Technology

Rumors and leaks around Apple products are nothing new, but following a recent unboxing video that claims to feature the leaked MacBook Pro M4, there has been a huge increase in ‘sellers’ promising the new MacBook before its official launch - if they've got one, they can get more, right?

Well, common sense says no, and so do researchers at Kaspersky. The hype around the new leaked product has been predictably followed by an influx of fraudulent activity, with scammers exploiting the excitement by offering fake product testing programs and pre-sale items.

Kaspersky identified a number of scams looking to lure victims in through emails with an exclusive offer to test the unreleased product, which is set to launch in November 2024.

A pinch of salt

In the email, the victim is sent a link that redirects them to a fake storefront.

From there, the victim fills out a form full of sensitive information and credit card details to receive the 'exclusive price'. Regardless of the leak's legitimacy, we can say with pretty high certainty that the offer of a free MacBook from an unauthorized source for ‘testing’ is fake.

“The recently released video featuring an unreleased laptop has created false expectations, leading people to believe that if an influencer managed to get their hands on the device, it might be available for regular users too.” said Dmitry Galov, Head of Research Center, Russia, at Kaspersky’s Global Research and Analysis Team (GReAT).

“Scammers are quick to capitalize on trends” he commented, "Remember, if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.”

This of course exposes victims not just to the initial credit card theft, but also to the threat of identity theft from the compromised material which will probably have been sold on the dark web by the scammers.

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Android 15 has been out for a while now, but we’re still discovering new features – such as a screensaver that allows you to control your smart home without even unlocking your phone.

The Home Controls feature turns your phone into a smart-home dashboard when the phone is docked – and it’s not just exclusive to Google’s platforms, either.

Home Controls works with the Google Home app and on Pixel phones, but also on at least one other smart-home app, Home Assistant, and on any phone running an Android 15-based operating system.

You can activate the Home Controls screensaver by heading to the Settings app, navigating to the 'Display & touch' tab, and clicking the Screen saver tab within.

Once Home Controls is activated, connecting the phone to a dock or charger will bring up a screen loaded with smart home options.

As Android Authority reports, Google added the Home Controls screensaver to the third Android 15 beta back in June.

However, Android 15 is only just beginning to make its way to flagship devices, with Google's own Pixel phones due to receive an Android 15-based OS update on October 15.

The report adds that the Home Controls screensaver runs via the Android SystemUI app, embedding the activity of Google Home or the third-party Home Assistant app.

Those concerned about battery health when leaving their phone connected to a charger for a prolonged period will be happy to hear that Android 15 offers an 80% charging cap on Pixel phones – we hope to see this feature come to other platforms, too.

For now, though, we’re glad to see these useful smart home options rolling out to all Android 15 users.

When will my phone get Android 15?

When your particular Android phone will get Android 15 features depends on the plans of the phone’s manufacturer.

Phone makers that use Android tend to add a cosmetic skin with some exclusive features, known as a 'wrapper', sometimes styled as an operating system unto itself.

As mentioned, Pixel phones will get Android 15 later this month, and other manufacturers like Motorola and Nothing have either announced rollout plans or begun beta testing.

For the latest updates on when Android 15 will come to your phone, be sure to keep up with our Android coverage.

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Play your cards right and you could get this luxury perk nearly for free.

In what might be perceived as the world's most significant IT outage, the CrowdStrike incident is likely to cost upwards of $5 billion in damages, also erasing billions from the cybersecurity company's own share price almost overnight. For organizations attempting to update and release software more quickly than ever, the lessons learned from the havoc wreaked by a single "buggy" endpoint security software update are poignant.

The CrowdStrike outage is the definitive illustration of the complications of software development and delivery today. The growing intricacies of the modern digital environment and the velocity and scope of software change make quality and reliability ever more challenging. Even when quality is a primary focus, as it was for CrowdStrike, delivering consistently high standards is no easy feat. Effective testing strategies are essential.

However, it's not uncommon for teams to push testing to the bottom of the priority pile in order to keep pace with delivery expectations. It's unfortunately considered a burden rather than a significant value driver.

From bottleneck to business enabler

With the right approach, testing can harness automation to ensure continuous and actionable feedback, and identify and target risks and defects early. Far from hindering speed, testing can actually shorten and enhance release cycles for high-quality products and services.

Automated testing has revolutionized software development, enabling teams to keep pace with projects' increasing speed and scale. It improves test coverage and accuracy when compared to manual approaches, as well as while delivering faster feedback - crucial for continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) processes.

Particularly effective for regression testing and change validation, automated testing also pinpoints code changes for a more precise and efficient workflow. The advent of GenAI-powered testing tools further elevates this process by significantly reducing testing time and freeing up resources to identify complex issues that AI alone might miss.

But it's not just building test automation coverage; it's about ensuring the right development environments are in place to test changes, from development and staging to pre-production and production. In order to create a testing strategy that provides quality while limiting exposure to risk and downtime, it's vital to adapt testing according to the problem to be solved. That means looking at who and where the user is, their risk profile, how they are using the application, and whether it's on-prem or in the cloud.

User-centric testing across environments: adapting strategies to mitigate risk

Understanding users' needs and how they use a product across multiple environments is fundamental to establishing where to focus testing efforts. User profiles can help recreate real-life situations, making sure that all potential use cases and environments are covered. By aligning testing efforts with user behaviors, requirements and environments, testing can be prioritized based on high-impact areas to identify issues early. This thorough approach ensures reliable performance across diverse operating systems, application technologies and device types. It can avert possible failures and ensure a consistent, high-quality user experience regardless of how customers access software applications.

Increased traffic and demand are two such scenarios it's vital to plan for. Higher loads can cause critical systems to grind to a halt or crash. The recent Oasis ticket sale fiasco showed that performance and load testing are essential. They help minimize unexpected repercussions from increased website and application loads, ensuring performance and reliability. Performance testing is a vital element of the overall testing strategy and should be incorporated throughout the software development life cycle (SDLC) to identify potential bottlenecks and ensure systems are prepared for real-world demands.

Identifying infrastructure & supply chain risk

However, it's not enough to consider only an organization's own systems. Integrations with third-party systems must also be robust and reliable. While the Oasis ticket sale sites had taken steps to manage load, including putting a new queue counter system in place, external payment systems also struggled.

It is therefore vital to identify and align with all third-party providers involved in critical business applications, reviewing their policies and procedures for managing faulty code that might originate with them. Service virtualization can be used to simulate services that are outside of an organization's control, allowing teams to test how their applications will perform under various conditions. Chaos testing of these integrated systems is also an important element of a complete test strategy to uncover vulnerabilities and ensure resilience against unexpected failures. Closely examining infrastructure and application integration points in this way reduces external source risks for an efficient and secure ecosystem.

Navigating resource constraints: prioritizing testing efforts effectively

It can be hard to know where to test, especially when resources are limited and prioritization is required. Finding solutions that look inside the code and alert teams of untested areas, providing visibility into change assessment, can deliver dividends. As the pace of change accelerates, this will be increasingly important.

Indeed, the majority of SaaS applications continuously release updates. Where application updates are dependent on external providers, automated and fast regression testing is imperative for businesses to minimize risk.

When accelerated development tempo creates bottlenecks and heightens testing demands, leveraging no-code or low-code platforms alongside AI-generated code can also enable development teams to deliver updates and new features more rapidly. Companies should incorporate AI-driven automation into their testing solution set to prevent innovation slowdowns.

Redefining software testing for a safer digital future

Staying error-free while keeping up with software change in today's complex and fast-paced digital world is a hard task. Still, we must strive to minimize the potential impact. The CrowdStrike and Oasis events should be treated as a wake-up call to reevaluate how businesses everywhere implement software testing to ensure software quality and reliability throughout the development lifecycle. Only by doing this can we hope to prevent similar problems in the future.

We've featured the best IT infrastructure management service.

This article was produced as part of TechRadarPro's Expert Insights channel where we feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today. The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/news/submit-your-story-to-techradar-pro

These waterproof smart lights can work for Halloween, Christmas and any other celebration all year long.

Another weekend has rolled around, so it's time to sit back, relax, and enjoy some brand-new content from the world's best streaming services. Expectedly, Netflix leads the way with two anticipated offerings – a returning TV fan favorite, plus a new animated series – but its competitors have also rustled up a number of new movies and shows of their own to pique the interest of their userbase.

No matter which platform you're subscribed, then, you'll find something fun worth watching after a long week at the office, university, or school. Without further ado, then, these are the films and TV series you need to catch before Monday morning.

Outer Banks season 4 part 1 (Netflix)

Ahoy, me hearties! Ready to get back on board with the Outer crew? The sun-kissed treasure hunting series' fourth season has arrived (or, rather, part 1 has), so we'll finally be able to see how the Blackbeard treasure hunt is going that we first heard about at the end of season 3.

I love nothing more than a sea tale, and the stories of pirates from the 1700s are some of my favorite, especially about the infamous Blackbeard. The pirate's ship has been found in real-life but in Outer Banks, it's still lost. That's where an elderly man called Wes Genrette (David Jensen) comes in, who has the captain's log with records of where the ship sailed to before it was shipwrecked. Will the 'Progues' find the lost treasure? Go stream the popular show's latest episodes to find out.

Amelia Schwanke, senior entertainment editor

• Watch Outer Banks season 4 part 1 on Netflix

Citadel: Diana (Prime Video)

Let's address the elephant in the room: Citadel, the expensively assembled Prime Video spy series that debuted in early 2023, was not good. Indeed, despite its obvious star power and potential to be the streamer's next TV Original hit, I said The Night Agent and James Bond had nothing to worry about after I streamed Citadel's first few episodes – and, after its public release, it seemed many viewers agreed with my sentiments.

That hasn't deterred Amazon MGM Studios, though, as the e-commerce giant's entertainment division is bringing us two spin-offs before 2024 ends. The first of those, Citadel: Diana, will aim to get the franchise back on solid ground. Its trailer (see above) suggests it may do that but, after watching its first episode pre-release, I'm not sure it will. Don't count on it joining our best Prime Video shows unless it rapidly turns its fortunes around in its five remaining chapters.

Tom Power, senior entertainment reporter

• Watch Citadel: Diana on Prime Video

Caddo Lake (Max)

As a thriller fan, I can't wait to tune in and watch Caddo Lake, which is produced by the new Max film produced by M. Night Shyamalan – who is, of course, renowned for his psychological thrillers. So, what's it about? Well, when an eight-year-old girl mysteriously disappears, a series of past deaths and disappearances at Caddo Lake start to come together that forever changes a fractured family's history.

Caddo Lake stars Dylan O'Brien among many others, and I've always thought he's put in strong performances when it comes to thrillers like The Maze Runner franchise, so I'm looking forward to seeing him in one of October's new Max movies. Combine this with the fact that Caddo Lake looks to be a real genre blender of horror, mystery, thriller and drama, then we could have one of the best Max movies on our hands.

Grace Morris, entertainment writer

• Watch Caddo Lake on Max

Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft (Netflix)

Lara Croft has seen many iterations. Whether it's Keeley Hawes in the original Tomb Raider video game series or Angelina Jolie in the early 2000s (I liked those, okay?), you must've been living under a rock if you haven't heard of the iconic archaeologist. Now, she's back in a very personal eight-part series where she's on the hunt to find an artefact that someone stole from Croft Manor. Why you'd steal from a double pistol wielding adventurer is beyond me, but someone had the guts to do it.

This time, Lara is voiced by Hayley Atwell, who has appeared throughout Marvel's Captain America movie trilogy, some of which are the best Marvel movies. She's joined by two of Lara's trusty sidekicks Jonah and Zip, who are my favourite Tomb Raider characters outside of the legend herself. But will that be enough to get it into our best Netflix shows feature? Only time will tell.

Lucy Buglass, senior entertainment writer

• Watch Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft on Netflix

Disclaimer (Apple TV Plus)

Celebrated filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón has landed his own Apple TV Plus show and I’m very intrigued to see where this one goes. In my Disclaimer trailer reaction, I compared Cate Blanchett’s character to her now iconic Lydia Tár, and it looks like she’s about to deliver another compelling performance as a respected journalist whose life is turned upside down when she discovers she’s a character in a novel that supposedly reveals her darkest secret.

I really hope that this is one we can add to our best Apple TV Plus shows list, but we’ll have to wait and see. Either way, a collaboration between Cuarón and Blanchett is one I’ve been excited about ever since it was announced, so I'll definitely be tuning into Apple's streaming platform to see it.

Lucy Buglass, senior entertainment writer

• Watch Disclaimer on Apple TV Plus

La Maquina (Hulu/Disney Plus)

Hulu and Disney Plus couldn't have chosen better stars for its first Spanish-language series. La Máquina will see long-time friends Gael García Bernal (Werewolf by Night) and Diego Luna (Andor), who previously worked together on the western satire Casa de Mi Padre in 2012, take on the roles of two best friends preparing for a boxing comeback.

The plot reads very much like Rocky or Creed in that it's about a boxer preparing for their next match with the help of their manager. Bernal plays Esteban Osuna, who's at a low point in his boxing career, while Luna takes on the role of his determined manager Andy Lujan. This has the potential to be a knockout, so keep an eye on our best Hulu shows and best Disney Plus shows lists to see if it lasts the distance and wins the day.

Amelia Schwanke, senior entertainment editor

• Watch La Maquina on Hulu (US) and Disney Plus (internationally)

Tuesday (Max)

The latest in a long line of A24-developed movies to land on Max, Tuesday follows a mother (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and her teenage daughter (Lola Petticrew) as they confront Death – when it arrives in the form of a talking bird – to help them cope with the daughter's impending death.

Tuesday certainly sounds like it's going to have me in tears, especially with Seinfeld star Louis-Dreyfus shedding her comedic skin for this powerfully moving performance about love and loss. Not only that, but The Guardian called it a "weird, wrenching and wildly ambitious [movie]" that's also "an achingly sad oddity". Now I definitely need to see what this heart-breaking fairytale is all about.

Grace Morris, entertainment writer

• Watch Tuesday on Max

For more streaming suggestions, read our guides on the best Netflix movies, best Max shows, best Paramount Plus movies, and best horror movies.

It'll be called Coordinated Lunar Time. But first, the space agency has to figure out how to do it.

The Eight Sleep Pod 3 Cover tracks my sleep, monitors my health vitals and keeps me from sweating in the middle of the night. Here's why I think hot sleepers will find this bedding accessory ridiculously cool.

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Asset management powerhouse Fidelity Investments has confirmed suffering a data breach in which crooks stole sensitive information on tens of thousands of people.

The company revealed the news via a breach notification filed with the Office of the Maine Attorney General, noting between August 17 and 19 2024, threat actors used two “recently established” customer accounts to access the company infrastructure.

“We detected this activity on August 19 and immediately took steps to terminate the access,” the company said in the letter. “An investigation was promptly launched with assistance from external security experts,” it added. The investigation determined that the crooks obtained information “related to a small subset” of Fidelity customers, and did not access anyone’s accounts.

Identity theft monitoring

This “small subset” counts exactly 77,099 customers, including 337 Maine residents. The letter does not detail the type of information stolen, but TechCrunch found a separate filing with the Massachusetts attorney general, in which it was said the hackers obtained people’s Social Security numbers and driver’s licenses - more than enough information to engage in phishing, identity theft, or possibly even wire fraud.

To access the data, the crooks allegedly created two customer accounts, and used them to submit fraudulent requests to an internal database, which held images of documents belonging to Fidelity customers.

So far, there has been no evidence of the data being misused in the wild, but Fidelity isn’t taking any chances. All affected individuals are being offered credit monitoring and identity restoration services, free of charge, for 24 months.

Fidelity Investments is a major financial services company, offering investment management, retirement planning, brokerage, and wealth management services. The firm manages over $4 trillion in assets for more than 40 million individual investors, institutions, and financial advisors.

Fidelity provides access to mutual funds, ETFs, and a wide array of investment products.

Via TechCrunch

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Pinterest and Threads seem convinced I’m in my 60s or going through menopause. Spend enough time in the bizarro worlds of these feeds, and you can start to believe anything.

The US defense research agency is funding three universities to engineer reef structures that will be colonized by corals and bivalves and absorb the power of future storms.

The first Intel Copilot+ PCs are arriving now thanks to the Core Ultra Series 2 CPUs, and the chip giant came ready to fight.

The iPhone 16 Pro has many positive traits, but one thing it does lack is personality – and a new transparent mod of the phone has just shown us how much more interesting it could be if Apple released its design handbrake.

Crafting transparent versions of Apple's latest phones is something of an annual tradition for the Phone Repair Guru YouTube channel, but this year's might be its best yet.

The see-through mod naturally has echoes of the Nothing Phone 2, but the iPhone 16 Pro looks particularly good as it has "some of the most stunning internals we've ever seen in an iPhone", as the channel notes.

You naturally can't buy the transparent 16 Pro as the modding technique is a pretty involved, warranty-busting process. As you can see in the full video below, once the various components have been stripped from the back plate, there's the not-inconsiderable task of removing its recycled aluminum finish.

That's where gallium comes in – a metal with a low melting point that also looks very Terminator T-1000, it can seemingly eat through aluminum for breakfast. So the channel applied it to the iPhone 16 Pro and the aluminum (eventually) peeled away like paper, leaving them to clean up and remove the remaining paint to create a transparent back plate.

All very 'do not try this at home', but the impressive result – with a metallic battery, copper-colored wireless charger, and labeled taptic engine – has now got us craving an iMac G3-style iPhone.

Echoes of the iMac G3

There is a close-to-zero chance of Apple releasing a transparent iPhone Pro, even though it did pioneer a similar kind of translucent look with the iMac G3 back in 1998. Still, all we really want for the Pro series is for it to get some of the bolder colors seen on the base iPhone 16 series.

Our recent WhatsApp poll asking which iPhone 16 models you were planning to buy saw way more engagement for the base iPhone 16 models, with the ultramarine shade beating teal and black.

Despite the arrival of the 'Desert titanium' shade on the iPhone 16 Pro series this year, its colors are otherwise very drab. While that certainly makes them more business-friendly, there are surely a significant number of Pro buyers who simply want a fun shade alongside the flagship model's bonus features like 5x optical zoom.

There are some early signs that Apple may have held back some bolder colors as part of its upgrade strategy for next year's the iPhone 17 Pro series, with a leaker suggesting that a Teal Titanium, Green Titanium or Dark Green Titanium shade could be in the pipeline for 2025.

We'd take that speculation with a hefty pinch of salt, but it would certainly be an improvement – even if Apple leaves the transparent offerings to modders.

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A major call center service provider in the Middle East has lost an enormous amount of private customer data after being hacked.

Researchers from Resecurity spotted the hackers trying to sell the stolen database on the dark web, via a new thread on the infamous Breached forums, where threat actors usually share resources, buy and sell information, and communicate.

In the thread, the seller said they breached a major AI-powered cloud call center in Saudi Arabia, and accessed its management dashboard, where they found more than 10 million conversations between consumers, operators, and AI bots. These conversations, the researchers further explained, contained things like national ID documents, which the crooks can easily exfiltrate and sort, creating a powerful database of fresh, relevant information.

Selling access

“Selling: 1k enterprise customers, 1m end users (not customers, but users who use their chats on various services, like banks, airlines, etc.), 10m+ chat messages/communications, GBs of documents (sent by customers and attached when chatting with AI assistant) - will give as a bonus, access to admin panel + VPN ( engineer)”, the ad reads.

This is incredibly valuable information for threat actors, who can later use it in phishing attacks, identity theft, social engineering attacks, and other malicious activity.

“Big data and access useful (sic) for social engineering and other maneuvers, especially when you are in session with client. VPN is needed to access it under engineer,” the ad concludes.

The database is being sold for $15,000, to be paid in either bitcoin or monero.

Resecurity said that the attackers were spotted and quickly removed from the systems, so the access being sold with the database is most likely not valid any more. However, the damage from the stolen database remains.

Via InfoSecurity

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The Sonos Arc Ultra is truly the worst-kept secret in tech right now, with the new soundbar leaking everything like water from a paper bucket. Only a few days ago, Best Buy seemed to reveal that it would have a price of $999, and now more retailers may have given us the release date.

Spotted by Redditors, Belgian retailers Fnac, Vandenborre, and MediaMarkt apparently had pre-order pages visible for the Sonos Arc Ultra and the Sonos Sub 4, promising a release date of 29 October 2024 for both.

The pre-orders offer a price of €999 for the soundbar, and €899 for the Sonos Sub 4 – all of which are in line with expectations.

(Image credit: Reddit / Fabulous-Rise1057)

October 29 is coming up fast, so we may get official information about the new soundbar imminently – early next week will be two weeks from that launch date, so I wouldn't be surprised to see something arrive then.

On top of this release date revelation, a load more images that are claimed to be of the Arc Ultra have leaked on Reddit, too. There's a combination of product shots and lifestyle images, and they appear to confirm that the soundbar will work with the Sonos Ace headphones (not that anyone had any doubt about that, especially since they were updated to work with the Beam and Ray soundbars).

Sonos Arc Ultra leak (again) from r/sonos

The Sonos Arc Ultra is exciting because it's claimed to be the first product with a new kind of speaker tech, which Sonos appears to be calling 'Sound Motion' based on previous leaks, but was previously known as Mayht Heart Motion before Sonos bought the company.

These drivers are much smaller than traditional speaker designs, but can apparently deliver the same power and depth. They're said to be used here, though we don't know in exactly what form yet – the likelihood is that they'll provide much more bass and mid-range power from the bar.

The original Sonos Arc still rates among the best soundbars you can buy today, and I've written before why I think the Arc's successor could be one of the best tech releases of the year. And if Sonos can keep its improved app on its positive track by adding features and fixing the reliability, we could be onto a real winner here. Looks like we'll find out one way or the other soon.

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Intel has just launched its Core Ultra 200S processors – the new generation for desktop PCs – and the company has informed us that laptop chips for this Arrow Lake family aren’t far away.

In fact, the Arrow Lake notebook CPUs will arrive in Q1 2025, in next-gen laptops, specifically with Core Ultra 200H and Core Ultra 200HX flavors, which are mainstream and enthusiast (very powerful) processors respectively.

These models will sit alongside Lunar Lake laptop (Core Ultra 200V) chips which have recently been sprung on the market (impressing a good many folks for one reason or another).

Core Ultra 200H chips will top out at 14-cores, with the flagship sporting 6 performance cores and 8 efficiency cores. As for Core Ultra 200HX, that will run up to 24-cores with 8 performance cores and 16 efficiency cores.

Expect to see new laptops packing Arrow Lake CPUs at CES 2025 (where we might also get Nvidia’s next-gen notebook GPUs, and other mobile goodies besides).

Analysis: Clearing up any CPU confusion

Confused about how Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake laptop silicon fits together, and what’s different? Let’s outline the main differences between the two, and indeed between the H and HX takes on Arrow Lake.

Lunar Lake majors in power-efficiency and is designed for thin-and-light premium laptops, whereas Arrow Lake will offer more in the way of performance and raw grunt, particularly with those top-end HX CPUs. (Although Arrow Lake is still very efficient compared to Raptor Lake Refresh, of course, as we heard all about at the desktop launch yesterday).

That said, on the AI side, things are a bit different. Lunar Lake features a much more powerful NPU with 40+ TOPS – so it qualifies as a CPU that can be the engine of a Copilot+ laptop – but Arrow Lake has an NPU that can only muster 13 TOPS (a measure of AI performance).

However, the total AI performance from the Core Ultra 200H family will be seriously beefy, as the integrated GPU offers 77 TOPS, plus 9 TOPS from the processor – all of these components join the NPU in dealing with AI workloads – giving a total of 99 TOPS. The HX series chips, however, have a GPU that only offers 8 TOPS, plus 15 for the CPU, for a total of 36 TOPS for these processors.

So, the Core Ultra 200H chips have a considerably more powerful integrated GPU (running with up to 8 Xe Cores, as opposed to 4 Xe Cores with the HX series) and XeSS support is in the mix. With 24-cores and relatively fast clock speeds, though, the Core Ultra 200HX will be formidable chips for the best gaming laptops (and the likes of workstations). These are basically the notebook equivalents of the freshly revealed desktop Core Ultra 200S chips – except these mobile CPUs come in a more compact package (a third smaller, in fact).

The idea is that HX processors will be paired with a heavyweight discrete GPU in gaming laptops, where integrated performance isn’t going to cut it. (Although we’re slowly moving towards a world where that statement is increasingly less true, it must be said – though a separate GPU is always going to be more powerful, of course).

Via Wccftech

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