To kick off this week’s CES trade event in Las Vegas, AMD is revealing a significant amount of new gear. The announcements made today demonstrate that the firm can still introduce competitive solutions using its current architectures, notwithstanding our collective curiosity about its next-generation AM5 and RDNA 4 products. Today, it is launching four new CPUs for its AM4 platform, new desktop APUs with Zen 4, and a new Radeon RX 7600 XT GPU with an incredible 16GB of memory for just $329.

The reason the GPU is the most intriguing is that this generation of GPUs has never seen 16GB of midrange memory before. With a 128-bit memory bus and a price tag of $499, the 16GB RTX 4060 Ti is the closest GPU in Nvidia’s lineup. The revised 7600 XT will take the place of its younger brother, the $269 Radeon RX 7600, which has 8GB of RAM but has received negative reviews. The specifications of all 7600 family cards are the similar; however, the XT card has twice as much memory and faster clocks. While its younger brother is limited to 1080p gaming, AMD claims that this combination of technologies enables the card to be positioned for 1440p gaming or 1080p with ray tracing. Both RX 7600 GPUs have a 128-bit bus, which will act as a bottleneck, just like Nvidia’s 4060 cards. At $329, it will debut on January 24 with partner boards and AMD reference designs.

The unveiling of a brand-new Ryzen 7 5700X3D CPU for the AM4 platform is the next most intriguing development. This is the younger sibling of the original V-Cache chip, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, however it is $200 less expensive than that chip’s $449 MSRP. Both CPUs have 8/16 cores and threads as well as 64MB of V-Cache. However, the 5700X3D has somewhat lower base and boost clocks—just 3GHz and 4.1GHz—than the 5800X3D, which has 3.4GHz and 4.5GHz. With 100MB total cache between L2 and L3 (96MB L3 plus 4MB L2), it has the same amount of memory. Its 105W TDP is the same as well. On January 31, the newest V-Cache CPU will go on sale for $249. In addition, AMD is introducing three more 5000-series AM4 CPUs targeted at less expensive gamers, none of which are X3D.

The Zen 4 APUs for desktops, which are affordable CPUs with integrated RDNA 3 graphics and the Ryzen AI engine developed by AMD, are also finally being unveiled by the company. This launch fills a void in the company’s lineup since desktop APUs for Zen 4 have not yet been released. As anticipated, the business will launch four APUs with eight, six, or four cores, depending on the model. The two six-core chips, the 8600G at $229 and the 8500G at $179, both have the identical six-core design, while the flagship 8700G CPU will cost $329 and have eight Zen 4 cores and Radeon 780M graphics. The budget-friendly 8300G has graphics powered by Radeon 740M and a modest four-core configuration.

This is a big announcement from AMD, and it’s probably the last one for the company’s RDNA 3 graphics platform and Zen 4 architecture. This will round up the company’s lines until September of this year, when we’re probably not going to see any next-generation gear. It will be interesting to see the benchmarking activity when AMD’s newest CPUs and GPU go up against Intel’s new Meteor Lake CPUs and Nvidia’s soon-to-be-announced Super GPUs.

With its Titan series, MSI has consistently provided a laptop with full beast mode. These massive notebooks are all about pure PC power; MSI likens them to a “nuclear reactor,” which is perhaps not the best way to put it, but it does the picture justice. The business is currently preparing an updated version for 2024 that will have the newest hardware, including the 14th generation HX mobile CPUs from Intel, which have not yet been revealed. The laptop has made its debut in China and is anticipated to make its CES premiere next week.

The upcoming MSI Titan 18 HX, which packs Intel’s newest desktop-class CPUs into a portable chassis, is expected to be among the most powerful laptops unveiled at CES. The business was keeping the airways clear of distractions in order to introduce its Meteor Lake Core Ultra CPUs for thin-and-light laptops, so it has only unveiled 14th Gen CPUs for desktops thus far—not mobile. Leaving that behind, it will unleash its most potent attack on the class to date, spearheaded by the Core i9-14900HX. This CPU features 24 cores (8P+16E) and 32 threads, and it is expected to have a maximum turbo frequency of 5.8GHz, just like the desktop chip.

It should come with an RTX 4090 or 4080 mobile GPU, much like the model from last year. But the laptop will supposedly be able to consume 270W at full blast thanks to the industry’s most powerful CPU and GPU—a 40W boost over the previous generation. That translates to 175W for the CPU and 95W for the GPU, according to Videocardz. It will come with a 400W power brick, instead of the 330W device that came with the previous model, to accommodate this much power usage. We can only speculate about the size of this brick because it will be large.

It will include an 18-inch 4K mini-LED display with a resolution of 3,840 by 2,200, which is a little higher than normal for a top-tier laptop. With a peak brightness of 1,000 nits and a refresh rate of 120 Hz, it should be more than capable of handling HDR material. A real mechanical keyboard with Cherry switches and RGB illumination are two more noteworthy improvements. A six-speaker sound system, storage, and a multitude of I/O possibilities are also included.

Since the Titan models are often the priciest consumer laptops available that aren’t manufactured by Apple, the price of this monstrosity is guaranteed to be exorbitant. Next week at CES, where it’s anticipated to be formally presented, we’ll undoubtedly learn more.

23andMe is further damaging its reputation in an effort to repair the harm caused by the disastrous user data leak. The company is both blaming its frantic consumers for last year’s breach and pretending there was never a severe breach in the first place. The company’s at-home DNA test kits allow users trace their genealogy and genetically encoded health concerns.

When 23andMe revealed that “particular 23andMe customer profile information was compiled through access to individual 23andMe.com accounts,” the leak became widely known in early October 2023. According to preliminary investigations, hackers were able to guess the credentials of 14,000 user accounts—which contain personal information such as family trees, health forecasts, and genetic information—by using passwords that were most likely compromised during prior cybersecurity events. The perpetrators of the 23andMe hack promptly listed their stolen data for sale, charging between $1 and $10 for each user profile. While the profiles lacked complete genetic tests, they did contain the names, birth years, and ancestry details of the users.

The problem with genetics, though, is that they are essentially social beings. According to a December 23andMe study, threat actors were able to acquire 6.9 million more user accounts through the website’s DNA Relatives and Family Tree feature profiles after breaching the first 14,000 user accounts. These results are being used by 23andMe to defend an assault on the initial targets of its disclosure.

In a letter to a group of clients accusing the business of carelessness and other privacy transgressions, 23andMe attributes hackers’ access to its databases to individuals who used weak passwords. The letter states, “23andMe believes that unauthorized actors were able to access certain user accounts in cases where users recycled their own login credentials—that is, users recycled and failed to update their passwords after these past security incidents, which are unrelated to 23andMe—on 23andMe.com as well as on other websites that had been subject to prior security breaches. “Therefore, 23andMe’s purported inability to maintain appropriate security measures in accordance with the [California Privacy Rights Act] did not cause the incident.”

“If a violation occurred, it has been remediated,” according to 23andMe’s letter. Even though it is likely that at least some customer data is still for sale, the corporation views resetting active logged-in user sessions and advising consumers to install two-factor authentication as comparable to remediation. This is because, according to 23andMe, the stolen data “could not have been used to cause pecuniary harm” because it did not contain any financial or social security information belonging to the victims.

It seems unlikely that the letter will be favorably received in any of the thirty cases pertaining to the 23andMe breach. Attorney Hassan Zavareei for the plaintiffs claimed in an email to TechCrunch that 23andMe had “apparently decided to leave its customers out to dry while downplaying the seriousness” of the breach.

Notably, AMD’s Zen 4 CPU platform for 2023 does not include any desktop APUs. It only introduced APUs for mobile devices, but that will change in 2024. The business is preparing several 8000-series APUs that are priced reasonably and come with Zen 4 CPUs with RDNA 3 graphics. The initial internet benchmarks for these future chips indicate that they may be released as early as the CES trade exhibition in Las Vegas next week.

In contrast to the current 7000-series APUs, which are “2023” chips and only intended for mobile devices, the next APUs will be branded as 8000G series chips, indicating they are 2024 models. For their CPUs, AMD has implemented a somewhat contentious naming approach in which the year is indicated by the first number rather than the architecture. In any case, the 5000G devices from this series’ earlier desktop iterations employed Zen 3. We now have the first verified specifications for these future APUs thanks to the latest Zen 4 version that has surfaced on Geekbench. They are made for people who want a low-cost CPU with a little amount of gaming power through integrated graphics.

The Ryzen 5 8600G is the chip that has surfaced in the Geekbench database. It contains six CPU cores and twelve threads, as well as Radeon 760M graphics. The test for the CPU indicates a base speed of 4.35GHz and a boost clock of 5GHz, which are 600MHz and 450MHz faster than the 5600G, the CPU’s Zen 3 predecessor, respectively. Significant modifications have also been made to the GPU side of things. The 760M, formerly known as the “Radeon 5”, has been renamed, and remarkably, its boost speed has increased to 2.8GHz, which is 900MHz faster than the graphics of the previous chip.

We’re not clear why there is a disparity between the Geekbench listing, which claims the updated GPU has four compute units, and Videocardz, which indicates the GPU has six RDNA 3 compute units (CU). However, as it employs the most recent design from the firm, this should perform at a whole new level when compared to the previous version’s seven Vega CUs.

An additional intriguing detail from the web description is that an uncommon combination of a high-end MSI motherboard, the X670E, and a midrange APU was used for testing. This suggests that rather than being something internal to AMD, it was probably tested by a reviewer or MSI, suggesting that it might be ready for release shortly. It’s easy to do the arithmetic on this one, especially with CES rapidly approaching.