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Volvo will use Nvidia’s tech for hands-free, point-to-point driving

15 October 2026 at 19:30
Volvo XC60

Volvo plans to launch hands-free, point-to-point driving by 2030, powered by Nvidia's latest AI technology. The Chinese-owned, Swedish-designed automaker said Thursday it would use Nvidia's autonomous driving stack to power a new partially automated driving system similar to Tesla's Full Self-Driving (Supervised).

Volvo says the new point-to-point system will be Level 2++, meaning it can handle complex urban environments, including traffic lights, stop signs, and unprotected left turns without explicit driver control. In addition to Tesla's FSD, it will also resemble the Nvidia-powered system that Mercedes-Benz recently rolled out for the …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The best reason to care about Nvidia’s RTX Spark: β€˜everything’ will run on Arm

15 October 2026 at 18:00
An Nvidia RTX Spark chip aboard an Asus laptop motherboard. | Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge

Fourteen years ago this month, Microsoft released an Nvidia-powered Windows PC that would become one of the greatest tech flops in modern history. The original Microsoft Surface, which ran a stripped-down version of Windows on an Nvidia Tegra chip, bombed so hard that Microsoft had to write off $900 million in inventory.

The problem was that Nvidia's Arm chip couldn't run existing Windows apps. Buyers had to leave their legacy programs behind.

This Friday, October 16th, Nvidia will once again be at the heart of Arm-powered Windows PCs with the first wave of RTX Spark laptops. But now, the company says, they'll run everything. Adobe. Offic …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Nvidia, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta gave Trump a combined $92 million for his ballroom

15 October 2026 at 17:46
A photo of Donald Trump with an illustrated background.

We knew that a number of big tech firms were helping to fund the construction of Trump's ballroom, but we didn't know just how much they were giving to the cause. Now the Washington Post published a list of all the major donors to the White House ballroom project, along with how much each contributed. In total, Silicon Valley and the crypto industry have reportedly delivered over $150 million for the effort.

Some of that money has come from individuals, some from charitable organizations tied to major firms or industry players, and some directly from the companies themselves. In Google's case, the $22 million was part of a controversial se …

Read the full story at The Verge.

How Windows is being optimized for Nvidia’s RTX Spark laptops

15 October 2026 at 16:30
Windows logo on black background

Microsoft and Nvidia held a launch party for the first wave of RTX Spark laptops last week in San Francisco, where a new wave of AI PCs took center stage amid a packed crowd and a lively hands-on area. A day after the media event, I was invited to a quieter Nvidia event to hear a lot more about the new RTX Spark computing platform. While Nvidia's new laptops might look like regular Windows machines, the chips inside are Arm-based, instead of the traditional x64 architecture used by AMD and Intel. Combined with a powerful GPU, RTX Spark is designed for the future of AI, and it means a lot of work has gone into getting these laptops ready for …

Read the full story at The Verge.

DLSS 5 gets toned down for its Hogwarts Legacy debut next month

13 October 2026 at 15:55
An image of Nvidia’s logo

When Nvidia originally showed off DLSS 5 earlier this year, the technology immediately got branded as gen AI for video games. To gamers, Nvidia had lost the plot. I personally couldn't get over how faces were transformed using DLSS 5. The 15-year-old student from Hogwarts Legacy suddenly looked much older, and Grace from Resident Evil Requiem looked yassified.

Now more than six months later, DLSS 5 is about to debut properly in Hogwarts Legacy, and it looks like it has been seriously toned down. Nvidia published new comparison screenshots today, where the changes to faces are as subtle as they are in NBA 2K27. Teenagers no longer look like …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The first Nvidia RTX Spark laptops cost up to $7,000

7 October 2026 at 21:05
A Surface Laptop Ultra laptop on a white table.
The 15-inch Surface Laptop Ultra starts at $2,599. | Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge

The first array of laptops powered by Nvidia's new RTX Spark chip are designed to compete with high-end MacBook Pros - and they've got some high-end prices to match.

The flagship Surface Laptop Ultra and RTX Spark laptops from Dell, Lenovo, MSI, HP, and Asus start as low as $2,599 for configurations with an 18-core CPU, 24GB of unified memory, and 512GB of storage. That's close in price to a similarly specced 14-inch MacBook Pro with M5 Pro chip, though Apple includes 1TB of storage. But the prices for both RTX Spark and Apple laptops of course go much, much higher.

Of the pricing we've seen so far, a kitted-out Asus ProArt P16 RTX Spark …

Read the full story at The Verge.

How Microsoft built its MacBook Pro competitor

7 October 2026 at 20:00

Before Microsoft releases a laptop to the public, it needs to put the device through its paces. That all happens inside a windowless, warehouse-like lab on the company's Redmond, Washington, campus, where the team developing Surface devices programs robots to press their buttons thousands of times, pelts devices with radio waves from giant antennas, and builds contraptions that drop objects from increasingly daring heights to see whether the products can hold up.

Its latest laptop, the product I'm here to see, really needs to hold up. The Surface Laptop Ultra isn't just another high-end config of the Surface Laptop, it's the debut platform …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Reflection debuts Beam, an open-weight AI model to rival Chinese models at lower compute cost

5 October 2026 at 21:33
Reflection is aiming Beam and future models at enterprises and sovereign nations. The pitch is to build β€œAI factories,” a product that would let institutions build their own customized, local AI system by training Reflection’s AI models on their own proprietary data.

Behold the horrors of DLSS 5, NVidia's real-time AI graphics improver

26 September 2026 at 18:04

DLSS 5 is Nvidia's AI-powered tech for dynamically repainting video game scenes in real-time, with more realistic lighting, textures and geometry. Controversial enough on recent games, where it succeeds on a technical level, the real fun is to be had applying it to old ones. β€” Read the rest

The post Behold the horrors of DLSS 5, NVidia's real-time AI graphics improver appeared first on Boing Boing.

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