Technology

Monitor maker Unitcom has released the iiyama PC, featuring a 14-inch or 16-inch design and plenty of other attractive features.

The iiyama PC comes with Intel's Core Ultra Series 2 processors, known as Lunar Lake, and the body of the laptop uses magnesium alloy to make the device lightweight without sacrificing sturdiness.

Thanks to the alloy, the 14-inch version of the iiyama PC can weigh less than 1kg, which is extremely light for a laptop. For comparison, the 14-inch MacBook Pro weighs in at 1.55kg with the lightest M3 chipset.

iiyama PC - an unexpected surprise

(Image credit: Unitcom)

Anyone who has looked to travel with a laptop knows that weight is basically the most important consideration, and the iiyama excels in this regard.

There is also Wi-Fi 7 and support for Microsoft's new Copilot+ PC initiative, which requires the laptop to use newer Intel chips to unlock various AI features within Windows and its associated apps. There's also a 5MP webcam for good measure.

The best business laptop you can't buy

The downside to wanting Unitcom's iiyama PC is that sadly it will only ever be available in Japan. While that might suit some frequent travellers to Japan, for the rest of us, we'll have to resign ourselves to never getting our hands on one.

The iiyama PC comes in three versions, for 169,800 yen (£870) and 194,800 yen (£997) for the 14-inch model and 199,800 yen (£1,000) for the 16-inch model.

What is the best business laptop?

Seeing as the iiyama is not widely available, TechRadar has spent a lot of time checking out all of the best business laptops on the market.

In our considered opinion, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 8 is the best thing out there right now, offering up to 13th-Gen Intel Core i7, 1TB to 4TB of storage, and a pretty lightweight and portable design.

For anyone on a budget, we recommend the Acer Travelmate P4, which has slightly less impressive specs but can easily be upgraded, has decent battery life and a Thunderbolt port, and doesn't cost much at all.

Of course, we'd be remiss not to mention the Apple MacBook Air 15-inch (2023), a laptop that probably doesn't need much introduction. If you aren't tied into the Windows ecosystem (or have loose ties), then this is the MacBook for work. The MacBook Pro isn't bad either .

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The Shazam Band is a new AI-powered collar containing speakers and sensors that lets your pet talk to you, just like the dogs in the Pixar movie UP can. Once your pet is wearing the band you can have a conversation with it, and the band emits a human voice in response to your questions.

You can also use the Shazam Band to track your pet if they wander off, and it will alert you via text message if they get into danger, say from other animals or traffic, or if they got left behind somewhere. You can find them using the Shazam app and the GPS inside the band.

A real life UP

Ever since the Pixar film UP came out in 2009 people have been trying to make a real-life version of a collar that lets your pet talk to you. Back in 2021 TechRadar even interviewed the makers of Petpuls, one of the first AI-powered dog collars that aimed to give your pet a voice.

So far though, nobody has really managed to crack a talking pet collar, but Shazam aims to get humans and animals talking once and for all. To find out more we met with John McHale, CEO of Personifi AI, the company behind Shazam. John explained that he got the idea for using AI to help pets communicate after his dog, Roscoe, got bitten by a rattlesnake, and nearly died because he didn’t know what had happened. “It got me thinking about AI and how the tragedy could have been averted and it became clear that we could apply AI in such a way that if Roscoe got bit by a rattlesnake, even if I wasn’t present, he could have texted me and notified me right away that he had had a rattlesnake encounter. That was the genesis of Shazam.”

(Image credit: Personifi AI) Sentience augmentation

Shazam works for any type of pet that can fit the collar, so think dog, cat, goat, or whatever four-legged friend you have running around your house. It works by using AI, trained on large data sets in a similar way to the way ChatGPT is trained.

The band contains a number of sensors, in particular, it seems to listen to the words that you say to your pet and react to them, but also interprets the kinematic behaviors of your pet. The result is that the Shazam Band provides what McHale calls “sentience augmentation”. What that means is it articulates your pet’s mood, experience, and responses back to you - as they’re happening - with little sound bites like “I’m feeling sad right now” and “You know I’m down to snuggle”. The idea is that you start to get into having a conversation with your pet and over time it learns and becomes more natural.

But does it work?

The million dollar question, of course, is does it actually work? I had a live demo of Shazam by the Personifi AI team in Texas, and I still don’t quite know what to make of it. John McHale demonstrated with his own dog, Roscoe, who was wearing the Shazam Band and I got to hear the dog 'speak'.

Without getting to test the device on my own pet it’s really hard to say how well it works, but in the demo, we saw Roscoe’s Shazam collar successfully interpret when his owner was happy or sad, and produce the appropriate responses. Also when McHale wrestled a dog toy in Roscoe’s mouth, much to his delight, his collar came out with Captain America's famous catchphrase, “I could do this all day!”.

They do say you should never work with children and animals, and during the live demo, Roscoe was clearly not in the mood for fun times. He preferred to lie on the sofa, but it’s impossible not to smile when hearing a dog ‘talk’ for the first time, especially since the voices have all been voiced by comedic actors. Many are voiced by Bobby Johnson, AKA RxCKStxR, a social media celebrity renowned for giving pets a voice online.

(Image credit: Personifi AI) Pick a persona

There are 25 different personas you can choose between for your pet, and each one is effectively a different voice. During your first 30 days of owning the Shazam Band, you get to try them all out before you have to settle on the persona that best suits your pet. We heard a lovable goofball, a witty southern belle, and a fast-talking mafia boss. Does one of those sound like your pet?

There were a couple of options for the international market, too – there was one British voice (male and posh, think Hugh Grant) and a female Spanish voice. Most striking was the Jamaican voice, which used a Patois.

Considering how crazy people get about their pets, the potential for Shazam is clearly huge, and once we get our hands on one in November we’ll bring you a full review. The ethical considerations of anthropomorphizing your pet still need to be considered, but as a cat owner, I would love to be able to find out what my cat actually wants when he looks at me, purrs, and meows. Is it attention? Is it food? Is it playtime? It would be very useful to know.

Ultimately, I’m left feeling slightly undecided by the whole talking pet situation. It was certainly fun for the owner, but I do wonder what Roscoe thought of it all. He seemed pretty happy with voices coming from his collar, but it’s not like he had a choice in the matter. What if he’s a dog that doesn’t want to be anthropomorphized? I guess that despite the inroads Shazam makes into human and animal interactions, we’ll never really be able to ask him.

The Shazam Band is available for pre-order in two different versions. The full GPS-enabled band costs $595 and a less fully-featured $495 version is available from shazampet.com.

A new smart collar aims to give pet owners the ability to talk to their fur babies. Or at least fake it.

Don’t buy a new PC until after October 25, 2024! Yes, I know that's extremely specific, but I promise, it'll all make sense shortly - as it seems like that date is when we’re going to finally know the truth of what’s in AMD’s Ryzen 7 9800X3D box.

It was leaker HXL on X who recently claimed that AMD’s new chip would be announced on October 25. Now leaker wjm47196, who posts on the Chiphell forum (and whose leaks tend to be true!), corroborates it.

10.24: ARL-S Review10.25: 9800X3D launch?11.7: 9800X3D Availablehttps://t.co/i6K3MChAHIOctober 11, 2024

A different rumor shared by leaker Hoang Anh Phu on X argues instead that AMD’s new 8-core gaming CPU will launch in the first week of November or a little later. Either way, these claims place the reveal shortly after Intel’s Core 200K Arrow Lake-S launch. That chip is currently rumored to be released on October 24, potentially just a single day before AMD’s hotly-anticipated 9800X3D announcement.

The competition is heating up (again)

The timing of the potential releases of both AMD and Intel’s next-gen CPUs is perfect, considering they’ll take advantage of the holiday season.

Intel will have a head start in the market, and potentially snap up the first swathe of early adopters. That head start isn’t massive, though, and the Arrow Lake range won’t contain anything like AMD’s new V-cache technology, which makes Team Red's X3D chips superior for gaming performance specifically. Intel recently admitted that its next-gen CPUs will be outperformed by AMD’s 3D V-cache Ryzen 7000 processors.

HXL also recently leaked some Cinebench R23 results alleged to be clock speeds of the 9800X3D. They showed a base clock speed of 4.7GHz and an all-core Turbo speed of 5.2GHz, making it faster than its predecessor the 7800X3D by 500MHz at base clock speed and 400MHz at all-core turbo.

So if you’re in the market for a new PC, stick some duct tape on your old one - for now, at least. Let the old workhorse wheeze along with you until October 25. That’s when the speculated prices and rumored clock speeds will be put to bed and you’ll know whether your next PC’s CPU should be blue or red.

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Could Nvidia be planning to release multiple versions of its upcoming GeForce RTX 5070? Potentially, if recent claims are to be believed - but it's hard to see where it will fit into Nvidia's RTX 5000 lineup.

Tom at Moore’s Law is Dead recently mentioned in a livestream on Patreon that he has heard rumors that suggest Nvidia might be planning to release an 18GB version of its hotly-anticipated RTX 5070 graphics card - the base version of which is expected to launch with 12GB of VRAM as standard.

Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5070, whose release date might be announced at CES in January, is expected to use GDDR7 memory, one of the first cards to use the latest generation of GPU VRAM. If the rumor is true, Nvidia could be planning to release an 18GB version under its 'Super' label, presumably at a later date. This isn't entirely shocking; it wouldn’t be the first time Nvidia has released a more powerful or enhanced version of an existing graphics card with the Super branding.

How worthwhile is this upgrade, really?

You would be right in thinking that using GDDR7 memory, which is expected to offer an over 30% boost in performance alone, offers a worthwhile enough improvement over current-gen graphics cards. The purported 18GB version would likely further improve this performance, using faster memory modules.

Still, some customers might question just how worthwhile buying this rumored Super variant could be. It will have more VRAM, and is expected to improve performance by 5-10%, but is that really necessary?

The 12GB model is expected to cost around $600 to $700, and the RTX 5070 18GB could cost around $800. Would you pay a possible extra $100-200 for a 5-10% improvement in performance?

If we compare the RTX 4070 Ti Super against its non-Super variants, the Super offered 5% faster rasterization (how well a GPU handles rendering scenes by converting 3D models into 2D images) and 5-10% faster raytracing compared to the non-Super variants. As such, it's reasonable for us to assume that the same will be true here; gains maxing out at 10% might not be worth an extra hundred bucks or more for many games.

However, there is an important caveat to make here. PC games are increasingly demanding more and more VRAM as models and textures become more detailed, so if you're looking to play the very latest games, that extra 6GB could make a significant difference (at least, in terms of future-proofing your PC). 12GB is still a decent amount, though, so it likely won't be an issue for most games.

So let’s just wait and see if any of these rumors turn out to be true. A Super variant of the RTX 5070 wouldn't exactly be a shock, unless Nvidia decides to launch it alongside the original model - that would be a real curveball from Team Green!

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