laptop demoing webcam effects like background blur and automatic emoji, using 51 percent of the NPU in the process, but AMD’s CPU was still being taxed — 78 percent of it, along with nearly half of the laptop’s 32GB of memory. It also couldn’t reliably generate an onscreen emoji based on my facial expression, and when it did, it took several seconds.
One of the most interesting AI apps AMD talked up was Story Cube, Asus’ AI-powered app that comes with its upcoming ProArt series laptops; the company says it can automatically retrieve, label, and sort photos and videos according to who or what is in the photo or where the photo was taken, using local on-device AI processing.
It also appeared to be available to test in the demo area — but when I asked an AMD representative to show me it in action, they said they couldn’t. Instead, I was shown the program sitting in an idle state, as if it had already finished organizing photos.
Just how fast are AMD’s new graphics?
During both its general sessions, AMD claimed its Radeon 890M iGPU could generate 52fps in Cyberpunk 2077 and Red Dead Redemption 2, and 72fps in Forza Horizon 5. With AMD Fluid Motion Frames turned on, AMD said it could get 93fps in Cyberpunk 2077, 90fps in Red Dead Redemption 2, and 148fps in Forza Horizon 5.
The company did not specify onstage (nor on some slides) the graphics settings and display resolution until it got to its comparison between the Radeon 890M plus AFMF and Nvidia’s mobile RTX 2050: full HD (1080p) on medium graphics. When I asked an AMD representative in the demo area if the same settings were used with AFMF turned off, they said yes.
AMD also claims its new iGPU runs faster in gaming than the Intel Core Ultra 9 185H and Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E-84-100: 1.65 times faster in Cyberpunk 2077 and 1.36 times faster in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. The company would not say what in-game settings it used here. They were not called out on the slide or in the footnotes at the end of the slide deck.

None of those games were available to demo with Radeon 890M, so I couldn’t verify any of AMD’s claims. In their place were Fallout 4 and Lies of Pi, but I wasn’t able to verify if either of those games was running at 1080p like AMD said they were or check out the graphics presets; they didn’t appear where they normally would be in the settings menu. I did notice that Lies of Pi’s frame rate was locked at 60fps when I enabled Steam’s in-game fps counter; Fallout 4 was running between 75fps and 95fps depending on what I was doing in-game.
I asked an AMD representative if it would be possible to run Cyberpunk 2077, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, or any other game it bragged about on the Radeon 890M but was told it would be best to wait for a review unit since performance is not indicative of the final, off-the-shelf version and that they would take too long to download because the hotel’s Wi-Fi was too slow.
Wait for the reviews
The first laptops with AMD’s Strix Point chips — Asus’ Zenbook S 16, ProArt P16, and ProArt PX13 — will hit shelves on July 28th. With MacBooks and Snapdragon laptops already taking up space on those shelves, this is a crucial moment for AMD to prove that its x86 Zen 5 architecture can be just as fast — or faster — than the Arm architecture of its competitors.
If AMD succeeds, that puts even more pressure on Intel ahead of its Lunar Lake release, especially since Intel also wants to prove its new x86 chips can beat Arm. If AMD doesn’t succeed, that puts the pressure back on Intel to show the old guard of PC chips can still keep up.

AMD touts its new Ryzen AI chips, aka Strix Point, on stage. | Image: Paul Sakuma for AMD

2024 will go down in tech history as the year Microsoft was finally able to make Windows laptops into serious competitors to the MacBook. So far, that’s thanks to Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon chips, which switched to a homogeneous chip architecture, increased clock speeds, and caught up to Apple’s speedy and power-efficient processors. But now, AMD says it has chips that can take on the MacBook, too — and keep the company’s processors in the mix.

Last week, AMD held a two-day event in Los Angeles to reveal in-depth information about its new Strix Point Ryzen AI chips built on its brand-new Zen 5 architecture. Zen 5 is supposed to be a major leap from AMD’s last-gen chip architecture, delivering more instructions per clock cycle and higher gaming frame rates with just 15W of power.

At that event, I heard AMD brag about beating the MacBook more than I’ve ever heard a company directly target a competitor before. AMD claimed its new Ryzen chip “exceeds the performance of what MacBook Air has to offer in multitasking, image processing, 3D rendering, and gaming”; “is 15 percent faster than the M3 Pro” in Cinebench; and is capable of powering up to four displays, “unlike the MacBook Air, which limits you to two displays only.”

But not only did AMD tell reporters its upcoming Ryzen AI chips are faster than Apple’s M3 and M3 Pro, it also said its new integrated graphics beat Qualcomm’s current-gen and Intel’s last-gen while pointedly remarking that it can power “triple-A games in full HD,” including titles that simply “don’t work on some of our competitors.” AMD also claimed its NPU performs 50 trillion floating point operations per second, more than any of its Microsoft Copilot Plus laptop competitors will offer this year.

But if they’re faster, AMD has yet to really prove it.

Games that AMD said ran faster on its new iGPU were not available for me to test at the event. Most of AMD’s AI demos weren’t actually running on AMD’s NPU, and the ones that were weren’t responsive. The most interesting of AMD’s AI demos — Asus’ automatic file consolidation and organization program — wasn’t available to try at all, and AMD’s most powerful gaming laptop on display was running its games on Nvidia graphics with Nvidia upscaling, not its own integrated graphics.

Various AMD spokespeople gave me various answers as to why none of that was available: the demo laptops are not representative of the final product; Asus might be working on some final BIOS adjustments; the hotel Wi-Fi is too slow to install other games; they were not sure why some of the AI-powered apps were not running on the NPU.

While I wasn’t able to actually see these Ryzen AI chips in action, here’s what I was able to find out at the event.

Architectural improvements

It does sound like Ryzen AI could be notably faster than AMD’s previous generation of laptop chips. AMD says the new Zen 5 CPU architecture delivers 16 percent more instructions per clock cycle (IPC) on average, performing tasks that much faster without having to increase the chip’s clock speed.

And while its CPU cores only offer 10 percent IPC uplift in an example game (Far Cry 6), AMD says its new RDNA 3.5 GPU architecture gives these chips between 19 percent and 32 percent more graphics performance per watt at 15 watts, which is the wattage that the thinnest laptops and handheld gaming systems typically use by default. Compared to the previous generation, the integrated graphics should theoretically be able to generate more frames per second or use less power or some of each.

Next-to-no mentions of battery life

Even though AMD’s chips are theoretically more efficient than before, it wouldn’t confirm if these machines will have any further improvement in battery life. During the event, AMD would only say that battery life would last “all day,” which the company defines as “eight hours or more.” I was unable to speak to an Asus representative at the event to get an actual number for the laptops it demoed, and AMD seemed hesitant about giving me an answer beyond “checking with my Asus representative.”

Thin and light productivity laptops have been able to get well over eight hours of battery life for a while. So, it stands to reason that these Ryzen AI laptops could probably do the same based on the numerous improvements AMD has made to its architecture. But laptop manufacturers generally overpromise yet underdeliver on battery life. An Asus representative on this Best Buy page said the Ryzen AI Zenbook S16 gets about 12 hours of battery life, while the Qualcomm Vivobook S15 gets 18 hours — meaning Asus’ flagship AMD laptop offers six hours fewer than its Qualcomm flagship. Twelve hours is also about six hours less than the MacBook Air M3 achieved in my testing.

At least one AMD laptop is thin and light as Air

“I wanted to build notebooks that are faster than MacBook Pro, thinner and lighter than MacBook Air,” said AMD’s Jack Huynh, senior vice president and GM of computing and graphics, as he introduced Asus’ Zenbook S16 onstage. But when I finally got to hold the Zenbook S16 in the demo area, it didn’t feel lighter and thinner, because it apparently wasn’t.

According to the companies’ spec sheets, the 16-inch Zenbook is the same weight and thickness as the 15-inch Air: 3.3lbs (1.5kg or 1.51kg) and 0.43in or 0.45in (1.1cm or 1.15cm) thick. (It’s also 0.52 inches wider and 0.32 inches longer.) That’s not to say it wasn’t impressively thin and lightweight, because it was — but for me to be truly impressed, I will need to see Ryzen AI beat its competitors with my own eyes.

World’s fastest mobile NPU

During one of the two-hour general presentations, AMD bragged that its 50 TOPS NPU is over five times faster than Intel’s Meteor Lake. (Never mind that Intel’s Lunar Lake NPU, coming this fall, offers up to 48 TOPS.) But I couldn’t get a good sense of how much faster AMD’s NPU really was compared to its competitors’ chips I’ve tested previously because the available demos weren’t running on the NPU.

I demoed two AI programs that generated images from typed prompts on the Zenbook S16 and the 13-inch ProArt, but neither of those programs were using AMD’s NPU to run the applications. Windows Task Manager showed either the CPU or the integrated graphics doing most or all of the image generation.

There was also an MSI Prestige laptop demoing webcam effects like background blur and automatic emoji, using 51 percent of the NPU in the process, but AMD’s CPU was still being taxed — 78 percent of it, along with nearly half of the laptop’s 32GB of memory. It also couldn’t reliably generate an onscreen emoji based on my facial expression, and when it did, it took several seconds.

One of the most interesting AI apps AMD talked up was Story Cube, Asus’ AI-powered app that comes with its upcoming ProArt series laptops; the company says it can automatically retrieve, label, and sort photos and videos according to who or what is in the photo or where the photo was taken, using local on-device AI processing.

It also appeared to be available to test in the demo area — but when I asked an AMD representative to show me it in action, they said they couldn’t. Instead, I was shown the program sitting in an idle state, as if it had already finished organizing photos.

Just how fast are AMD’s new graphics?

During both its general sessions, AMD claimed its Radeon 890M iGPU could generate 52fps in Cyberpunk 2077 and Red Dead Redemption 2, and 72fps in Forza Horizon 5. With AMD Fluid Motion Frames turned on, AMD said it could get 93fps in Cyberpunk 2077, 90fps in Red Dead Redemption 2, and 148fps in Forza Horizon 5.

The company did not specify onstage (nor on some slides) the graphics settings and display resolution until it got to its comparison between the Radeon 890M plus AFMF and Nvidia’s mobile RTX 2050: full HD (1080p) on medium graphics. When I asked an AMD representative in the demo area if the same settings were used with AFMF turned off, they said yes.

AMD also claims its new iGPU runs faster in gaming than the Intel Core Ultra 9 185H and Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E-84-100: 1.65 times faster in Cyberpunk 2077 and 1.36 times faster in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. The company would not say what in-game settings it used here. They were not called out on the slide or in the footnotes at the end of the slide deck.

None of those games were available to demo with Radeon 890M, so I couldn’t verify any of AMD’s claims. In their place were Fallout 4 and Lies of Pi, but I wasn’t able to verify if either of those games was running at 1080p like AMD said they were or check out the graphics presets; they didn’t appear where they normally would be in the settings menu. I did notice that Lies of Pi’s frame rate was locked at 60fps when I enabled Steam’s in-game fps counter; Fallout 4 was running between 75fps and 95fps depending on what I was doing in-game.

I asked an AMD representative if it would be possible to run Cyberpunk 2077, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, or any other game it bragged about on the Radeon 890M but was told it would be best to wait for a review unit since performance is not indicative of the final, off-the-shelf version and that they would take too long to download because the hotel’s Wi-Fi was too slow.

Wait for the reviews

The first laptops with AMD’s Strix Point chips — Asus’ Zenbook S 16, ProArt P16, and ProArt PX13 — will hit shelves on July 28th. With MacBooks and Snapdragon laptops already taking up space on those shelves, this is a crucial moment for AMD to prove that its x86 Zen 5 architecture can be just as fast — or faster — than the Arm architecture of its competitors.

If AMD succeeds, that puts even more pressure on Intel ahead of its Lunar Lake release, especially since Intel also wants to prove its new x86 chips can beat Arm. If AMD doesn’t succeed, that puts the pressure back on Intel to show the old guard of PC chips can still keep up.

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Image: Channel 4 / Talkback Thames

Have you turned it off and on again? That familiar refrain from IT departments and The IT Crowd is being echoed by Microsoft today as a recommended way of fixing the faulty CrowdStrike update that has taken down thousands of Windows PCs and servers today.
In a support note on Microsoft’s Azure outage page, the company says it has heard from customers that rebooting virtual machines and PCs multiple times can help. “We have received feedback from customers that several reboots (as many as 15 have been reported) may be required, but overall feedback is that reboots are an effective troubleshooting step at this stage,” says Microsoft.
If rebooting a machine 15 times doesn’t do the trick, Microsoft recommends the workaround that many IT admins have been using today, which involves deleting the faulty CrowdStrike driver. In the case of Microsoft’s Azure virtual machines, it should be easier for IT admins to mount a disk and attempt to delete the faulty file rather than having to boot machines into Safe Mode.
We’ve heard from some IT admins that rebooting is indeed fixing the problems. It’s amazing that one of the worst global IT outages in history can be fixed by just turning it off and on again. A meme saves the day.

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Image: Channel 4 / Talkback Thames

Have you turned it off and on again? That familiar refrain from IT departments and The IT Crowd is being echoed by Microsoft today as a recommended way of fixing the faulty CrowdStrike update that has taken down thousands of Windows PCs and servers today.

In a support note on Microsoft’s Azure outage page, the company says it has heard from customers that rebooting virtual machines and PCs multiple times can help. “We have received feedback from customers that several reboots (as many as 15 have been reported) may be required, but overall feedback is that reboots are an effective troubleshooting step at this stage,” says Microsoft.

If rebooting a machine 15 times doesn’t do the trick, Microsoft recommends the workaround that many IT admins have been using today, which involves deleting the faulty CrowdStrike driver. In the case of Microsoft’s Azure virtual machines, it should be easier for IT admins to mount a disk and attempt to delete the faulty file rather than having to boot machines into Safe Mode.

We’ve heard from some IT admins that rebooting is indeed fixing the problems. It’s amazing that one of the worst global IT outages in history can be fixed by just turning it off and on again. A meme saves the day.

Read More 

Image: Adrienn Szabo / Paramount Plus

Paramount has canceled its live-action Halo series for Paramount Plus, according to The Hollywood Reporter and Variety. But if you’re a fan of the show and want to see it continue, there’s a sliver of hope: both publications report that the show’s producers are shopping the series around, so perhaps there will be a third season.
The Halo show premiered in 2022 and ran for two seasons, with the second debuting earlier this year. Pablo Schreiber starred as Master Chief.

“We are extremely proud of this ambitious series and would like to thank our partners at Xbox, 343 Industries and Amblin Television, along with showrunner and executive producer David Wiener, his fellow executive producers, the entire cast led by Pablo Schreiber as Master Chief and the amazing crew for all their outstanding work,” Paramount said in a statement to THR and Variety. “We wish everyone the best going forward.”
The Halo show had its issues, primarily the fact that we never really got to see the titular Halo in any kind of detail. Some fans of the games could never get over the decision to show the Master Chief’s face throughout the majority of the show — something that’s never been done in the games. And some folks were really unamused by the romance subplot between the Chief and a human member of the alien Covenant, which included an unintentionally hilarious sex scene.

The show’s second season was a vast improvement over the first. The season’s first episode and its later depiction of the Fall of Reach — a major moment in the game series — really captured the harrowing yet valorous essence of the Halo games despite not strictly following the game’s canon. Season 2 also added more depth to Schreiber’s Silver Team costars, especially from Riz-028 (Natasha Culzac) and Vannak-134 (Bentley Kalu). The games have done a poor job of capturing the humanity of the people under all that power armor, and that was something the Halo TV series really excelled at, despite all its other faults.
Hopefully, the showrunners will find a new home for the series to continue what’s been an interesting take on one of the most popular video game series of all time.

Image: Adrienn Szabo / Paramount Plus

Paramount has canceled its live-action Halo series for Paramount Plus, according to The Hollywood Reporter and Variety. But if you’re a fan of the show and want to see it continue, there’s a sliver of hope: both publications report that the show’s producers are shopping the series around, so perhaps there will be a third season.

The Halo show premiered in 2022 and ran for two seasons, with the second debuting earlier this year. Pablo Schreiber starred as Master Chief.

“We are extremely proud of this ambitious series and would like to thank our partners at Xbox, 343 Industries and Amblin Television, along with showrunner and executive producer David Wiener, his fellow executive producers, the entire cast led by Pablo Schreiber as Master Chief and the amazing crew for all their outstanding work,” Paramount said in a statement to THR and Variety. “We wish everyone the best going forward.”

The Halo show had its issues, primarily the fact that we never really got to see the titular Halo in any kind of detail. Some fans of the games could never get over the decision to show the Master Chief’s face throughout the majority of the show — something that’s never been done in the games. And some folks were really unamused by the romance subplot between the Chief and a human member of the alien Covenant, which included an unintentionally hilarious sex scene.

The show’s second season was a vast improvement over the first. The season’s first episode and its later depiction of the Fall of Reach — a major moment in the game series — really captured the harrowing yet valorous essence of the Halo games despite not strictly following the game’s canon. Season 2 also added more depth to Schreiber’s Silver Team costars, especially from Riz-028 (Natasha Culzac) and Vannak-134 (Bentley Kalu). The games have done a poor job of capturing the humanity of the people under all that power armor, and that was something the Halo TV series really excelled at, despite all its other faults.

Hopefully, the showrunners will find a new home for the series to continue what’s been an interesting take on one of the most popular video game series of all time.

Read More 

Photo by Jakub Porzycki / NurPhoto via Getty Images

Look, in the grand scheme of the global outage that’s wreaking havoc across airlines, banks, supermarkets, TV stations, and countless businesses, being unable to order a Trenta iced coffee from Starbucks with my smartphone is a minor inconvenience. But you can add the company’s mobile ordering system to the list of casualties from this CrowdStrike BSOD situation.

I am now personally affected by this because I had to order my Starbucks latte verbally and stand in a line. Am I entitled to compensation? pic.twitter.com/ClVO81mIyK— Sherrod DeGrippo (@sherrod_im) July 19, 2024

Starbucks is closed. pic.twitter.com/bsFwSgx155— NoneShallPass (@bfrahm73) July 19, 2024

The Starbucks app itself is working, but the ability to order ahead is currently unavailable at all locations. It looks as though some Starbucks shops have (temporarily) closed altogether to avoid dealing with this tech hassle until the situation improves.

Image: @itsataries (Twitter)
Yeah, that’ll down the morning rush.

For what it’s worth, Dunkin’s mobile ordering system seems to be running smoothly at press time. CrowdStrike has already deployed a fix for the bug that caused headaches worldwide today, and the company’s CEO issued an apology.
You’ll just have to live without those Starbucks star points today, I’m afraid. Use the inconvenience as motivation. Break out that cold brew maker that’s been collecting dust in a kitchen cupboard somewhere — or support a local coffee shop, maybe. We’ll get through this.

Photo by Jakub Porzycki / NurPhoto via Getty Images

Look, in the grand scheme of the global outage that’s wreaking havoc across airlines, banks, supermarkets, TV stations, and countless businesses, being unable to order a Trenta iced coffee from Starbucks with my smartphone is a minor inconvenience. But you can add the company’s mobile ordering system to the list of casualties from this CrowdStrike BSOD situation.

The Starbucks app itself is working, but the ability to order ahead is currently unavailable at all locations. It looks as though some Starbucks shops have (temporarily) closed altogether to avoid dealing with this tech hassle until the situation improves.

Image: @itsataries (Twitter)
Yeah, that’ll down the morning rush.

For what it’s worth, Dunkin’s mobile ordering system seems to be running smoothly at press time. CrowdStrike has already deployed a fix for the bug that caused headaches worldwide today, and the company’s CEO issued an apology.

You’ll just have to live without those Starbucks star points today, I’m afraid. Use the inconvenience as motivation. Break out that cold brew maker that’s been collecting dust in a kitchen cupboard somewhere — or support a local coffee shop, maybe. We’ll get through this.

Read More 

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

On Friday morning, some of the biggest airlines, TV broadcasters, banks, and other essential services came to a standstill as a massive outage rippled across the globe. The outage, which has brought the Blue Screen of Death upon legions of Windows machines across the globe, is linked to just one software company: CrowdStrike.
CrowdStrike plays an important role in helping companies find and prevent security breaches, billing itself as having the “fastest mean time” to detect threats. Since its launch in 2011, the Texas-based company has helped investigate major cyberattacks, such as the Sony Pictures hack in 2014, as well as the Russian cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee in 2015 and 2016. As of Thursday evening, CrowdStrike’s valuation was upwards of $83 billion.
It also has around 29,000 customers, with more than 500 on the list of the Fortune 1000, according to CrowdStrike’s website.
But that popularity put it in the position to wreak havoc when something went wrong, with systems using CrowdStrike and Windows-based hardware falling offline in droves this morning. CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said on Friday that the company is “actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts” while emphasizing that the issue isn’t linked to a cyberattack. It also doesn’t affect Mac or Linux machines.
The July 19th outage is tied to CrowdStrike’s flagship Falcon platform, a cloud-based solution that combines multiple security solutions into a single hub, including antivirus capabilities, endpoint protection, threat detection, and real-time monitoring to prevent unauthorized access to a company’s system.
The update in question appears to have installed faulty software onto the core Windows operating system, causing systems to get stuck in a boot loop. Systems are showing an error message that says, “It looks like Windows didn’t load correctly,” while giving users the option to try troubleshooting methods or restart the PC. Many companies, including this airline in India, have resorted to the good old-fashioned way of doing things by hand.

“Our software is extremely interconnected and interdependent,” Lukasz Olejnik, an independent cybersecurity researcher, consultant, and author of the book Philosophy of Cybersecurity, tells The Verge. “But in general, there are plenty of single points of failure, especially when software monoculture exists at an organization.”
Although CrowdStrike has deployed a fix, getting things up and running won’t be a simple task. Olejnik tells The Verge that this issue could take “days to weeks” to resolve because IT administrators may have to have physical access to a device to get them working again. How fast that happens depends on the size and resources of a company’s IT team. “Some systems in certain specific circumstances may be unrecoverable, but I assume that the majority will be recovered,” Olejnik adds.

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

On Friday morning, some of the biggest airlines, TV broadcasters, banks, and other essential services came to a standstill as a massive outage rippled across the globe. The outage, which has brought the Blue Screen of Death upon legions of Windows machines across the globe, is linked to just one software company: CrowdStrike.

CrowdStrike plays an important role in helping companies find and prevent security breaches, billing itself as having the “fastest mean time” to detect threats. Since its launch in 2011, the Texas-based company has helped investigate major cyberattacks, such as the Sony Pictures hack in 2014, as well as the Russian cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee in 2015 and 2016. As of Thursday evening, CrowdStrike’s valuation was upwards of $83 billion.

It also has around 29,000 customers, with more than 500 on the list of the Fortune 1000, according to CrowdStrike’s website.

But that popularity put it in the position to wreak havoc when something went wrong, with systems using CrowdStrike and Windows-based hardware falling offline in droves this morning. CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said on Friday that the company is “actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts” while emphasizing that the issue isn’t linked to a cyberattack. It also doesn’t affect Mac or Linux machines.

The July 19th outage is tied to CrowdStrike’s flagship Falcon platform, a cloud-based solution that combines multiple security solutions into a single hub, including antivirus capabilities, endpoint protection, threat detection, and real-time monitoring to prevent unauthorized access to a company’s system.

The update in question appears to have installed faulty software onto the core Windows operating system, causing systems to get stuck in a boot loop. Systems are showing an error message that says, “It looks like Windows didn’t load correctly,” while giving users the option to try troubleshooting methods or restart the PC. Many companies, including this airline in India, have resorted to the good old-fashioned way of doing things by hand.

“Our software is extremely interconnected and interdependent,” Lukasz Olejnik, an independent cybersecurity researcher, consultant, and author of the book Philosophy of Cybersecurity, tells The Verge. “But in general, there are plenty of single points of failure, especially when software monoculture exists at an organization.”

Although CrowdStrike has deployed a fix, getting things up and running won’t be a simple task. Olejnik tells The Verge that this issue could take “days to weeks” to resolve because IT administrators may have to have physical access to a device to get them working again. How fast that happens depends on the size and resources of a company’s IT team. “Some systems in certain specific circumstances may be unrecoverable, but I assume that the majority will be recovered,” Olejnik adds.

Read More 

The Verge

A “Trump2024” banner labeled Promoted by Team Trump sat atop the What’s Happening summary on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, during the fourth and final night of the Republican National Convention on Thursday.
While the #Trump2024 hashtag temporarily showed the American flag and clicking it caused an animated “hashfetti” effect with flags raining down, it was the icon attached to the number one trending #MAGA topic that caught our eyes.

Image: X.com
The Trump hashmoji attached to #MAGA

It temporarily featured a low-res version of a now-famous image showing Trump with his fist raised while being lifted to his feet by Secret Service agents following an assassination attempt during his campaign event last weekend. However, that image, taken from that angle, looks just like the one owned by the Associated Press and its photographer, Evan Vucci.
Asked about the hashflag, Associated Press communications VP Lauren Easton responded, “This is not an authorized use of our photo,” which is “available for editorial use only.”
“The Associated Press is proud of Evan Vucci’s photo and recognizes its impact. In addition, we reserve our rights to this powerful image,” wrote Easton earlier this week in response to its unlicensed use on t-shirts, coffee mugs, and other items.

Screenshot: X.com
“Hashfetti.”

In response to an inquiry from The Verge, someone responded from the X press email account, without attaching their name, stating that the hashmoji and “hashfetti” animation are “a commercially available product.” According to a post on X’s business blog, the animated effect has been used by more than 30 brands since its first appearance during a Louis Vuitton campaign last year.
The account did not respond to a question about whether or not the AP has licensed its image for this use or to confirm the purchaser of this commercially available product.

The Verge

A “Trump2024” banner labeled Promoted by Team Trump sat atop the What’s Happening summary on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, during the fourth and final night of the Republican National Convention on Thursday.

While the #Trump2024 hashtag temporarily showed the American flag and clicking it caused an animated “hashfetti” effect with flags raining down, it was the icon attached to the number one trending #MAGA topic that caught our eyes.

Image: X.com
The Trump hashmoji attached to #MAGA

It temporarily featured a low-res version of a now-famous image showing Trump with his fist raised while being lifted to his feet by Secret Service agents following an assassination attempt during his campaign event last weekend. However, that image, taken from that angle, looks just like the one owned by the Associated Press and its photographer, Evan Vucci.

Asked about the hashflag, Associated Press communications VP Lauren Easton responded, “This is not an authorized use of our photo,” which is “available for editorial use only.”

“The Associated Press is proud of Evan Vucci’s photo and recognizes its impact. In addition, we reserve our rights to this powerful image,” wrote Easton earlier this week in response to its unlicensed use on t-shirts, coffee mugs, and other items.

Screenshot: X.com
“Hashfetti.”

In response to an inquiry from The Verge, someone responded from the X press email account, without attaching their name, stating that the hashmoji and “hashfetti” animation are “a commercially available product.” According to a post on X’s business blog, the animated effect has been used by more than 30 brands since its first appearance during a Louis Vuitton campaign last year.

The account did not respond to a question about whether or not the AP has licensed its image for this use or to confirm the purchaser of this commercially available product.

Read More 

Image: Microsoft

A global IT outage grounded flights and resulted in outages at the London Stock Exchange and other systems early Friday morning. Industries ranging from healthcare, banking, air travel, and others are struggling with a global IT outage that hit Microsoft Windows systems PCs and servers connected to the Crowdstrike security platform early Friday morning — and that could take a while to fully resolve.
CrowdStrike, which is a cybersecurity firm based in the US, said on Friday that a faulty update was the culprit, not a “security incident or cyberattack,” according to a post on X by CEO George Kurtz. Banks, airlines, TV broadcasters, and supermarkets had systems suddenly reboot to display a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) error that might require a reboot into safe mode to fix.
Thousands of flights have been delayed or canceled and some businesses are now slowly beginning to come back online. Kurtz told NBC News that it “could be some time” before systems recover.

Image: Microsoft

A global IT outage grounded flights and resulted in outages at the London Stock Exchange and other systems early Friday morning.

Industries ranging from healthcare, banking, air travel, and others are struggling with a global IT outage that hit Microsoft Windows systems PCs and servers connected to the Crowdstrike security platform early Friday morning — and that could take a while to fully resolve.

CrowdStrike, which is a cybersecurity firm based in the US, said on Friday that a faulty update was the culprit, not a “security incident or cyberattack,” according to a post on X by CEO George Kurtz. Banks, airlines, TV broadcasters, and supermarkets had systems suddenly reboot to display a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) error that might require a reboot into safe mode to fix.

Thousands of flights have been delayed or canceled and some businesses are now slowly beginning to come back online. Kurtz told NBC News that it “could be some time” before systems recover.

Read More