AMD Better Watch Out

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]They've done it. Intel has just revealed two purpose-built chips just for handheld gaming. The Arc G3 and G3 Extreme marching straight onto turf that AMD's Ryzen Z series has owned for years. I'm Linus Sebastian. This is TechL. And these new chips should not be confused with the iMac G3, the last good thing to wear that badge. Instead of jamming a laptop chip into a handheld again and hoping that the whole battery efficiency thing fixes itself, Intel has built these G3 chips on Panther Lake just for the form factor. The two are nearly identical 14 core processors separated mainly by their graphics capabilities. The Extreme model uses ARK B390, packing 12 XC3 cores against the regular G3's 10 XC3 cores. The company claims high settings by default in modern AAA games using their XSS3 AI upscaling. Handhelds will start rolling out in June with Acer's Predator Atlas 8 following in October. No confirmed pricing yet, but one leaked configuration from MSI is uh apparently flirting with the $2,000 price point.

[00:01:13]So, the long-awaited AMD killer is for now mostly a wallet killer.

[00:01:18]>> My wallet died long ago.

[00:01:20]>> Qualcomm, meanwhile, has unveiled their Snapdragon C, a chip built to make Windows laptops as cheap as $300, undercutting Apple's MacBook Neo. To hit that number, they are swapping out the custom Orion cores from Qualcomm's pricier Snapdragon X lineup for cryoores that were yanked straight out of their mobile chips. This makes the budget laptop war officially just a two phones in a trench coat war. They did pack on an NPU for ondevice AI, but it looks like they're going to miss Microsoft's bar for Copilot Plus. So instead, you get an AI laptop that can't really run the AI features that everyone keeps advertising, but few people were using anyway. No.

[00:02:03]The first confirmed laptop running this new chip is Acer's Aspire Go 15, a plastic 15-in that tops out like the MacBook Neo, at just 8 gigs of RAM. That is the catch, isn't it? Qualcomm is chasing their $300 laptop dream right as the global memory shortage has quadrupled RAM prices with analysts saying that sub$500 PCs are going extinct.

[00:02:26]>> The dinosaurs came back. It's not impossible.

[00:02:29]>> An Austrian security research group has developed a new technique called Frost that lets websites spy on you by analyzing your SSD activity.

[00:02:40]Oo, that is ice cold. The exploit is enabled through a contention side channel attack which measures the timing of IO operations on your drive. It then runs that data through a pre-trained convolutional neural network which can infer which apps and websites are open or running on your device. Frost runs exclusively in the browser and leverages the OPFS which is the sandboxed storage area on your disk that websites can write to without explicit user permission. This does create some limitations to the technique, though.

[00:03:12]The OPFS needs to be stored on the same disc as the app that the attacker is trying to collect information on, and it can cause the OPFS sandbox to get so large that users would start to notice it. Uh, luckily, researchers say that there's no evidence that Frost has ever been used in the wild, unlike our sponsor, OP Manager Nexus. At the intersection of love and hate, passion and desire, dev and ops, there is OP Manager Nexus, an observability platform like no other. One that entwines all of your data, network, infrastructure, applications, and UX into one beautiful platform. It gives you customizable dashboards that adapt to your every desire, AI event correlation that cuts through the noise to whisper sweet nothings of hung jobs and depleted eyeops and encryption that keeps your secrets safe. Op manager Nexus is part of the manage engine ecosystem and yet still flexible enough to integrate with all your other tools both in the cloud and onrem. Op manager Nexus visibility without complexity. Stop guessing and start knowing with full stack visibility. Link in the description.

[00:04:17]God, I love these guys. A speedy eighth of a bite is kind of like a shooting star. It's gone before you can even make the wish. And if we're being honest, it's really just a flaming rock burning up on the way down. Here are five >> eighth of a bite.

[00:04:32]Valve Steam Deck just sold out across North America in less than 24 hours despite a mindblowing $300 price hike.

[00:04:42]Gamers were understandably furious at the increased cost, prompting Epic Games Epic Nerd Tim Sweeney to pile on, insinuating that the price hike might have been to cover the rising cost of Gayen's beloved Mega Yachts. Given the speed of the sellout, it seems that Gaba's going to be graduating to Giga Yachts pretty soon, though. Haha.

[00:05:04]>> Sweeny would have one if he could.

[00:05:05]Hundreds of volunteer Wikipedia editors are threatening to go on strike over layoffs of the community tech team, which is a group of engineers that builds tools for the editors. Given that Wikipedia is so reliant on volunteer efforts, this could be crippling for the organization. According to a former Wikipedia Foundation employee, an interruption of the volunteer efforts would cause Wikipedia to go into rapid decline, which according to her would be a disaster for humanity. So, no pressure. NASA just unveiled a three-phase plan to build a permanent moon base at the lunar south pole. The goal is to have humans living there in semi-permanent housing by 2032. NASA is reportedly partnering with Blue Origin for this mission.

[00:05:50]Have they heard? Do they know? Because unfortunately for them, just 2 days after this announcement, Blue Origin's new Glenn rocket blew up on the launchpad in Florida.

[00:06:02]>> Oh no. Oh, >> hi. I don't know about you guys, but I can't wait to go to the moon in that.

[00:06:07]It's going to BE LIKE YOSE SAM. Y ILLINOIS just passed the nation's first law mandating third party safety audits of major AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. Experts are calling it the strongest AI safety bill that's been passed so far. Enforcement is expected to come into effect in January 2028 with violations carrying a penalty of up to $3 million per offense. And finally, speaking of offensive, Ferrari has unveiled its competitor to the Nissan Leaf, otherwise known as the Luch. The company's first ever EV. The $640,000 $1,035 horsepower liftback was styled by iPhone designer Johnny IV, which explains why the interior looks like an Apple Watch that gained sentience and bought a Ferrari badge. Within a day of the reveal, Ferrari stock had dropped 5%. Turns out a thousand horses cannot outrun a bad first impression.

[00:07:04]>> Revolutionary.

[00:07:05]>> Just like I'll be a bad impression if you don't come back Monday for more tech news. I don't know who this is supposed to be an impression of, but it's certainly bad. See you next time.