Nvidia is on top of the world right now, riding waves of investment in “AI” and becoming one of the most powerful and most profitable companies on the planet. Intel? Not so much. The company has been struggling in sales and performance for more than a year. So color me shocked when Nvidia and Intel announced a joint venture this morning that could be huge for both. Nvidia is investing $5 billion into Intel stock—a comparatively small slice for both companies—and approximately half of what the United States government invested in it after president Trump and other politicians demanded action on Intel’s CEO. But the bigger news coming from the press release is that Nvidia and Intel will partner on new chips for both data centers and consumers. The so-called “x86 RTX” chips will integrate Nvidia-designed graphics and AI chiplets into Intel CPUs. “This historic collaboration tightly couples Nvidia’s AI and accelerated computing stack with Intel’s CPUs and the vast x86 ecosystem—a fusion of two world-class platforms,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Nvidia has been unassailable on the discrete graphics card front for years, now commanding over 90 percent of sales for desktop add-in boards in an effective monopoly, and dominating both sales and discussion for anything related to graphics, gaming, and “AI” industrial processing. Its longtime rival AMD has struggled to hold onto what market share it had, slipping even as it reportedly sells every GPU it can make. Things are better for AMD on the CPU side, where it’s gaining ground against Intel on the back of strong sales for laptop and desktop chips, especially its well-regarded X3D gaming series. Intel has been trying to enter the discrete graphics market for the last three years. But despite impressive gains in performance right out of the gate, the Arc series of desktop graphics cards has made barely a blip, falling to nearly zero percent market share. Exactly what will happen to Arc if Intel starts to co-brand Nvidia integrated graphics isn’t quite known. Nvidia’s meteoric rise to the top of both the chip market and the technology world has recently hit a highly visible snag, as reports indicate that the Chinese government is blocking purchases of its chips. The incredibly lucrative market was already showing some speed bumps as embargoes limit the performance of exported chips and China invests in domestic production to leverage its incredible energy and industrial infrastructure to compete with rivals like the United States and Taiwan. Intel and Nvidia will hold a joint press conference this afternoon, broadcast live on the web. Read...

“Click To Do” is Microsoft’s latest AI feature and selling point for Copilot+ PCs. Now that Windows Recall has taken a backseat after so much privacy criticism, Microsoft is turning the page—and this time it’s all about a special shortcut for accessing contextual AI actions. To use Click To Do, you just hold down the Windows key on your keyboard and click once with the left mouse button. You can also press Windows key + Q if you’d rather use a keyboard shortcut. (If nothing happens, that means you aren’t on a Copilot+ PC.) When Click To Do is activated, an outline will appear around your screen and Windows will highlight all text and images on your screen, making them selectable and allowing you to perform actions with them. Not only that, but Microsoft keeps adding more actions to this menu! Click To Do started with Windows Recall Funnily enough, Click To Do began its life as a feature built into Windows Recall. It let you take actions on text that appeared in the snapshots that Recall automatically took of your screen. However, after Microsoft pivoted from Recall, Click To Do became its own standalone feature. As far as privacy goes, Click To Do feels like the anti-Recall: it doesn’t do anything in the background, and you must choose to use it. Chris Hoffman / Foundry When you activate Click To Do, it takes a screenshot and lets you interact with it. When you select actions like “Summarize Text,” all of it happens right on your PC with your PC’s neural processing unit. But while most actions happen right on your PC, there are some actions—like “Search the web,” “Visual search with Bing,” and “Ask Copilot”—that will send data to Microsoft’s servers for processing. Fortunately, nothing leaves your PC unless you intentionally use such actions. Click To Do lets you feed text to AI models Click To Do uses optical character recognition (OCR) technology to scan your current screen and make text selectable. Basically, it’s taking a screenshot and letting you interact with elements within it. For example, if you select an email address, the Click To Do menu presents “Send email” to compose an email. If you select a website URL, you can choose “Open website” to launch it in your default web browser. (Thankfully, this doesn’t always use Microsoft Edge!) If you select over 10 words of text, things get more interesting. You’ll get a variety of actions that use the Phi Silica language model that runs on your Copilot+ PC’s NPU to perform actions like summarizing text, creating a bulleted list, or rewriting the text in different tones. Chris Hoffman / Foundry This is one of Microsoft’s first attempts at integrating NPU-powered text actions on a Copilot+ PC. Because it’s based on a screenshot, you can only send so much text to the language model at once. That should improve the experience, because let’s be honest: those local language models that run on your Windows PC are nowhere near as powerful as a cloud-based large language models like ChatGPT. (If you’re using a chatbot app in your browser, you’ll wonder why you’re bothering to use a worse app that runs entirely on your PC. That’s a core problem with so many Copilot+ PC local AI features.) Chris Hoffman / Foundry There’s also an “Ask Copilot” action that will send your selected text to Microsoft’s Copilot AI chatbot, and a “Draft with Copilot in Word” action to start working on a Word document with Microsoft’s AI. You can send information to a chatbot in the cloud here, too—but only if you’re using Microsoft’s Copilot (for home users) or Microsoft 365 Copilot (for businesses). Yeah, I know, it can be confusing. Click To Do exposes AI image tools, too Click To Do isn’t just for doing things with text—it also takes actions with images. This is where Microsoft’s other goals for Click To Do start to become clear. When you click on an image, you can select actions like “Blur background with Photos,” “Erase objects with Photos,” or “Remove background with Paint.” Chris Hoffman / Foundry These are all AI-powered image actions that would normally be scattered throughout Windows across different applications, but Microsoft is exposing them here through the Click To Do interface. And there’s also an “Ask Copilot” action here, so you can send an image to Microsoft’s Copilot AI and start a conversation about it there. There’s still no shortcut for the impressive Super Resolution feature, though. That would be really useful! You can disable Click To Do if you want If you don’t want Click To Do for whatever reason—and let’s be honest, that “hold the Windows key and click” shortcut could easily get in the way when playing some PC games—you can turn it off. Chris Hoffman / Foundry To do so, head to Settings > Privacy & security > Click to Do. Flip the switch here to turn it off. (While Click To Do is activated by default, it’s only available on Copilot+ PCs, so you won’t see it on your average Windows 11 PC.) What’s coming in the future? Microsoft has been spending a lot of time adding feature after feature to Click To Do. For example, Click To Do will soon have an integrated Copilot prompt box where you can select text/images, type a prompt, and then click “Ask Copilot” to send the selected content to Copilot along with the prompt you typed. You will also be able to select a mix of text and images, describe an image with an on-device large language model, and send text to the Microsoft Reaching Coach app. Click To Do will also soon be able to detect tables on your screen so you can send them right to Microsoft Excel. This mix of features shows what Microsoft wants Click To Do to become: the “one click to access AI anywhere in Windows” action. Microsoft hasn’t added file integration to Click To Do yet, but lots of actions for right-clicking files and sending them to Copilot and other AI tools are popping up in File Explorer’s context menu. As for me? I’d rather copy and paste After using so many half-baked Copilot+ PC features, it’s nice to see something with long-term potential. However, even though I use a Surface Laptop when I’m away from my powerful desktop PC, I must confess: I never actually use Click To Do, just like I never use Recall. Click To Do is an interesting idea, but I still find myself copy-and-pasting text and images instead. I can copy-paste text and images into any app, with or without AI tools. And Windows 11’s built-in Snipping Tool is already great for extracting text from screenshots and capturing images for me to send to other apps or whatever else. Maybe this will change in the future. Maybe not. But one thing’s for sure: Microsoft’s move away from Recall towards Click To Do is a smart one, and if it ends up paying off, it will pay off big. Further reading: Should you buy a Copilot+ PC? What to know Read...

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At a glanceExpert`s Rating Pros Provides up to four full-speed PCIe 5.0 NVMe M.2 slots Fantastically affordable Auxiliary power connector and fan control header Very good performance Cons Motherboard PCIe bifurcation capabilities determine how many of the four slots will function No hardware RAID Our Verdict Carefully check your motherboard’s PCIe capabilities and BIOS bifurcation settings for its x16 slot before buying the Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5. Those determine how many of the Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5’s four x4 M.2 ports you’ll be able to use. Given the price, even one slot will make it worthwhile. Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today Best Prices Today: Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 NVMe adapter card Retailer Price $89.99 View Deal Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide Product Price Price comparison from Backmarket Best Prices Today: Check today’s prices When I first heard about the Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5, I had visions of the 4-slot NVMe 5.0 adapter card as an uber-affordable four-SSD RAID 0 array cranking out 50GBps of sustained throughput. Dream on, buddy. Asus’ product page doesn’t really highlight that this card relies on your system’s ability to divvy up (bifurcate) lanes in the x16 slot that the card occupies: four lanes per SSD slot. Not a lot of systems can manage more than two. Our Intel test bed only allowed three, and performance maxxed out at 25GBps. To be fair to Asus, this is true for nearly all low-cost PCIe RAID cards. They just apparently assume that you’ll know this. I should have given the low cost. Regardless, the Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 is priced so low it’s a boon, even if you can use only one, two, or three of the slots. Especially on some Intel motherboards where adapter card PCIe 5.0 M.2 NVMe slots tend to perform better than those on the motherboard. What are the Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5’s features? I’ve already described most of the card’s features, but to add a bit more detail… The card is a full-length, 11.5-inch, x16, PCIe 5.0 adapter featuring four M.2 NVMe slots. There are also plenty of thermal strips (top and bottom), a fan, plus a beefy heatsink (see the lead photo) that covers most of what you see in the image below. As you can see, there are not a lot of logic chips on the card. It’s just smart enough to present the SSDs as the motherboard allows. To make sure the card can handle any NVMe SSD or combination thereof, there’s a six-pin power connector. Nice touch, though even with four fast PCIe 5.0 SSDs on board, I didn’t need it. If for some reason you do, hopefully your power supply has a spare. Finally, there’s also a fan control header that you can attach to the motherboard so that the Asus Fan Xper4 software can define the operational parameters for the cooling fan. The endplate features a fan on/off switch (maybe you like quiet?) and status LEDs so you can tell if the slots are filled and power is supplied. However, they won’t tell you whether the SSD is actually available to the system or not. For that, check the BIOS or Windows Disk Management. Caveats My biggest issue with the Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 is that the website product page doesn’t prominently call out the need for the proper motherboard bifurcation. Or that the RAID is only achieved via software, for that matter. Again, to be fair to Asus, these caveats apply to nearly every low-cost PCIe NVMe RAID card I’ve seen, the Konyead PCIe 3.0 four-slot card, which I have not tested, excepted. Most however, saliently call out the need for bifurcation. See anything here about system PCIe bifurcation required? Neither do we. There is a small blurb about bifurcation under the “Support RAID” section (see below) when you scroll down, but it still doesn’t make the ramifications obvious and further muddies the waters by talking about the NVMe RAID function. There is no dedicated NVMe RAID function, just Windows RAID, Intel’s RST RAID, or software (I used OWC SoftRAID). This doesn’t tell you a lot about the bifurcation requirements and might lead you to believe the card has NVMe RAID functionality. It doesn’t. As already stated, the Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 relies completely upon your motherboard to divvy up the 16 lanes of PCIe in your x16 slot to supply each slot with the four lanes it requires. Upon query, AMD told me that bifurcation capabilities start with the CPU, but can also involve the chipset and BIOS. Intel had not answered my query at the time of this writing, but I suspect the same answer. Our Asus ProArt Creator Z890 test bed does not support 4x4x4x4, only 8×8 (two slots) and 8x4x4 (three slots). I could not use all four. However, an Asus ProArt AMD X870E motherboard apparently does support 4x4x4x4. This bifurcation chart from Asus covers all its motherboards, chipsets, and major CPUs. It also shows that apparently there’s a very good reason you might want to opt for AMD when it comes to cheap NVMe RAID storage. None of Intel’s mainstream CPUs/chipsets support 4x4x4x4 (also notated X4+X4+X4+X4), though some of their workstation products do. Another consideration is how many PCIe lanes your CPU supports. But more PCIe lanes, say 48 as opposed to 24 doesn’t mean a 4x4x4x4 bifurcation setting; it just means that you might be able to run a x16 GPU as well as an x16 RAID card. How much does the Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 cost? The Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 card costs only $80 — merely $15 more than I paid for the older single-slot Asus Hyper M.2 card. Even if you can only use one or two slots, that’s not a bad deal at all. And… If you ever get a motherboard that supports 4x4x4x4, you’re good to go. Of course, if you want four guaranteed-functional PCIe 5.0 NVMe slots for your x16 slot, you can always opt for Highpoint’s excellent self-bifurcating 7604A card — for $1000. Gulp. Alas, we’ve had some odd issues with that card. Even if you can only use one or two slots on the Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5, it’s still a good deal at the $80 price. How does the Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 perform? Obviously, I was hoping for a four-SSD RAID 0 array, but three had to do: a WD SN8100, Crucial 700 Premium, and a Lexar 790 Pro. All fast, all PCIe 5.0. SSDs mounted in the card performed a bit faster individually than those same SSDs in our Z890 motherboard’s onboard PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot. This is not unheard of in the industry. The difference isn’t earth-shattering, but it is noticeable — 1GBps faster for the WD SN8100 results shown below. This is the WD SN8100 tested singly on the Asus card. It’s around 1GBps faster on the card than in the motherboard’s PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot. I first created the three-drive array using Windows own Disk Management (RAID 0, or Striped in Windows world). This is the most readily available and cheapest for most users as it’s built into Windows. Windows RAID turned in a balanced, if unspectacular combination of read and write performance — faster than a single drive, but not by a ton. OWC’s SoftRAID was faster reading, but slower writing, and Intel’s RST was faster writing, but slower reading. This is a nice, but not earth-shattering gain in performance. If you decide on Windows RAID, make sure you select quick format. It’s not selected by default and the long format process takes seemingly, and beats on your SSDs as if they were HDDs, chewing up write cycles as it goes. OWC’s SoftRAID delivered 24GBps reading and 13GBps writing. Not nearly the write performance I was hoping for. OWC’s SoftRAiD was fast reading, and slow writing, though I did see some better write performances (15GBps) than the one shown. Using Intel’s (RST) Rapid Storage Technology, I got better write numbers and worse read numbers than with either Windows RAID or OWC’s SoftRAID. Go figure. It’s still not my fantasy 50GBps (or 40Gbps given only three SSDs). Three SSDs on the x16 Gen5 using Intel RST. In reality, your mileage will vary according to which SSDs you use, how many you combine in RAID, and the software you use. But it will be faster than a single SSD if you stripe them. Note that RAID 0 offers zero fault tolerance — if one SSD dies, the data does as well without expensive recovery. While there is this risk with SSDs, it’s not nearly the danger that it is with mechanical HDDs. We haven’t really seen an SSD flat-out fail in a number of years. On the upside, along with RAID 0’s increased performance, you get a larger volume size (the size of the smallest-capacity disk in the array times the number of disks). The one in our testing was 6TB (2TB times three). In the end, the performance wasn’t what I’d hoped for, which is not so much a jab at Asus, but the software and drivers involved. Not shocking, but disappointing. I was most perturbed by Intel RST’s slower read performance, which I thought would be significantly faster. As to RST… Before you decide on Intel RAID, beware that retreating from it once deployed can be a struggle. Somewhat surprisingly, RST RAID 0 enabled and configured solely in the BIOS was just as fast without the Windows drivers installed. I say stick with that arrangement as uninstalling the RST drivers from Windows rendered the OS on our testbed unbootable. Additionally, either the BIOS RST, RST driver, or a combination of both seemingly corrupted the GPT on one of the SSDs. This created a BIOS error about said issue that I couldn’t get past (after disabling RST) without removing it from the Asus card and repairing it in an external enclosure. Fun, fun, fun. Do yourself a favor, and image your OS drive before trying Intel RST. Caveat: With our Z890 motherboard’s 8x4x4 bifurcation setting, both the 3rd and 4th slots on the Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 card had to be filled, or the third drive would not show up. Should you buy the Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5? If you’ve read this article thoroughly, and understand the requirements and limitations — sure. As much as I wish I could use all four slots, it was still a boon having three more fast PCIe 5.0 SSDs in addition to our motherboard’s solitary PCIe 5.0 type. If the testbed didn’t already employ the super-fast (and extremely pricey) Highpoint 7604A, I’d certainly use the Asus card in testing. Read...

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If you end up searching for Chrome in Bing Search with Microsoft Edge, you might start seeing a new advertisement that says “All you need is right here,” reports Windows Latest. The advertisement includes a table that compares features between Chrome and Edge and tries to sell you on the browser by saying “Microsoft Edge runs on the same technology as Chrome, with the added trust of Microsoft.” You’ll also spot quick links to apps like YouTube, Facebook, Gmail, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Netflix. It’s no secret that Microsoft really, really wants users to stick with Edge and will do anything it can to deter users from switching to Chrome. In the past, Microsoft injected an awkward poll when downloading Chrome via Edge, and earlier this year hid the Chrome download link in Edge. Meanwhile, Microsoft is testing new ways to convert Chrome users. To be fair, Edge has been improving. In addition to getting various AI features, Edge has gotten much faster and will continue to be supported even after Windows 10’s end of life. But tacky tactics like this are sure to turn off anyone who’s still on the fence, and there aren’t many left. Read...

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In the latest beta of Microsoft’s Edge browser (version 141.0.3537.13), there’s an interesting new AI-powered feature for real-time translation of video clips. The translation can produce both subtitles as well as audio. According to Windows Latest, the translation happens more or less live. However, given that it’s powered by the latest AI technology, you’ll need to have a reasonably powerful computer for this feature—at least 12GB of RAM and at least a quad-core CPU. (Note that if you assign that much memory to Edge, other apps will slow to a crawl while translating.) The biggest problem with this real-time audio translation feature right now is that the AI-generated audio can suddenly switch between male and female voices when the tone of voice changes. Furthermore, translation language support is extremely limited, with only English, Spanish, and Korean currently supported. However, the plan is to add more languages in the future. Read...