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A handful of notable mortgage rates inched up. Here's what experts say is next for the housing market this year.

Supplement Security Income recipients may want to file a tax return for this year. We'll tell you why you might want to and the benefits you could get from it.

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Donald Trump's first administration advanced rules forcing hospitals and insurers to reveal prices for medical services. Employers don't want to risk backtracking during Trump's second administration.

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• Lead architect of the PS5 and PS5 Pro, Mark Cerny, has announced a new collaboration between Sony and AMD codenamed 'Amethyst'
• The first goal is to create "a more ideal architecture for machine learning", as well as develop a high quality set of CNNs for game graphics
• Cerny said this collaboration is "multi-year" but we shouldn't "expect a massive hardware announcement immediately coming out of this"

PlayStation console architect Mark Cerny has announced a new collaboration between Sony and AMD codenamed 'Amethyst' to develop machine learning technology across various devices.

Mark Cerny, lead architect of the PS5 and PS5 Pro, presented a technical seminar yesterday, offering a deep dive into the mid-generation console and its new PSSR (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution) technology.

During the presentation, Cerny also revealed that Sony is furthering its current partnership with AMD - which already collaborates on the PS5 and PS5 Pro's GPUs - to develop machine learning in games in a new project called 'Amethyst'.

"With Amethyst, we’ve started on another long journey and are combining our expertise with two goals in mind," Mark Cerny said.

"The first goal is a more ideal architecture for machine learning. Something capable of generalized processing of neural networks but particularly good at the lightweight CNNs needed for game graphics and something focused around achieving that Holy Grail of fully-fused networks."

Cerny explained that the second goal is to develop "in parallel, a set of high quality CNNs for game graphics" to will help further graphical capability.

"Both SIE and AMD will independently have the ability to draw from this collection of network architectures and training strategies, and these components should be key in increasing the richness of game graphics as well as enabling more extensive use of ray tracing and path tracing," he said.

Cerny also spoke to Digital Foundry in a Q&A following the presentation to discuss more about the AMD collaboration. The developer said that it's a "deep collaboration" that's "multi-year", but that we shouldn't "expect a massive hardware announcement immediately coming out of this".

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• Supposedly leaked renders show the front of both the Samsung Galaxy S25 Plus and Ultra
• The designs appear similar to the S24 line, but with curvier corners on the Ultra
• This leak lines up exactly with previous leaked images

You can tell we’re getting close to the launch of the Samsung Galaxy S25 series, as there are seemingly new leaks about these phones every single day. Indeed, today’s leak takes the form of some renders showing the front of the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra and Galaxy S25 Plus.

Shared by Evan Blass – a leaker with a superb track record – these images don’t really show anything new, but they provide yet more evidence that Samsung will be changing the design of the Ultra by giving the new model curvier corners than the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra.

That said, the corners are still less curvy in these images than those of the Samsung Galaxy S25 Plus, presumably so that it will still be easy to distinguish Samsung’s top phone from the rest of the S25 line.

The Galaxy S25 Plus (left) and the S25 Ultra (right) (Image credit: Evan Blass)

Corners aside, you can see in these images that the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra unsurprisingly has slightly smaller bezels than the S25 Plus. In fact, we’d recently heard that the Galaxy S25 Ultra might have the smallest bezels of any phone.

You can also see that both phones have a single-lens punch-hole camera at the top-center of the screen, which is in line with their predecessors.

Similar from the back, too

Sadly, we can’t see the back of the phones here, but previous leaks – including photos of the Samsung Galaxy S25 Plus and renders of the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra – have shown us their rear panels. Going by those, these phones look a lot like their predecessors from the back, albeit with darker rings around the camera lenses.

So, we’re not expecting drastic design changes, but of course the Samsung Galaxy S25 colors probably will differ from those of the Samsung Galaxy S24 series, and bigger changes are expected on the inside – including the likely presence of a top-end Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset.

The Samsung Galaxy S25, Galaxy S25 Plus, and Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra are all widely rumored to be launching on January 22, so we should know exactly what they have to offer soon.

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• The OnePlus Open 2 could have a huge 5,900mAh battery
• Improved performance and waterproofing are also tipped
• We should see the phone show up in early 2025

Having loved the OnePlus Open, we're ready and waiting for the OnePlus Open 2 to be revealed in the first few months of 2025 – and the latest leak around the foldable has raised the anticipation level up a few more notches.

According to well-known tipster @chunvn8888, the OnePlus Open 2 is going to come with some key hardware upgrades. Those upgrades include a 5,900mAh battery (up from 4,805mAh in the first model), which would be the biggest battery in a foldable to date.

That's not all: the handset is set to come with IPX9 waterproofing – taking this foldable phone from "splash resistant" with the 2023 model to truly waterproof for the 2025 edition – and the top-end Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset from Qualcomm.

The phone will apparently be led by a 50MP camera on the rear, with the same 3x optical zoom as previously. The cameras on the back are said to be arranged in a W shape, so it seems something of a redesign is on the way as well.

The rumors so far

OPPO/OnePlus foldable will have a big comeback sometime during Q1/2025, and ofc global release is guaranteed. It will pack the biggest battery size for a foldable (5900mAh) in one of the slimmist form on market , IPX9 debut, 50MP W shape IMX882 3x tele, 8 Elite SoC.December 19, 2024

This new information lines up pretty well with the OnePlus Open 2 rumors we've heard so far, though a previous leak put the battery size at a mere 5,700mAh. That leak said the new phone would be slimmer than its predecessor too, which is backed up by @chunvn8888.

The latest tip also mentions a launch window of Q1 2025 – so January, February, or March. Again, that's something we've heard before, so it's looking increasingly likely that the foldable will break cover before we're too far through next year.

In our OnePlus Open review, we described it as the first foldable we'd seen that didn't compromise on anything – though since then the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 and Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold have arrived to give OnePlus some new competition.

It certainly sounds as though the OnePlus Open 2 is going to be a major upgrade on the first model, and the kind of phone that's going to find a place in our best foldables list. As soon as anything is made official, we'll let you know.

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• Samsung OLED model numbers for 2025 may have leaked
• It reveals sizes as well as names
• Models are moving from D to F and we don't know why

It's quite common for new tech to leak when it's submitted to regulatory bodies for approval: the databases of those bodies are typically open to the public, and that means eagle-eyed tech watchers can often find new model numbers and other details well in advance of any official launch. And it looks like three Samsung smart TVs have just arrived on one of those databases with a surprising change.

According to DisplaySpecifications (via Notebookcheck), there are references to multiple new Samsung OLED TVs in the South Korean regulatory database with a product code ending in F, rather than the D used for 2024 TVs: the S85F, the S90F and the S95F. And that raises an interesting question: what happened to the E TVs?

What the F?

The current crop of Samsung TVs have model designation D, such as the Samsung S90D OLED. But according to the records in the database, Samsung is skipping E altogether. We have no idea why.

The original actually report suggests that the S85F TV may use QD-OLED panels in some cases, but we'd be surprised if that’s the case: the S85 models are usually W-OLED to keep them affordable and we'd be amazed if that changes in 2025

We're expecting the S90F to continue to use a mix of QD-OLED and W-OLED in different sizes in 2025, based on the sizes listed here.

According to the report, you can expect the S85F series to come in 55, 65, 77 and 83 inches in the US and from 55 to 77 inches in Europe.

The S90F will come in sizes from 48 to 83 inches in the US and the same in Europe; and the S95F series will range from 55 to 83 inches in the US and Europe. If you've been following the sizes of the Samsung S95D, you might note that the 83-inch size is new here, and since Samsung doesn't mix QD-OLED and W-OLED panels in this model, it suggests that the leak of an 83-inch QD-OLED last month from Samsung's own parts database is going to result in a new size of elite TV.

There's no information about these TVs beyond the surprise name jump and the sizes, but we're expecting to see the new models unveiled at CES 2025. Samsung's had a great run among the best OLED TVs, so we're excited to see the new models.

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