It's "the new generation of Tablet for simplicity and privacy..." according to its Kickstarter page. "Top-tier performance, lightweight design and completely Google-free." And it's already reached its funding goal of $53,312 — climbing to over $75,000 from 115 backers with another 26 days still to go. 9to5Linux reports: Volla, the maker of the Volla Phone smartphones, has launched a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter for their first tablet device, the Volla Tablet, which will also support the Ubuntu Touch mobile OS.

Featuring a 12.3-inch Quad HD display with 2650Ã--1600 pixel resolution, the Volla Tablet uses a powerful MediaTek Gaming G99 8-core processor, 12 GB RAM, and 256 GB internal storage. It also comes with a long-lasting 10,000 mAh battery, 2G/3G/4G cellular network support, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a 13+5 MP main camera.

By default, Volla Tablet ships with Volla OS 13, Volla's in-house operating system based on the free Android Open Source Project (AOSP), but users will be able to buy the tablet with Ubuntu Touch featuring built-in convergence and support for Android apps with WayDroid container.
"Users will also be able to use desktop apps like Firefox or LibreOffice thanks to the help of the Libertine container," according to the article. ("Volla says that Volla Tablet with Ubuntu Touch is ideal for Linux enthusiasts and minimalists seeking a simplified, efficient, and familiar operating system experience.")

Its Kickstarter page points out the tablet even offers options like "hide.me VPN" and private speech recognition that's "cloud-independent for secure, confidential interactions."

("For U.S. users, please note that only roaming SIM cards from abroad can be used.")

Today is Record Store Day, which according to Wikipedia is happening in the U.S., the UK, Ireland, Mexico, Europe, Japan and Australia.

An anonymous reader shared this report from The Los Angeles Times: 420 isn't just for stoners. This year, Record Store Day — the worldwide celebration for independent record shops that typically happens every third Saturday of April — falls on the storied day... [A]udiophiles and vinyl collectors will converge at participating stores to search for one-of-a-kind wax and CD releases by artists new and old, along with other one-of-a-kind items....

This year's event brings in roughly 400 anticipated titles including a live recording of Talking Heads from a 1977 performance (featuring seven previously unheard songs), a 12-inch vinyl release of Daft Punk's "Something About Us (Love Theme From Interstella 5555)", an unreleased live solo recording of "The Godmother of Rock n' Roll" by Sister Rosetta Tharpe (from 1966) and a 10-year anniversary edition of Freddie Gibbs & Madlib's "Piñata." Also, this year's Record Store Day ambassador, Paramore, will release a remix version of its 2023 album, "This Is Why" and Cheech and Chong will reissue the soundtrack for their 1978 film, "Up in Smoke," on smoky green vinyl just in time for 4/20...

[E]ven if you're not interested in copping a special release, it's still worth checking out what your favorite record store has to offer on April 20. You'll find events like in-store DJ sets, pop-up shopping experiences and in-store performances.
The event features Record Store Day exclusives (not otherwise available), as well as specially-pressed commemorative editions (which will see a later release on plain black vinyl). American Songwriter lists some of the highlights:

• A special limited edition "miniature turntable" and four 3-inch singles of the Beatles' songs played 60 years ago on the Ed Sullivan show.

• A four-LP set of a 1989 Grateful Dead concert

• A limited edition "expanded" edition of Elton John's album Caribou with a disc of bonus tracks.

• A 12-inch EP previewing the upcoming box set edition of John Lennon's Mind Games album, including a song Lennon wrote for a 1973 Ringo Starr album which also featured George Harrison.

• A white-vinyl pressing of seven Rolling Stones tracks recorded last October — including the live debut of four songs later released on their new album Hackney Diamonds. (One track is a duet with Lady Gaga)

You can see the full list here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Atlantic: In October 2003, Mark Zuckerberg created his first viral site: not Facebook, but FaceMash. Then a college freshman, he hacked into Harvard's online dorm directories, gathered a massive collection of students' headshots, and used them to create a website on which Harvard students could rate classmates by their attractiveness, literally and figuratively head-to-head. The site, a mean-spirited prank recounted in the opening scene of The Social Network, got so much traction so quickly that Harvard shut down his internet access within hours. The math that powered FaceMash -- and, by extension, set Zuckerberg on the path to building the world's dominant social-media empire -- was reportedly, of all things, a formula for ranking chess players: the Elo system.

Fundamentally, what an Elo rating does is predict the outcome of chess matches by assigning every player a number that fluctuates based purely on performance. If you beat a slightly higher-ranked player, your rating goes up a little, but if you beat a much higher-ranked player, your rating goes up a lot (and theirs, conversely, goes down a lot). The higher the rating, the more matches you should win. That is what Elo was designed for, at least. FaceMash and Zuckerberg aside, people have deployed Elo ratings for many sports -- soccer, football, basketball -- and for domains as varied as dating, finance, and primatology. If something can be turned into a competition, it has probably been Elo-ed. Somehow, a simple chess algorithm has become an all-purpose tool for rating everything. In other words, when it comes to the preferred way to rate things, Elo ratings have the highest Elo rating. [...]

Elo ratings don't inherently have anything to do with chess. They're based on a simple mathematical formula that works just as well for any one-on-one, zero-sum competition -- which is to say, pretty much all sports. In 1997, a statistician named Bob Runyan adapted the formula to rank national soccer teams -- a project so successful that FIFA eventually adopted an Elo system for its official rankings. Not long after, the statistician Jeff Sagarin applied Elo to rank NFL teams outside their official league standings. Things really took off when the new ESPN-owned version of Nate Silver's 538 launched in 2014 and began making Elo ratings for many different sports. Some sports proved trickier than others. NBA basketball in particular exposed some of the system's shortcomings, Neil Paine, a stats-focused sportswriter who used to work at 538, told me. It consistently underrated heavyweight teams, for example, in large part because it struggled to account for the meaninglessness of much of the regular season and the fact that either team might not be trying all that hard to win a given game. The system assumed uniform motivation across every team and every game. Pretty much anything, it turns out, can be framed as a one-on-one, zero-sum game. Arpad Emmerich Elo, creator of the Elo rating system, understood the limitations of his invention. "It is a measuring tool, not a device of reward or punishment," he once remarked. "It is a means to compare performances, assess relative strength, not a carrot waved before a rabbit, or a piece of candy given to a child for good behavior."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Today Meta unleashed its ChatGPT competitor, Meta AI, across its apps and as a standalone. The company boasts that it is running on its latest, greatest AI model, Llama 3, which was trained on "data of the highest quality"! A dataset seven times larger than Llama2! And includes 4 times more code! What is that training data? There the company is less loquacious.

Meta said the 15 trillion tokens on which its trained came from "publicly available sources." Which sources? Meta told The Verge that it didn't include Meta user data, but didn't give much more in the way of specifics. It did mention that it includes AI-generated data, or synthetic data: "we used Llama 2 to generate the training data for the text-quality classifiers that are powering Llama 3." There are plenty of known issues with synthetic or AI-created data, foremost of which is that it can exacerbate existing issues with AI, because it's liable to spit out a more concentrated version of any garbage it is ingesting.

An anonymous reader shares a report: iPerf is a fairly popular cross-platform tool that is used by many to measure network performance and diagnose any potential issues in this area. The open-source utility is maintained by an organization called Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) and officially supports Linux, Unix, and Windows. However, Microsoft has now published a detailed blog post explaining why you should not use the latest version, iPerf3, on Windows installations.

Microsoft has highlighted three key reasons to discourage the use of iPerf3 on Windows. The first is that ESnet does not support this version on Windows, and recommends iPerf2 instead. On its website, ESnet has emphasized that CentOS 7 Linux, FreeBSD 11, and macOS 10.12 are the only supported platforms. Another very important reason not to use iPerf3 on Windows is that it does not make native OS calls. Instead, it leverages Cygwin as an emulation layer, which obviously comes with a performance penalty. This alone means that iPerf3 on Windows isn't really an ideal candidate for benchmarking your network. While Microsoft has praised the maintainers who are trying to get iPerf3 to run on Windows via emulation, another flaw with this approach is that some advanced networking options simply aren't available on Windows or may behave in unexpected ways.

Korean newspaper KED Global: Executives at all Samsung Group units will work six days a week from as early as this week in a shift to emergency mode. The move comes as the won's sharp depreciation, rising oil prices and high borrowing costs aggravate business uncertainties after some of the group's mainstay businesses delivered poorer-than-expected results in 2023. The executives of Samsung Electronics Co., including those in the manufacturing and sales divisions, will work either on Saturday or Sunday following the regular five-day work week, according to Samsung Group officials.

They will review their business strategies and may modify them to adapt to the changing business environment amid mounting gepolitical risks from the prolonged war between Russia and Ukraine and escalating tensions in the Middle East. "Considering that performance of our major units, including Samsung Electronics Co., fell short of expectations in 2023, we are introducing the six-day work week for executives to inject a sense of crisis and make all-out efforts to overcome it," said a Samsung Group company executive.

Top management at Samsing Display Co., Samsung Electro-Mechanics Co. and Samsung SDS Co. will adopt the six-day work week as early as this week. Samsung Life Insurance Co. and other financial services firms under the Samsung Group will likely join them soon. Executives of Samsung C&T Corp., Samsung Heavy Industries Co. and Samsung E&A Co. have already been voluntarily working six days a week since the start of this year.

Michael Larabel reports via Phoronix: With the Framework 16 laptop one of the performance pieces I've been meaning to carry out has been seeing out Linux performs against Microsoft Windows 11 for this AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS powered modular/upgradeable laptop. Recently getting around to it in my benchmarking queue, I also compared the performance of Ubuntu 23.10 to the near final Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on this laptop up against a fully-updated Microsoft Windows 11 installation. The Framework 16 review unit as a reminder was configured with the 8-core / 16-thread AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS Zen 4 SoC with Radeon RX 7700S graphics, a 512GB SN810 NVMe SSD, MediaTek MT7922 WiFi, and a 2560 x 1600 display.

In the few months of testing out the Framework 16 predominantly under Linux it's been working out very well. With also having a Windows 11 partition as shipped by Framework, after updating that install it made for an interesting comparison against the Ubuntu 23.10 and Ubuntu 24.04 performance. The same Framework 16 AMD laptop was used throughout all of the testing for looking at the out-of-the-box performance across Microsoft Windows 11, Ubuntu 23.10, and the near-final state of Ubuntu 24.04. [...]

Out of 101 benchmarks carried out on all three operating systems with the Framework 16 laptop, Ubuntu 24.04 was the fastest in 67% of those tests, the prior Ubuntu 23.10 led in 22% (typically with slim margins to 24.04), and then Microsoft Windows 11 was the front-runner just 10% of the time... If taking the geomean of all 101 benchmark results, Ubuntu 23.10 was 16% faster than Microsoft Windows 11 while Ubuntu 24.04 enhanced the Ubuntu Linux performance by 3% to yield a 20% advantage over Windows 11 on this AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS laptop. Ubuntu 24.04 is looking very good in the performance department and will see its stable release next week.

WhatsApp users in the U.S. will soon see support for real-time AI image generation. The Verge reports: As soon as you start typing a text-to-image prompt in a chat with Meta AI, you'll see how the image changes as you add more detail about what you want to create. In the example shared by Meta, a user types in the prompt, "Imagine a soccer game on mars." The generated image quickly changes from a typical soccer player to showing an entire soccer field on a Martian landscape. If you have access to the beta, you can try out the feature for yourself by opening a chat with Meta AI and then start a prompt with the word "Imagine."

Additionally, Meta says its Meta Llama 3 model can now produce "sharper and higher quality" images and is better at showing text. You can also ask Meta AI to animate any images you provide, allowing you to turn them into a GIF to share with friends. Along with availability on WhatsApp, real-time image generation is also available to US users through Meta AI for the web. Further reading: Meta Releases Llama 3 AI Models, Claiming Top Performance

Meta debuted a new version of its powerful Llama AI model, its latest effort to keep pace with similar technology from companies like OpenAI, X and Google. The company describes Llama 3 8B and Llama 3 70B, containing 8 billion and 70 billion parameters respectively, as a "major leap" in performance compared to their predecessors.

Meta claims that the Llama 3 models, trained on custom-built 24,000 GPU clusters, are among the best-performing generative AI models available for their respective parameter counts. The company supports this claim by citing the models' scores on popular AI benchmarks such as MMLU, ARC, and DROP, which attempt to measure knowledge, skill acquisition, and reasoning abilities. Despite the ongoing debate about the usefulness and validity of these benchmarks, they remain one of the few standardized methods for evaluating AI models. Llama 3 8B outperforms other open-source models like Mistral's Mistral 7B and Google's Gemma 7B on at least nine benchmarks, showcasing its potential in various domains such as biology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, and commonsense reasoning.

TechCrunch adds: Now, Mistral 7B and Gemma 7B aren't exactly on the bleeding edge (Mistral 7B was released last September), and in a few of benchmarks Meta cites, Llama 3 8B scores only a few percentage points higher than either. But Meta also makes the claim that the larger-parameter-count Llama 3 model, Llama 3 70B, is competitive with flagship generative AI models including Gemini 1.5 Pro, the latest in Google's Gemini series.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: In a major clean energy benchmark, wind, solar, and hydro exceeded 100% of demand on California's main grid for 30 of the past 38 days. Stanford University professor of civil and environmental engineering Mark Z. Jacobson has been tracking California's renewables performance, and he shares his findings on Twitter (X) when the state breaks records. Jacobson notes that supply exceeds demand for "0.25-6 h per day," and that's an important fact. The continuity lies not in renewables running the grid for the entire day but in the fact that it's happening on a consistent daily basis, which has never been achieved before.

At the two-week record mark, Ian Magruder at Rewiring America made this great point on LinkedIn: "And what makes it even better is that California has the largest grid-connected battery storage facility in the world (came online in January ...), meaning those batteries were filling up with excess energy from the sun all afternoon today and are now deploying as we speak to offset a good chunk of the methane gas generation that California still uses overnight." On April 2, the California Independent System Operator (ISO) recommended 26 new transmission projects worth $6.1 billion, with a big number being devoted to offshore wind. In response, Jacobson predicted on April 4 that California will entirely be on renewables and battery storage 24/7 by 2035.

Top takeaways from Stanford's new AI Index Report [PDF]:
1. AI beats humans on some tasks, but not on all. AI has surpassed human performance on several benchmarks, including some in image classification, visual reasoning, and English understanding. Yet it trails behind on more complex tasks like competition-level mathematics, visual commonsense reasoning and planning.
2. Industry continues to dominate frontier AI research. In 2023, industry produced 51 notable machine learning models, while academia contributed only 15. There were also 21 notable models resulting from industry-academia collaborations in 2023, a new high.
3. Frontier models get way more expensive. According to AI Index estimates, the training costs of state-of-the-art AI models have reached unprecedented levels. For example, OpenAI's GPT-4 used an estimated $78 million worth of compute to train, while Google's Gemini Ultra cost $191 million for compute.
4. The United States leads China, the EU, and the U.K. as the leading source of top AI models. In 2023, 61 notable AI models originated from U.S.-based institutions, far outpacing the European Union's 21 and China's 15.
5. Robust and standardized evaluations for LLM responsibility are seriously lacking. New research from the AI Index reveals a significant lack of standardization in responsible AI reporting. Leading developers, including OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, primarily test their models against different responsible AI benchmarks. This practice complicates efforts to systematically compare the risks and limitations of top AI models.
6. Generative AI investment skyrockets. Despite a decline in overall AI private investment last year, funding for generative AI surged, nearly octupling from 2022 to reach $25.2 billion. Major players in the generative AI space, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Hugging Face, and Inflection, reported substantial fundraising rounds.
7. The data is in: AI makes workers more productive and leads to higher quality work. In 2023, several studies assessed AI's impact on labor, suggesting that AI enables workers to complete tasks more quickly and to improve the quality of their output. These studies also demonstrated AI's potential to bridge the skill gap between low- and high-skilled workers. Still, other studies caution that using AI without proper oversight can lead to diminished performance.
8. Scientific progress accelerates even further, thanks to AI. In 2022, AI began to advance scientific discovery. 2023, however, saw the launch of even more significant science-related AI applications -- from AlphaDev, which makes algorithmic sorting more efficient, to GNoME, which facilitates the process of materials discovery.
9. The number of AI regulations in the United States sharply increases. The number of AIrelated regulations in the U.S. has risen significantly in the past year and over the last five years. In 2023, there were 25 AI-related regulations, up from just one in 2016. Last year alone, the total number of AI-related regulations grew by 56.3%.
10. People across the globe are more cognizant of AI's potential impact -- and more nervous. A survey from Ipsos shows that, over the last year, the proportion of those who think AI will dramatically affect their lives in the next three to five years has increased from 60% to 66%. Moreover, 52% express nervousness toward AI products and services, marking a 13 percentage point rise from 2022. In America, Pew data suggests that 52% of Americans report feeling more concerned than excited about AI, rising from 37% in 2022.

Sony is getting ready to release a more powerful PS5 console, possibly by the end of this year. After reports of leaked PS5 Pro specifications surfaced recently, The Verge has obtained a full list of specs for the upcoming console. From the report: Sources familiar with Sony's plans tell me that developers are already being asked to ensure their games are compatible with this upcoming console, with a focus on improving ray tracing. Codenamed Trinity, the PlayStation 5 Pro model will include a more powerful GPU and a slightly faster CPU mode. All of Sony's changes point to a PS5 Pro that will be far more capable of rendering games with ray tracing enabled or hitting higher resolutions and frame rates in certain titles. Sony appears to be encouraging developers to use graphics features like ray tracing more with the PS5 Pro, with games able to use a "Trinity Enhanced" (PS5 Pro Enhanced) label if they "provide significant enhancements."

Sony expects GPU rendering on the PS5 Pro to be "about 45 percent faster than standard PlayStation 5," according to documents outlining the upcoming console. The PS5 Pro GPU will be larger and use faster system memory to help improve ray tracing in games. Sony is also using a "more powerful ray tracing architecture" in the PS5 Pro, where the speed here is up to three times better than the regular PS5. "Trinity is a high-end version of PlayStation 5," reads one document, with Sony indicating it will continue to sell the standard PS5 after this new model launches. Sony is expecting game developers to have a single package that will support both the PS5 and PS5 Pro consoles, with existing games able to be patched for higher performance.

An anonymous reader shared this report from BleepingComputer: Researchers have demonstrated the "first native Spectre v2 exploit" for a new speculative execution side-channel flaw that impacts Linux systems running on many modern Intel processors. Spectre V2 is a new variant of the original Spectre attack discovered by a team of researchers at the VUSec group from VU Amsterdam. The researchers also released a tool that uses symbolic execution to identify exploitable code segments within the Linux kernel to help with mitigation.

The new finding underscores the challenges in balancing performance optimization with security, which makes addressing fundamental CPU flaws complicated even six years after the discovery of the original Spectre....

As the CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) disclosed yesterday, the new flaw, tracked as CVE-2024-2201, allows unauthenticated attackers to read arbitrary memory data by leveraging speculative execution, bypassing present security mechanisms designed to isolate privilege levels. "An unauthenticated attacker can exploit this vulnerability to leak privileged memory from the CPU by speculatively jumping to a chosen gadget," reads the CERT/CC announcement. "Current research shows that existing mitigation techniques of disabling privileged eBPF and enabling (Fine)IBT are insufficient in stopping BHI exploitation against the kernel/hypervisor."
"For a complete list of impacted Intel processors to the various speculative execution side-channel flaws, check this page updated by the vendor."

China's push to replace foreign technology is now focused on cutting American chip makers out of the country's telecoms systems. From a report: Officials earlier this year directed the nation's largest telecom carriers to phase out foreign processors that are core to their networks by 2027, a move that would hit American chip giants Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, people familiar with the matter said. The deadline given by China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology aims to accelerate efforts by Beijing to halt the use of such core chips in its telecom infrastructure. The regulator ordered state-owned mobile operators to inspect their networks for the prevalence of non-Chinese semiconductors and draft timelines to replace them, the people said.

In the past, efforts to get the industry to wean itself off foreign semiconductors have been hindered by the lack of good domestically made chips. Chinese telecom carriers' procurements show they are switching more to domestic alternatives, a move made possible in part because local chips' quality has improved and their performance has become more stable, the people said. Such an effort will hit Intel and AMD the hardest, they said. The two chip makers have in recent years provided the bulk of the core processors used in networking equipment in China and the world.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Recent headlines have made clear: If AI is doing an impressively good job at a human task, there's a good chance that the task is actually being done by a human. When George Carlin's estate sued the creators of a podcast who said they used AI to create a standup routine in the late comedian's style, the podcasters claimed that the script had actually been generated by a human named Chad. (The two sides recently settled the suit.) A company making AI-powered voice interfaces for fast-food drive-thrus can only complete 30% of jobs without the help of a human reviewing its work. Amazon is dropping its automated "Just Walk Out" checkout systems from new stores -- a system that relied on far more human verification than it was hoping for.

We've seen this before -- though it may already be lost to Silicon Valley's pathologically short memory. Back in 2015, AI chatbots were the hot thing. Tech giants and startups alike pitched them as always-available, always-chipper, always-reliable assistants. One startup, x.ai, advertised an AI assistant who could read your emails and schedule your meetings. Another, GoButler, offered to book your flights or order your fries through a delivery app. Facebook also tested a do-anything concierge service called M, which could answer seemingly any question, do almost any task, and draw you pictures on demand. But for all of those services, the "AI assistant" was often just a person. Back in 2016, I wrote a story about this and interviewed workers whose job it was to be the human hiding behind the bot, making sure the bot never made a mistake or spoke nonsense.

Apple, aiming to boost sluggish computer sales, is preparing to overhaul its entire Mac line with a new family of in-house processors designed to highlight AI. Bloomberg News: The company, which released its first Macs with M3 chips five months ago, is already nearing production of the next generation -- the M4 processor -- according to people with knowledge of the matter. The new chip will come in at least three main varieties, and Apple is looking to update every Mac model with it, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans haven't been announced.

The new Macs are underway at a critical time. After peaking in 2022, Mac sales fell 27% in the last fiscal year, which ended in September. In the holiday period, revenue from the computer line was flat. Apple attempted to breathe new life into the Mac business with an M3-focused launch event last October, but those chips didn't bring major performance improvements over the M2 from the prior year. Apple also is playing catch-up in AI, where it's seen as a laggard to Microsoft, Alphabet's Google and other tech peers. The new chips are part of a broader push to weave AI capabilities into all its products. Apple is aiming to release the updated computers beginning late this year and extending into early next year.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Owners of Intel's latest 13th and 14th Gen Core i9 desktop processors have been noticing an increase in game crashes in recent months. It's happening in games like The Finals, Fortnite, and Tekken 8, and has even led Epic Games to issue a support notice to encourage Intel Core i9 13900K and 14900K owners to adjust BIOS settings. Now, Intel says it's investigating the reports. "Intel is aware of problems that occur when executing certain tasks on 13th and 14th generation core processors for desktop PCs, and is analyzing them with major affiliates," says an Intel spokesperson in a statement to ZDNet Korea.

The crashes vary in severity depending on the game, with some titles producing an "out of memory" error, others simply exiting out to the desktop, and some locking up a machine entirely. Most of the games affected seem to be based on the Unreal Engine, which could point to a stability issue that Intel needs to address. The only workarounds that seem to improve stability involve manually downclocking or undervolting Intel's processors. Epic Games has suggested changing the SVID behavior to Intel Fail Safe in the BIOS settings of Asus, Gigabyte, or MSI motherboards. Custom PC builders Power GPU recommend reducing the performance core ratio limit, which seems to help with stability in certain games.

Google Cloud on Tuesday joined AWS and Azure in announcing its first custom-built Arm processor, dubbed Axion. From a report: Based on Arm's Neoverse 2 designs, Google says its Axion instances offer 30% better performance than other Arm-based instances from competitors like AWS and Microsoft and up to 50% better performance and 60% better energy efficiency than comparable X86-based instances. [...] "Technical documentation, including benchmarking and architecture details, will be available later this year," Google spokesperson Amanda Lam said. Maybe the chips aren't even ready yet? After all, it took Google a while to announce Arm-chips in the cloud, especially considering that Google has long built its in-house TPU AI chips and, more recently, custom Arm-based mobile chips for its Pixel phones. AWS launched its Graviton chips back in 2018.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft is getting ready to fully unveil its vision for "AI PCs" next month at an event in Seattle. Sources familiar with Microsoft's plans tell The Verge that Microsoft is confident that a round of new Arm-powered Windows laptops will beat Apple's M3-powered MacBook Air both in CPU performance and AI-accelerated tasks. After years of failed promises from Qualcomm, Microsoft believes the upcoming Snapdragon X Elite processors will finally offer the performance it has been looking for to push Windows on Arm much more aggressively. Microsoft is now betting big on Qualcomm's upcoming Snapdragon X Elite processors, which will ship in a variety of Windows laptops this year and Microsoft's latest consumer-focused Surface hardware.

Microsoft is so confident in these new Qualcomm chips that it's planning a number of demos that will show how these processors will be faster than an M3 MacBook Air for CPU tasks, AI acceleration, and even app emulation. Microsoft claims, in internal documents seen by The Verge, that these new Windows AI PCs will have "faster app emulation than Rosetta 2" -- the application compatibility layer that Apple uses on its Apple Silicon Macs to translate apps compiled for 64-bit Intel processors to Apple's own processors.

App emulation has been a big problem for Windows on Arm over the past decade, but Microsoft did deliver x64 app emulation for Windows 11 more than two years ago. This helps ensure apps can run on Windows on Arm devices when there isn't a native ARM64 version. Native Arm apps are key for improved performance on upcoming Windows on Arm laptops, and Google has just recently released its own ARM64 version of Chrome ready for these upcoming devices.

Slashdot reader Mononymous writes: The latest release of OpenBSD, the FOSS Unix-like operating system focused on correctness and security over features and performance, has been released. This version includes newer driver support, performance improvements, stability fixes, and lots of package updates. One highlight is a complete port of KDE Plasma 5.

You can view the announcement and get the bits at OpenBSD.org.
Phoronix reports that with OpenBSD 7.5 "there is a number of improvements for ARM (AArch64) hardware, never-ending kernel optimizations and other tuning work, countless package updates, and other adjustments to this popular BSD platform."