The removal of Blued and Finka has raised concerns amongst the LGBT community in the country. Read...

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Hey Microsoft, you should apply a little dating advice when trying to win over your users: desperation is never attractive. The company has employed Windows’ built-in Edge browser as a marketing tool many times before, often in trying to convince people not to use Chrome. Now it’s pulling some similar moves, begging people to use Microsoft’s Copilot “AI” system rather than ChatGPT or Perplexity. If you happen to be reading this in Edge right now (hey, it’s not impossible), then try heading over to ChatGPT.com, Perplexity.ai, or DeepSeek.com. You might see a little flashing banner in the URL bar inviting you to “Try Copilot.” That’s according to Windows Latest, which also says that you’ll be seeing Copilot ads in Bing Search if you look for competing products. I’m not able to replicate the results on my own desktop (where I have Copilot turned off) or laptop, and neither are other PCWorld team members. But considering how much Microsoft has plastered Copilot over every possible surface for the last year, I’m not in any doubt that it’s an active campaign for at least some users. There’s a bit of irony in the prompt, since many Copilot functions use ChatGPT itself—Microsoft and OpenAI are close partners, as ChatGPT and other systems tap into Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. But Microsoft would surely prefer that you use its own branded and integrated interface rather than the LLM/chatbot that’s become phenomenally popular with web spammers, cheating students, and lawyers charging hundreds of dollars an hour to create fake case references. (And I guess some other people use ChatGPT, too.) Apparently that big push for Windows 11 isn’t occupying all of the marketing team’s time just yet. But I suppose it’s only fair, since going to Perplexity’s site opened up an ad for that company’s Comet browser. Read...

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Neither Intel nor Nvidia have said exactly when the first fruits of its co-designed integrated CPUs will ship. But the thinking right now seems to be that it might a take a few years. Nvidia announced a $5 billion investment into Intel last week, where Intel will supply CPU cores to Nvidia for potential use in the data center. In the PC, both Intel and Nvidia will collaborate on presumably mobile processors, where Nvidia will supply RTX chiplets for Intel to integrate, potentially upending the direction of GPUs. Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang told journalists last week that the partnership dates back a year, as per PCWorld’s reporting. Intel also told PCWorld that the partnership wouldn’t change its own roadmap, essentially adding on premium options to a number of product categories. But even with a head start the development work may take some time, the thinking goes, and the two sides won’t be prepared to talk about their efforts for some time. Sources at competitors to Intel and Nvidia said that they expect the first products from the collaboration are more than two years away, and that they too are leaving their roadmaps unchanged as a result. One said that their company has doubts that Intel could work together with Nvidia to deliver the sort of complex, highly-integrated products both sides described. “We’re creating an SOC [system-on-chip] that fuses two processors,” Huang said on a conference call with reporters last week. “It fuses the CPU and Nvidia GPU, RTX GPU, using NVLink and it fuses these two dies into one essentially virtual giant SOC, and that would become essentially a new class of integrated graphics laptops that the world’s never seen before.” One issue is NVLink, Nvidia’s high-speed interface that can be used to combine the power of two Nvidia graphics card, at speeds higher than the PC’s backbone, PCI Express, achieves. A source at one competitor said that it has doubts that Intel has the engineering capabilities to make an integrated CPU-GPU with NVLink system-on-chip actually work, given Intel’s past history of engineering missteps dating from Arrow Lake’s poor desktop performance or the recent bugs that caused some processors to crash. They also wondered if Nvidia really cares to enable such a chip when its discrete GPUs already serve as a viable alternative. Another source referenced a note from BofA Global Research, which worried about what role Softbank’s $2 billion investment into Intel might have on the development, as well as input from the U.S. government which has secured its own investment. Such thinking is typically referred to as FUD, or “fear, uncertainty, and doubt,” a now fairly traditional means of criticizing one’s competitors in the technology industry. Still, this is a time where Intel’s dominance is seen as especially vulnerable, and AMD’s ongoing resurgence in desktop market share is evidence of that. Intel’s competitors would be especially eager to cut into Intel’s share in laptops, where Intel stubbornly holds on to about 80 percent of the market. This week, rival Qualcomm is expected to unveil new Snapdragon mobile processors for laptops, hoping to cut into Intel. Still, shipments of Copilot+ PCs (which include Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors) were just 2.3 percent of all Windows PCs sold during the first quarter of 2025, market researcher IDC reported earlier this year. Mercury Research reported that “growth in ARM in Copilot+ PCs also appeared to be at a standstill,” based on the firm’s estimates of the PC CPU market for the second quarter of 2025. Dean McCarron, principal of Mercury Research, pointed out that Intel had worked together with AMD to develop the “Kaby Lake G” chip, announced in November 2017. In January 2018, Intel announced the “8th-gen Intel Core with Radeon RX Vega M graphics,” shipping the Core i7-8705G chip based on the partnership in June 2018. In PCWorld’s review of the processor, we noted that chip wasn’t tremendously exceptional, compared to the existing CPU + discrete GPU landscape, but that future iterations could have more impact. But only a handful of PC vendors built systems around the chip, and those future iterations never happened, possibly because it wasn’t quite clear which company was support the Kaby Lake G chip and its successors. “I don’t think the challenge of adapting a GPU to a chiplet is a significant one, particularly for lower power graphics (which is what would likely be used for mobile designs),” McCarron said in an email. Adapting Nvidia’s “Blackwell” architecture, the basis of its GeForce 5000 series of GPUs, wouldn’t be too long if Nvidia used a standard bus structure like PCI Express — two years maximum, with most of the time associated with CPU integration, packaging, and test. McCarron projected spring 2027 as a guess for when that could happen, though that assumed using a standard PCIe bus, not NVLink. Intel is thinking of the new collaborative CPUs as a premium offering, and McCarron said he agreed with that. “I would agree it’s probably a premium play, but probably not at the very top end,” McCarron wrote. “I could see this fitting well with the upper end of Core Ultra 5 and lower end of Core Ultra 7 [using Intel’s new naming scheme] especially in the thin and light segment of notebook.” “Higher-end [Core Ultra 7] and [Core Ultra 9] would still go with separate GPUs for performance reasons,” McCarron added. “It would be reasonable to assume it’s going to be a normal Intel core with an extra chiplet rather than some new custom core just to support graphics integration, which points to re-using Panther Lake or Nova Lake,” the two Intel CPUs due in late 2025 and late 2026, respectively. Read...

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Jim Johnson has been named head of Intel’s Client Computing Group, headlining a list of changes Intel made Monday to its leadership team. As part of the moves, Intel announced the departure of Michelle Johnston Holthaus, the former co-chief executive and head of Intel Products. Johnson had served as the interim head of Intel’s CCG as Holthaus took on senior roles. Now, his official title will be senior vice president and general manager, responsible for the PC and edge ecosystems, Intel said. Johnson has worked at Intel for 40 years, including in the Technology and Manufacturing Group and the Networking and Communications Group. Intel also has named a new head of its Data Center Group: Kevork Kechichian who joins as executive vice president and general manager of the Data Center Group (DCG). Kechichian formerly was the executive vice president of engineering at Arm. Intel also said that Naga Chandrasekaran, executive vice president and chief technology and operations officer of Intel Foundry, will expand his role to include Foundry Services. The promotions and new hires come at the tail end of management shakeups dating back to last year, when Intel chief executive Pat Gelsinger was forced out of his role as chief executive and replaced with Lip-Bu Tan, a prominent leader in the EDA industry. After Gelsinger left, Michelle Johnston Holthaus and chief financial officer David Zinsner were named co-CEOs. Former Intel exec Michelle Johnston Holthaus.Mark Hachman / IDG After Tan joined, Holthaus — formerly the executive vice president and general manager of Intel CCG — was then asked to lead Intel’s products team, which also included the Client Computing Group. Holthaus served more than 30 years at Intel, and will remain a strategic adviser to the company over the coming months, Intel said. Johnson will oversee the fall launch of Panther Lake, the company’s next CPU architecture, as well as the Intel 18A manufacturing process that will form its foundation. Tan, meanwhile, is looking for customers for both Intel’s 18A and the subsquent 14A manufacturing process, which may decide whether Intel remains in silicon manufacturing or not. Read...

Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are engaged.  The Grammy-winning Love Story pop icon and the Kansas City Chiefs tight end announced the news on Instagram.  “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married,” they captioned the joint Instagram post.  The photos featured a slideshow of moments from the proposal, along with a shot of the large diamond ring set in yellow gold.  View this post on Instagram A post shared by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift) Since formally starting dating in the autumn of 2023, Swift and Kelce appear to have gone a long way, with marriage imminent.  Their relationship began in July 2023 when Kelce went to an Eras tour show at the Chiefs’ home arena, Arrowhead Stadium.  The two eventually communicated after the NFL player was able to deliver a friendship bracelet bearing his phone number to Swift’s camp.  Weeks before their engagement, the couple recorded their first appearance together on Kelce’s New Heights podcast, which he co-hosts with his brother, former Philadelphia Eagles player Jason Kelce. The show also featured Travis Kelce’s 2023 attempt at a romantic relationship with the Grammy winner.  The couple spent more than two hours discussing their dating experiences and Swift’s account of how they met.  Taylor Swift appeared on the `New Heights` podcast, discussing her new album `The Life of a Showgirl` and her relationship with Travis Kelce. Photo / New Heights  Swift claimed on the show that Kelce’s public declaration that he wanted to date her was a “wild, romantic gesture”. She said that the only reason she consented to go on New Heights for the first time as a podcast was because Kelce made it “his personal dating app”, which “got me a boyfriend”.  Swift claimed that they came to know one another quite naturally and that he frequently made her laugh, despite the fact that their first profession of love was a little ridiculous.  Swift also announced her upcoming album, The Life of a Showgirl, on the podcast, which will be released on October 3.  Swift last week released collectable vinyl box sets of The Life of a Showgirl after similar countdowns. Each sold out within minutes, as fans rushed to secure limited-run versions of the album.  Taylor swift eras tour. Photo / Instagram, @taylorswift  In December 2024, Swift concluded her Eras tour and celebrated her musical marathon with a private wrap party, with Kelce in attendance.  The 35-year-old songwriting sensation shattered records with her nearly two-year-long Eras tour that ended last year.  It raked in $2 billion over 149 shows around the world, making it the most lucrative tour in music history.  Tickets for the tour sometimes sold for exorbitant prices, and it drew millions of fans.  Read...