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It's always gratifying when something promised at CES actually comes to market. That's the case with the Pebble Flow electric trailer that my colleague Sam Rutherford checked out last year's CES. I was able to see the final draft on the show floor this week and was adequately impressed. Like the (four!) other sustainable, electrified tiny homes we saw this year, it was shiny and luxe and decked out in wood tones, glass, metal and white polymers. The main features that drew us to the Flow last year remain intact: sleeping for four, a 45 kWh battery and a 1.1 kW solar panel, full kitchen and bath, a queen-size Murphy bed that transforms into a shared working space and a convertible dinette at the other end. The kitchen faucet even spins 180-degrees and out the window to let you do some washing up outside. The option for the Magic Pack add-on is still here. For an upcharge, it allows the Flow to self-park, automatically hitch itself and provide it's own propulsion from dual motors so it's not such a drag (literally) on the vehicle that's towing it. One of the coolest features is still the glass separating the bathroom from the rest of the cabin. At the push of a button it goes from clear to opaque so you can have some privacy without having to kick your entire family out of the trailer. Amy Skorheim for Engadget As for what's new, those changes were partly sourced from prospective customers. One directive was "more windows," so a skylight was added, along with a larger window at the back. The cupboards are now easier to access by flipping up instead of down. And the overall shape was refined to be more aerodynamic. Walking around in the Flow, everything felt soothing and clean. The bed was so plush I wanted to melt into it. The seating area was inviting and spacious. It was tough to leave this homey pod (especially considering how stupendously hard it is to just find a place to sit down at CES). I don't have a vehicle that can pull a trailer, but I would love to park one of these in my backyard. Even if I never took it on the road, I'd happily hang out in its well-appointed comfort and even (reluctantly) give it up to guests when they visited. Production on the Flow will begin early this year and shipping is scheduled for spring. The option without the motor assist and self-parking features will go for $109,500. If you want the Magic Pack package, that brings your price to $135,500. There's also a "Founders Edition" with a limited-edition color scheme and a few more upgrades going for $175,000. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/evs/cess-pebble-flow-ev-trailer-gets-some-tweaks-ahead-of-its-spring-shipping-date-161502791.html?src=rss
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There was no question that NVIDIA's RTX 5000 GPUs would be one of the biggest stories at CES 2025, and I figured Intel and AMD to arrive with some new hardware of their own. But I didn't expect that each of these companies would, in their own way, be putting the pedal to the metal when it comes to power for their chip designs. After all, we've spent the last few years covering AI PC CPUs that was targeting efficiency more than raw performance. While NVIDIA RTX 5000 GPUs seem to deliver the performance leap we expected over its 2022-era cards, AMD is also redefining what's possible for mobile workstations with its Ryzen AI Max chips, which combine powerful graphics with gobs of integrated memory. Intel isn't sitting still either it's finally moving Arrow Lake into the high-performance and gaming arena with its Core Ultra 200HX chips, which can reach up to 24 cores and 5.5GHz speeds. I'm not just talking about power in the sheer performance sense, either. NVIDIA's $1,999 RTX 5090 requires a 1,000-watt power supply to function and uses up to 575 watts. The Ryzen AI Max chips, meanwhile, could eat up as much as 120-watts. Intel's Core Ultra 200HX chips go as high as 120-watts. Clearly, none of this hardware is meant for anyone concerned about their energy bills or potential laptop battery life. RTX 5090RTX 5080RTX 5070 TiRTX 5070RTX 4090ArchitectureBlackwellBlackwellBlackwellBlackwellLovelaceCUDA cores21,76010,7528,9606,14416,384AI TOPS3,3521,8011,4069881,321Tensor cores5th Gen5th Gen5th Gen5th Gen4th GenRT cores4th Gen4th Gen4th Gen4th Gen3rd GenVRAM32 GB GDDR716 GB GDDR716 GB GDDR712 GB GDDR724 GB GDDR6XMemory bandwidth1,792 GB/sec960 GB/sec896 GB/sec672 GB/sec1,008 GB/secTGP575W360W300W250W450W So what do you get for all of this energy consumption? AMD says the RTX 5090 will deliver roughly twice the performance of its previous flagship, the $1,499 RTX 4090. In a 4K Cyberpunk 2077 demo with full ray tracing, the 4090 hovered around 108 fps while the 5090 was reaching 240 fps. That frame count is a bit controversial, though, since the RTX 5090's DLSS 4 AI upscaling generates three frames for every natively rendered frame. The end result may look smoother to most people, but some gamers might question the integrity of so-called false frames. It's those same AI-generated frames that allow NVIDIA to proclaim that the $549 RTX 5070 could be as powerful as the 4090. That may be true when it comes to pure frames-per-second count, but it certainly won't be for rasterized performance without DLSS 4. AMD's Ryzen AI Max chips aren't aiming for the same sort of graphical heights as NVIDIA's new GPUs, but they're still notable for the sheer amount of hardware they contain. The top-of-the-line Ryzen AI Max+ 395 sports 16 CPU Zen 5 cores, 50 TOPS of AI performance and 40 RDNA 3.5 GPU compute units. According to AMD, it should be on-part with Apple's 14-core M4 Pro chip (and even faster in the Vray benchark), and it's 2.6 times faster in 3D rendering than Intel's Core Ultra 9 288V. AMD In an interview with AMD CVP and product CTO Joe Macri, he told Engadget that the success of Apple Silicon as a major reason why the Ryzen AI Max exists. "What Apple showed was consumers don't care what's inside the box," he said. Macri later noted, "I always knew, because we were building APUs, and I'd been pushing for this big APU forever, that I could build, a system that was smaller, faster, and I could give much higher performance at the same power." AMD also briefly previewed its RDNA 4 graphics at CES, though at this point it's clearly aiming for the mid-range and not NVIDIA's RTX 5090. Notably, AMD will debut a new AI powered upscaling technology in RDNA 4 GPUs, FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 (FSR 4). That should finally give AMD a way to directly compete against NVIDA's DLSS, which for years has looked better than earlier versions of FSR. The first RDNA 4 cards, the Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT, will arrive sometime in the first quarter. Intel's presence at CES 2024 was more muted than the competition, but loyalists will likely appreciate the new Core Ultra 200HX chips. While they scale back NPU performance from its recent AI PC hardware (12 TOPS down from 48 TOPS), the Core Ultra 9 285HX looks like a 24-core beast. It'll be interesting to see how it competes AMD's Ryzen AI 300 hardware, though it likely won't stand a chance against the Ryzen AI Max when paired up with a discrete GPU. Intel This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/nvidia-amd-and-intel-aimed-for-maximum-power-at-ces-2025-150038070.html?src=rss
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Google has teamed up with the Linux Foundation to establish a new initiative called the "Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers." At the moment, most of the money that keeps Chromium, the open-source web browser project that produced the codebase powering Chrome, comes from Google. The company says it has no intention of reducing its contribution going forward, but it also continues to "welcome others stepping up to invest more." Under the Linux Foundation's management, the new initiative aims to fund the open development of Chromium projects and ensure proper support for contributions that could lead to technological advancements. It's also meant to provide a "neutral space" where developers, members of the academia and big industry players can work together. Aside from Google, Microsoft, Meta and Opera have also pledged their support for the initiative. Google said it established the new program after hearing from "many companies and developers about how critical the Chromium project is to their work" and how they would like to give it more than direct engineering support over the years. Chrome is just one of the browsers built on Chromium Microsoft's Edge and Opera are also based on the project's codebase, so their involvement in the initiative doesn't really come as a surprise. It's worth noting that the Department of Justice called for the breakup of Google last year, including a sale of the Chrome web browser. Google said in its announcement that it intends to continue supporting the Chromium project, but only time will tell if selling off Chrome will affect its contributions. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/a-new-initiative-will-fund-and-support-open-source-chromium-projects-143028118.html?src=rss
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