At the AMD Tech Summit in Beijing this weekend, AMD vice president Scott Herkelman took the stage to discuss the upcoming Vega-powered graphics cards. While we didn’t get a release date, Herkelman did discuss AMD’s plans to stay competitive in the notebook GPU market.
According to VideoCardz, AMD plans to decrease the overall footprint of the upcoming mobile GPUs by stacking VRAM dies and freeing up more internal space without sacrificing performance. Size is an important consideration for notebook manufacturers, but this announcement was light on details.
It’s unclear whether or not AMD’s new Vega architecture will be rolled out to discrete mobile GPUs — the kind found in premium and gaming-oriented systems — or if it will be included in AMD’s “APUs” — a CPU/GPU combo that delivers a smaller overall footprint but a lot less graphical performance.
Herkelman did mention that AMD hopes the new Vega-powered mobile chips will provide notebook manufacturers with the horsepower they’ll need for their products to drive virtual reality and “the latest and greatest AAA games,” which strongly suggests that we’ll see discrete GPUs powered by the new Vega architecture. It’s unlikely even a next-gen onboard GPU would have the headroom necessary to drive any but the least demanding VR experiences.
AMD’s previous architecture, code-named “Fiji,” never made a big splash in the notebook market, in part due to its overwhelming power demands. But Nvidia has had some success bringing the full-fat versions of its 10-series GPUs to notebooks despite their power consumption, indicating that there is a strong appetite for nearly desktop-grade graphical performance even if it impacts battery life.
Additionally, it appears that AMD’s Vega-powered GPUs will be available in 4GB and 8GB options, on account of the way the new chips will stack memory. Unfortunately, Herkelman didn’t offer a concrete timeline for when we might see those desktop and mobile GPUs hit the market, but reassured the Beijing audience that Vega-powered chips were “just around the corner.”
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.