Netflix memo encourages recruiters to avoid talking about Dave Chappelle

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Netflix sent recruiters talking points on how to avoid discussing _The Closer_with job candidates, according to a leaked memo obtained by The Verge. The memo tells members of the talent acquisition team not to comment on Dave Chappelle’s stand-up set, which sparked a national conversation about transphobia, cancel culture, and comedy.

“Find a way to respectfully end and move on from the topic if you’re pressed further on the topic in areas not covered in the talking points,” the memo reads.

In a section titled “The Closer and employees,” Netflix encourages recruiters to state: “We value our trans colleagues and allies, and understand the deep hurt that’s been caused. We respect the decision of any employee who chose to walk out, and...

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Zoë Schiffer and Sarah Jeong rejoin The Verge

Zoë Schiffer and Sarah Jeongare rejoining The Verge, editor-in-chief Nilay Patelannounced today. Schiffer will be a senior reporter covering labor and workplace organizing in the tech industry, starting this week, and Jeong will be a deputy features editor commissioning, editing, and producing longform features, starting January 10. These hires are part of a larger hiring push The Verge kicked off in 2021 to add 25 newsroom roles over 18 months.

“We’re excited to welcome Zoe back to The Verge, where her reporting on labor issues at Apple and Netflix has provided an unprecedented window into two of the most successful yet guarded companies on Earth. We’re also excited to welcome Sarah Jeong back in a full-time role as our deputy...

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Today I learned about the attempts to make goldfish mech suits

This robot follows the fish. | Image: @ronen_segev on Twitter

Something interesting swam across my Twitter feed recently: a video of a goldfish that seemed to be controlling a robotic fish tank with wheels, with the contraption following the direction the fish was swimming. “Oh no,” I thought. “They gave this goldfish a robot, and now it’s unstoppable.”

Thankfully, it doesn’t seem like it was done as a part of some evil plot. The goldfish mech suit was posted by Ronen Segev, a researcher on a team that was looking into how animals navigate. Helpfully, Segev links to a full research paper in the Twitter thread, which should offer more insight into the project.

The fish were tasked to “drive” the vehicle towards a visual target in the terrestrial environment, which was observable through the walls...

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Anker’s new Nano II 100W USB-C charger is the smallest 100W GaN charger yet

Anker has a new GaN charger that the company announced at CES 2022, the $79 Anker Nano II 100W (also known as the Anker 736 charger), which the company says is “the world’s smallest 100W gallium nitride wall charger.”

The new Nano II 100W charger offers a pair of USB-C ports and a single USB-A port, and it uses Anker’s second-generation GaN II technology that the company debuted earlier this year on its other Nano II chargers.

More power in a smaller package

It’s also worth noting that the 100W output is only for a single device at once — if more than one gadget is plugged in, the Nano II 100W will divvy up wattage according. But the 100W output here is enough to charge most laptops at full speed, which is a nice improvement over...

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Anker’s new Video Bar is an all-in-one speaker, light, and webcam for your PC

Anker

Anker has announced the B600 Video Bar, a nifty video conferencing toolkit that houses everything that meeting-goers need. It rests upon your monitor (or TV), and the webcam portion of the Video Bar features a 2K sensor capable of 30 frames per second capture. It offers field-of-view adjustment, autofocus, and like most fancy webcams these days, it supports an AI-powered zoom feature and image enhancement. Within the device, there’s also a microphone array. It uses an AI algorithm to make noisy environments sound quiet on the other end.

The Video Bar also packs two features that aren’t commonly included with a webcam: a key light and speakers. I’d assume that a large percentage of people who work from home don’t have ideal lighting...

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Acer’s latest Nitro 5 gaming laptop continues the tradition of great value

Acer

Acer’s Nitro 5 gaming laptop lineup has become more refined and feature-packed over time, and the new versions announced at CES 2022 make it even more appealing. Like before, the Nitro 5 for 2022 comes in two sizes, 15.6 inches and 17.3 inches, and you can choose between a 1080p or a QHD display. What’s new for this year is that its chassis design ditched those angular corners and added some extra pizazz to its lid. Also of note is that you can get one with either the latest 12th-Gen Intel processors (starting with a Core i5 12700H and going up to an Core i7 12700H) or one of AMD’s Ryzen 6000-series processors (starting with the Ryzen 5 6600H, going up to the Ryzen 7 6800H). Both versions can stock up to Nvidia’s new RTX 3070 Ti graphics...

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Acer updates its Swift X laptops, and the 16-inch model has an Intel Arc GPU

Acer is announcing updates to its Swift X line of ultraportable laptops at CES 2022, each sporting 12th Gen Intel Core processors and, on the 16-inch model, a discrete Intel Arc GPU.

The 2022 versions of the laptops come in two screen sizes (and both have a 16:10 aspect ratio): a 14-inch model with a 2240 x 1400 resolution and a 16-inch model with an up to 2560 x 1600 resolution. While the 16-inch version has the Intel Arc GPU, the 14-inch model is available with Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3050 Ti laptop GPU or integrated graphics.

Both models run Windows 11 and are equipped with two Thunderbolt 4 ports, two USB-A ports, an HDMI 2.0 port, and a fingerprint reader. And both sound like they’ll be relatively light — Acer says the 14-inch model...

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Intel updates its Evo laptop standard for better video calls and foldable laptops

Intel has announced its third-generation update for its “Intel Evo” certification program at CES 2022, adding new requirements for better video calls for future devices, expanding the certification to include larger and more powerful laptops, and new foldable designs.

The Evo branding (itself an extension of Intel’s original Project Athena program) was introduced in 2020 alongside Intel’s 11th Gen Tiger Lake chips as a simple and easy way for customers to know that they’d be getting a laptop that checked certain basic performance and experiential metrics.

Specifically, in addition to offering one of Intel’s 11th Gen U-series or Y-series chips, Evo-branded laptops had to get over nine hours of “real-world” battery life, wake from sleep...

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Intel’s 12th Gen Alder Lake chips arrive at CES 2022 for its most powerful laptops ever

Intel has announced its latest 12th Gen Alder Lake featuring the company’s new hybrid architecture at CES 2022 with its first laptop chip using the new design, led by the Core i9-12900HK, which Intel boldly claims is “the fastest mobile processor. Ever.”

Intel’s first wave of 12th Gen Alder Lake chips on desktop last fall were one of its biggest successes in years, allowing the company to offer a chip that could beat or compete with AMD’s Ryzen 9 5950X flagship across productivity and gaming. And now, Intel is bringing that same new approach to chip design — with its Arm-esque performance and efficiency cores — to laptops, starting with its most powerful 45W H-series models of chips.

But the laptop world also has gotten a lot more...

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Intel’s upcoming Arc GPUs inch closer to their debut with latest OEM update

Intel’s highly anticipated Arc GPUs have gotten a step closer to gamers’ hands: the company announced at CES 2022 that it’s already started shipping its first-generation Alchemist GPUs to OEM customers for desktop and laptop systems, including Acer, Asus, Clevo, Dell, Gigabyte, Haier, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, MSI, and NEC.

The Arc GPUs are a big deal for Intel, set to package the company’s new Xe graphics architecture into discrete laptop and desktop GPUs, marking the biggest foray yet for Intel (which is best known for its CPUs) into the graphics world. Arc GPUs promise support for high-level gaming and creative features, too, including hardware-accelerated ray tracing and XeSS, Intel’s AI-accelerated supersampling. In short, Arc is...

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HP adds two new Dragonfly models to its business lineup

A pretty fly. | Image: HP

HP will release business laptops of all shapes and sizes this year, but the ones the C-suite will likely have their eyes on are members of the Elite Dragonfly line. If its predecessors are anything to go by, the Elite Dragonfly G3 will be a light, powerful, beautiful, and undoubtedly expensive Windows PC. The HP Elite Dragonfly Chromebook, more intriguingly, will bring a Chrome OS platform to the line for the first time. That could be the premium, well-built device for which Chrome OS fans in the business sphere have been waiting.

The HP Elite Dragonfly Chromebook features a haptic trackpad (the first one we’ve seen on a Chromebook to date), a fingerprint sensor, and a Sure View Reflect privacy screen. For a better conference call...

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Death Stranding Director’s Cut is coming to PC this spring

The director’s cut for Death Stranding is coming to PC, following its release on PS5 a handful of months ago. It’ll launch simultaneously on Steam and the Epic Games Store this spring, so you won’t have to wait long. Kojima Productions timed up this announcement to coincide with Intel showing off its new Xe Super Sampling (XeSS) graphics tech, a machine learning tech that claims to boost performance and elevate visual fidelity, similar to Nvidia’s DLSS tech.

In terms of the content arriving in the director’s cut on PC, it’s likely a match to what PS5 owners received. Publisher 505 Games shared that the director’s cut on PC will bring photo mode and ultrawide monitor support to the game, though the standard version of the game already has...

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Mobileye and Geely team up to build a self-driving car you can buy

Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images

Mobileye, the autonomous vehicle company owned by Intel, and Geely, China’s largest automaker, are joining forces to develop a consumer-ready autonomous vehicle that they claim will be ready by 2024.

The self-driving car, which will also be battery-electric, will be produced under Geely’s Zeekr brand, which was unveiled last year as the automaker’s “new electric mobility technology and solutions company.”

The new car will be equipped with Level 4 autonomous driving capabilities, meaning it will handle 100 percent of the driving tasks under certain conditions, like favorable weather or within certain geographic limits.

The vehicle will operate with a number of Mobileye’s branded AV systems, including six of the company’s EyeQ5...

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Intel announces 22 more 12th Gen CPUs for mainstream consumer desktops

At CES 2022, Intel is announcing the rest of its Alder Lake desktop lineup: 22 new chips, spanning the $489 Core i9-12900 to the $42 Celeron G6900, designed for mainstream desktops, all-in-ones, and other PC designs.

Now, Intel’s 12th Gen Alder Lake chips already technically launched for desktops last fall, but the lineup then was pretty limited: just six chips (three, if you don’t count the variants without GPUs as separate models), almost entirely focused for pricey, high-powered gaming setups.

Admittedly, there’s a fair amount of duplication here. A lot of the new chips — like the top-of-the-line Core i9-12900 — are extremely similar to the first wave of unlocked chips Intel already released last fall, albeit with lower power demands...

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HP updates its business-focused laptop lineup with Intel 12th Gen Alder Lake CPUs

The HP EliteBook 1040 G9 has a 14-inch IPS display. | Image: HP

HP debuted its new commercial laptops at CES 2022, including its convertible Elite x360 devices, EliteBook 800 and 600 lineups, as well as its ProBook 400 G9 series laptops. Each Windows 11 laptop comes with Intel’s 12th Gen processor, which was just introduced last October.

The HP Elite x360 1040 G9 and HP EliteBook 1040 G9 have almost the same internals; one of the main differences is that the Elite x360 is a convertible device with a touchscreen, while the latter is just your typical clamshell laptop. Each device has a 14-inch 16:10 IPS display, supports up to 2TB of storage, and comes with optional 5G connectivity.

While the Elite x360 supports up to 16GB of DDR5 SODIMM memory and 2TB of storage, the EliteBook 1040 G9 comes with up...

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Huawei ban gets parodied in truly bizarre Chinese state media sketch

China’s state news agency, Xinhua News, has released a bizarre James Bond-themed parody video mocking the US and UK’s crackdown on Huawei. It really needs to be seen to be believed. The English-language video was spotted by Gizmodoand has been released both on Xinhua’s New China TV YouTube channel as well as its China Xinhua News Twitter account, with both accounts carrying a warning about their affiliations with the Chinese state.

I mean, where do we even start with this video. There’s the fact that our protagonist is called James Pond, in what appears to be an unwitting reference to the series of ’90s video games based on an anthropomorphic mudskipper of the same name. Or what about the fact that one secret agent is supposedly doing...

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Razer’s 2022 Blade laptops are more refined but mostly the same

Razer

Razer isn’t using CES 2022 as a moment to show off a bold, new laptop concept. Instead, it’s asserting its dominance in the gaming laptop world by announcing refreshed Blade laptops that are barely different on the outside but with marked improvements on the inside.

Starting with the biggest updates, the Blade 14, Blade 15, and Blade 17 each feature the jump to faster DDR5 RAM (Razer’s goes up to 4,800MHz), along with support for AMD’s latest Ryzen 9, or Intel’s new 12th Gen processors, depending on the model you want. Additionally, Razer’s 2022 update will offer support for up to Nvidia’s new RTX 3070 Ti and the 3080 Ti mobile graphics chip. You’re likely to find these specs in many gaming laptops being announced during this year’s...

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Eufy’s new video doorbell uses two cameras to catch porch pirates

The Eufy Security Video Doorbell Dual uses two cameras to keep an eye on your front door. | Image: Eufy

Eufy, Anker’s smart home brand, is trying to solve the video doorbell’s biggest blindspot with a new dual-camera option. The Eufy Security Video Doorbell Dual has two cameras: a 2K camera up top to capture the face and body of a visitor and a 1080p camera down below to monitor packages left on the doorstep. At CES 2022 this week, the company also announced a new Garage Cam, which is a garage door controller and camera in one.

The concept of two cameras in a video doorbell is an interesting one, helping solve the problem most camera doorbells have where they either show you a tall, skinny video so you can see packages as well as people, but not much context outside that. Or, you get a wide view that gives more context but misses out on...

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Hisense floods the zone with TVs at every price point for 2022

Image: Hisense

Hisense is one of those brands that’s easy to sleep on when you’re shopping for a new TV. But over the last few years, the company has built a strong reputation for delivering much better picture quality than you’d typically expect from TVs that sell at similar prices. And for 2022, Hisense is trying to offer a TV that won’t disappoint regardless of your budget.

At the top of the heap of this year’s “ULED” TVs is the flagship U9H Series. It’s got Mini LED backlighting (with over 1,280 dimming zones), quantum dot HDR, a peak brightness of 2,000 nits, support for 4K gaming at 120Hz, FreeSync variable refresh rate, and an upgraded processor for improved responsiveness.

Under that comes the U8H, the latest in the well-reviewed U8 series,...

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Anker’s portable 4K projector runs Android TV and brings its own speakers

Anker’s Nebula Cosmos Laser 4K. | Image: Anker

Anker sub-brand Nebula has a new projector that runs Android TV 10.0 called the Cosmos Laser 4K. It’s designed to be portable with a pair of 30W speakers baked right in for spontaneous gaming or movie nights wherever you might be. The ALPD 3.0 laser tech can project 4K images at 2400 ANSI lumens. That’s respectable, but likely too dim to produce a decent image in anything but a darkened room.

It unfortunately looks like it won’t run Netflix natively, just likeother Android TV 10.0 projectors we’ve reviewed. Instead Anker says the Cosmos Laser comes with a “4K streaming dongle” to push content off your phone.

3 second autofocus and keystone correction

Other features include fast (3 second) autofocus and automatic keystone correction...

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Nvidia’s GeForce Now will be limited to 1080p on Samsung and LG TVs — for now

Image: Samsung

Samsung and LG have embraced cloud gaming this winter with support for Google Stadia and Nvidia’s GeForce Now in their television sets — but neither brand of TV will include Nvidia’s best quality streams for now. Nvidia cloud gaming boss Phil Eisler confirmed to The Verge that TVs will start at 1080p, and it sounds like the company’s 4K HDR streams will stay exclusive to the company’s own Nvidia Shield TV set-top through the first half of 2022.

But afterward, that may change — depending on your TV’s processor.

“The TVs use many different SOCs with different performance levels capable of decoding our streams at 60 FPS, so we’re focused on 1080p first,” Eisler explains. “We’ve rolled that out with LG first in December and with Samsung...

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Nvidia announces RTX 3090 Ti with faster memory and performance

Nvidia is announcing a new flagship GPU today, the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti. While the wait continues for Nvidia’s Ampere successor, the RTX 3090 Ti is here to prove Nvidia can still squeeze more performance out of its existing 8nm GA102 chip.

Nvidia is only teasing the RTX 3090 Ti today, and it’s the familiar-looking triple-slot design we’ve seen on the RTX 3090. Both cards may look identical, but inside, the new RTX 3090 Ti will include 24GB of GDDR6X running at 21Gbps. That’s the same amount of VRAM as the RTX 3090 but with a nearly 7.7 percent faster memory clock, providing additional performance for 4K gaming and AI tasks.

Nvidia says the RTX 3090 Ti will also include 40 teraflops of GPU performance, around 11 percent...

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HP announces new Elitebooks with Ryzen Pro 6000 processors and 16:10 screens

HP’s new Elitebooks have AMD’s latest mobile processors. | Image: HP

HP has announced a redesign of its Elitebook 805 laptops, which will soon include AMD’s Ryzen Pro 6000 processors and screens with the taller-than-standard 16:10 aspect ratio appreciated by businesspeople who spend their days scrolling through documents. HP has also announced a new Elitebook 605 series, which comes equipped with more mundane processors and screens (though for IT departments buying dozens at a time, that’s probably not such a bad thing).

This year’s Elitebook 805 G9 laptops come in three variations: the 835, 845, and 865. The middle number refers to the laptop’s screen size: the 835 has a 13.3-inch screen, the 845 has a 14-inch screen, and the 865 has a 16-inch screen, which is a new option for the series. Specs-wise, the...

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Nvidia announces 3080 Ti and 3070 Ti laptop GPUs, says they can control your CPU, too

Nvidia’s virtual CES 2022 keynote is underway, and the company’s just announced a new slate of gaming laptop chips there — including mobile versions of the RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 3080 Ti that’ll appear in laptops starting at $1,499 and $2,499, respectively. They’ll be out February 1st from the typical array of partners including Alienware and Razer.

While the company isn’t sharing a lot of specs just yet — only that they’ll offer Ultra-spec 1440p gaming at 100 and 120 frames per second, respectively, and that the 3080 Ti is faster than a desktop Titan RTX — Nvidia has something up its sleeves that might make this latest slate a little different than previous laptop gens. The company claims its fourth-gen Max-Q platform comes...

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Nvidia’s new $249 RTX 3050 GPU offers ray tracing and DLSS on a budget

Nvidia has a new budget GPU king, announced at CES 2022: the RTX 3050, which starts at $249 and undercuts the company’s previous entry-level RTX graphics card, the $329 RTX 3060, by a solid $80.

As with the other RTX GPUs, the RTX 3050 is built on Nvidia’s Ampere architecture and promises to offer the company’s most affordable entry to ray-traced gaming at 60fps (albeit at 1080p), along with 8GB of GDDR6 memory. The RTX 3050 also offers Nvidia’s third-generation Tensor cores to enable things like its AI-based DLSS upscaling, despite the lower price.

A new entry-level GPU from Nvidia... if you can find one

According to Matt Wuebbling, Nvidia’s VP of global GeForce marketing, 75 percent of customers are still using the...

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Nvidia’s new G-Sync monitors let you switch between 1440p and 1080p

Nvidia is launching new G-Sync monitors that let you pick between 1440p and 1080p modes. While the majority of PC gamers still use 1080p (67 percent according to Steam), many are considering the upgrade to 1440p. Nvidia is hoping its new G-Sync monitors could ease the transition, particularly for those looking for an esports display.

These new 27-inch esports displays include up to 360Hz refresh rates, support for Nvidia’s Reflex Analyzer system latency tool, an esports vibrance mode that uses mini LED backlights to enhance the color profile of the panel, and a special 25-inch 1080p mode.

These monitors are really designed for competitive players who play titles like Valorant, CS:GO, Overwatch, or Rainbow Six Siege. All of these games...

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AMD’s new Radeon Super Resolution software promises to bring AI super-sampling to almost any game

AMD has announced a new gaming software feature at CES 2022: Radeon Super Resolution, which promises to bring AI-powered supersampling improvements to almost any game, even if it hasn’t been specifically updated to support AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution.

According to AMD, Radeon Super Resolution (RSR) is built on the same algorithm as FidelityFX Super Resolution, but it’s integrated into AMD’s Adrenalin software suite as a driver-based feature, allowing it to work on a far wider range of games.

Once it rolls out, gamers will be able to simply enable RSR in Adrenalin, lower the resolution in their games, and get the boosted performance benefits from the new software. RSR works on any of AMD’s RDNA-based GPUs, and promises to offer...

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AT&T is giving away six months of Nvidia GeForce Now cloud gaming service

Image: Nvidia

At its CES 2022 virtual keynote, Nvidia is announcing a partnership with AT&T to offer six months of GeForce Now cloud gaming service for free. New and existing AT&T customers with a 5G-capable device and qualifying plan can claim the promotion through the service provider, allowing them to stream free-to-play titles and supported PC games they already own on the go with the cloud gaming service.

This promotional offer is for Nvidia’s Priority tier of GeForce Now, not the new RTX 3080 one we recently enjoyed. The Priority tier normally costs $49.99 for a prepaid six-month period (or $9.99 monthly) and includes enough GPU power to add raytracing to some older games at 1080p resolution and at up to 60fps (though you won’t see that in...

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Mass Effect Legendary Edition comes to Game Pass this week

BioWare

Game Pass is starting the new year off strong with the announcement that Mass Effect Legendary Edition will be among the first games to arrive on the service in January. The alien dating simulator cleverly disguised as an epic space opera trilogy arrives on Game Pass console and PC on January 6th. So if you’ve ever wondered what a Garrus Vakarian is and why people are so obsessed with wooing what looks like a rock-plated chicken lizard, now’s your chance.

Other titles coming to Game Pass in January include roguelike cave explorer_Spelunky 2_, the award-winning, time-warping Outer Wilds, and a preview of the four-person co-op shooter The Anacrusis.

Coming with the enthusiastic endorsement of The Verge’s Andrew Webster, Gorogoa, a...

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AMD’s new Radeon 6000S series GPUs are here to beef up thin-and-light gaming laptops

AMD is going for a full overhaul of its laptop hardware at CES 2022, with a full slate of new discrete GPUs for laptops: a new line of RX 6000S models designed for beefing up graphics on thin-and-light gaming laptops and an expanded line of RX 6000M GPUs for more traditional gaming laptops.

The RX 6000S series of chips is kicking off with three new designs: the RX 6800S, the RX 6700S, and the RX 6600S. AMD says that the new GPUs will enable powerful gaming laptops that are 20 percent thinner and under 4.5 pounds in weight, with a goal of maximizing power efficiency.

The 6000M series is getting a pair of new entry-level chips — the RX 6500M and RX 6300M — and souped-up versions of some of its existing models, including the...

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