AMD just revealed the Ryzen 9950X3D2 Dual Edition desktop processor, which is a beastly follow-up to last year’s 9950X3D. This is the company’s first desktop processor where both chiplets have been equipped with AMD’s proprietary 3D V-Cache technology, which seems like a boon for gamers. Each chiplet includes 104MB of cache, offering an incredible 208MB total on-chip cache.

“208MB of cache means more game data, more assets and more working data sitting right next to the CPU cores,” AMD Senior VP Jack Huynh explained in an announcement video.

Just like last year’s release, the 9950X3D2 features a 16-core processor based on the Zen 5 architecture. This new release has increased to a 200W TDP, compared to the 170TDP of the original. This could indicate an increase in speed and performance, but with more heat output. 

AMD

AMD says the chip will be great for both gaming and for creative workloads, like compiling game engines, running AI models and rendering 3D objects. The company says it can deliver a five to 10 percent performance boost when using applications like Unreal Engine, Chromium, Blender and DaVinci Resolve.

Last year’s 9950X3D chip was already an absolute powerhouse, so we are looking forward to putting this one through its paces. The Ryzen 9950X3D2 chip will be available on April 22, though we don’t have a price just yet. The standard 9950X3D currently costs around $675.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/amds-ryzen-9950x3d2-chip-features-an-incredible-208mb-of-on-chip-cache-154137156.html?src=rss

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When you’re shopping around for a massage gun, you want to focus on features that justify the price. Specifically, I focus on features like speed settings (both intensity and versatility), noise and ease of use, battery life, and size. I’ve learned the hard way that when you’re looking for a travel-sized massage gun, you have to be extra shrewd.

I was once gifted a mini massage gun that, according to the holiday gift exchange rules, must have cost less than $30. It ran out of battery within one or two minutes of weak “massaging.” All of that is to say, a cheap massage gun isn’t worth it. Even if you’re looking for “mini,” you still need to invest in one up to the task of hammering away the pain. And do I have the guy for you: Normally $99.99, this mini massage gun is currently on sale for $78.82 as part of Amazon’s Big Spring Sale.

Bob and Brad Mini Massage Gun

$78.82
at Amazon

$99.99
Save $21.17

$78.82
at Amazon

$99.99
Save $21.17

At barely one pound, the Bob and Brad Q2 Mini certainly lives up to its name. Luckily, this massage gun still packs a lot of punch, in terms of both literal vibrations and my overall user experience. For me, the real selling point of this massage gun—which I review in-depth here—is the effectiveness of its heat therapy. Plus, its compact size makes it perfect for travel or bringing to the gym—something I never considered with my full-sized TheraGun Therabody. Even if you already own a larger massage gun, the Q2 Mini’s heat therapy and sweet size could make it a worthwhile addition to your recovery toolkit.

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If you’re in the Apple ecosystem, and you’re looking for a new pair of earbuds, you’d have trouble doing better than AirPods Pro 3. Apple’s flagship earbuds sound great, come with interchangeable tips, and sport a number of intelligent, useful features. That package doesn’t come cheap, though—Apple has the newest AirPods Pro priced at $249. That’s why they’re great to buy on sale: Amazon currently has the AirPods Pro 3 for $50 off their usual price.

AirPods Pro 3

$199.00
at Amazon

$249.00
Save $50.00

$199.00
at Amazon

$249.00
Save $50.00

AirPods Pro 3 are Apple’s best earbuds, hands down—if you prefer the design, that is. They offer the highest quality sound, the best noise cancellation, and sizing flexibility with their interchangeable tips. If you find that the “one size fits all” approach of Apple’s standard AirPods don’t work for you, one of these AirPods Pro sizes might fit better.

AirPods Pro 3 come with a ton of features, too. The buds have Active Noise Cancellation, and Apple says these are up to four times better than its first-generation Pros. There’s also Conversation Awareness, which lowers the volume of your music when you’re speaking so you can have a chat, then raises the volume back up when you’re done. Apple’s Live Translation feature can translate conversations on the fly directly in your AirPods, and you can even use the buds as hearing aids. (They’re actually FDA-approved.)

But those features are also in some of Apple’s other earbuds. What’s exclusive here is the built-in heart rate sensor. If you have an Apple Watch, or another fitness tracker, you might not find that particularly useful, but if you don’t, you can rely on your earbuds to keep tabs on your heart rate during exercises, for more accurate fitness measurements. The charging case is also Apple’s first to include its second-generation Ultra Wideband chip, which makes finding the case (and your buds) much easier with Find My.

Apple says you can get up to eight hours of listening time on a single charge with Active Noise Cancellation (6.5 hours when using the heart rate sensor), and up to 24 hours when you take the charging case into consideration. These are IP57-rated for resistance against dust, sweat, and water, so while they’re not waterproof, they should handle workouts just fine.

Recent repairs to a centuries-old tile floor at a church in the Netherlands may have revealed the skeleton of the French Musketeer d’Artagnan.

Today, Charles de Batz de Castlemore, Count d’Artagnan, is best known as a character in The Three Musketeers, written by Alexandre Dumas and eventually played by both Gene Kelly and future Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy—but he was a real French military officer and spy. D’Artagnan died during a siege, and the whereabouts of his body have remained a mystery for more than 350 years. But an archaeologist in the Netherlands recently unearthed a skeleton from the floor of a 17th-century church that could actually be d’Artagnan.

“It is only the dead who do not return”

The ground beneath the centuries-old Saints Peter and Paul Church subsided earlier this year, cracking a few of the blue tiles that pave the chapel’s floor. During repairs, church staff decided to have a look beneath the floor to see if there was any truth to the rumor that d’Artagnan—famous French Musketeer and inspiration for a series of swashbuckling novels—lay buried beneath their church. It turns out that there actually was a skeleton buried under the church floor, and there’s a decent chance it’s d’Artagnan himself.

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A while back I switched to running while wearing bone conduction headphones (BCH), and I have zero regrets. Sure, they may never match the bass in traditional headphones, but a good pair can bring you perfectly solid sound quality—not to mention the comfort and safety that comes with an open-ear fit and BCH technology (they really do send sound through your bones).

Right now my number one favorite headphones for running, the Shokz OpenRun Pro 2, are available for $139.95 as part of Amazon’s Big Spring Sale, a 22% discount off their list price of $179.95.

Shokz OpenRun Pro 2

$139.95
at Amazon

$179.95
Save $40.00

$139.95
at Amazon

$179.95
Save $40.00

As my colleague Daniel Oropeza noted in his review, the Shokz OpenRun Pro 2 are the best set of BCHs that either of us have ever tried. They’re across the board winners: Sound quality, secure fit, and battery life. (That last point is especially important for distance runners—even if I forget to charge the night before a long workout, a quick five-minute top-up gives me around 1.5 hours of listening time.)

If you’re looking for an even more affordable pair (without sacrificing quality), the original Shokz OpenRun are also on sale, down to $89.94 from a list price of $129.95. They might not have as powerful bass or as long a battery life compared to the OpenRun Pro 2, but they live up to the Shokz name.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Physics World: Researchers at the CERN particle-physics lab have successfully transported antiprotons in a lorry across the lab’s main site. The feat, the first of its kind, follows a similar test with protons in 2024. CERN says the achievement is “a huge leap” towards being able to transport antimatter between labs across Europe. […] To do so, in 2020 the BASE team began developing a device, known as BASE-STEP (for Baryon-Antibaryon Symmetry Experiment-Symmetry Tests in Experiments with Portable Antiprotons), to store and transport antiprotons. It works by trapping particles in a Penning trap composed of gold-plated cylindrical electrode stacks made from oxygen-free copper that is surrounded by a superconducting magnet bore operated at cryogenic temperatures.

The device, which also contains a carbon-steel vacuum chamber to shield the particles from stray magnetic fields, is then mounted on an aluminium frame. This allows it to be transported using standard forklifts and cranes and withstand the bumps and vibrations of transport. In 2024, BASE researchers used the device to transport a cloud of about 105 trapped protons across CERN’s Meyrin campus for four hours. After that feat, the researchers began to adjust BASE-STEP to handle antiprotons and yesterday the team successfully transported a trap containing a cloud of 92 antiprotons around the campus for 30 minutes, traveling up to 42 km/h.

With further improvements and tests, the team now hope to transport the antiprotons further afield. The first destination on the team’s list is the Heinrich Heine University (HHU) in Dusseldorf, Germany, which would take about eight hours. “This means we’d have to keep the trap’s superconducting magnet at a temperature below 8.2 K for that long,” says BASE-STEP’s leader Christian Smorra. “So, in addition to the liquid helium , we’d need to have a generator to power a cryocooler on the truck. We are currently investigating this possibility.” If possible to transport to HHU, physicists would then use the particles to search for charge-parity-time violations in protons and antiprotons with a precision at least 100 times higher than currently possible at CERN.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chevrolet has developed something of a modern tradition with recent generations of the Corvette: As a new generation approaches, the company rolls out the Grand Sport. It’s intended to be a sort of “sweet spot” version of the ’Vette, pairing the go-fast bits of the higher-spec machines with the entry-level motor found in the Stingray.

If that pattern holds, the mid-engined, eighth-generation Corvette may be nearing the end—because this is the new Grand Sport. This one, though, is different. It comes with an all-new V8 at its heart, one with substantially more power and torque than the current base Stingray. If that’s not enough, you can also get it with the ZR1X’s electric motor and battery. That model is called the Grand Sport X, and it’s the effective replacement for the first all-wheel-drive hybrid Corvette.

Yes, the E-Ray is dead, three years after Chevrolet raised eyebrows by putting a hybrid system where many said it didn’t belong. But you can’t argue with that system’s all-weather capability. It lives on in the new Grand Sport X, which pairs a 186-horsepower (139 kW) electric motor on the front axle with a new V8 at the rear.

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If you’re a regular ChatGPT user, then you’re one of a crowd that’s now around 900 million people strong. It seems that plenty of us are spending significant amounts of time with the AI chatbot, whether that’s to get more done, search the web, work on creative or coding projects, or just have something to talk to. Are you making the most out of ChatGPT though? The web, mobile, and desktop apps come with a selection of settings and some prompt adjustment possibilities that you may not have fully explored yet. Here’s how to level up.

Use ‘branch conversations’ to explore tangents off your chats

OpenAI often rolls out minor but useful upgrades to ChatGPT that can get missed, and one of those is branch conversations. They quite literally let you branch off from one conversation and start another, while leaving the original chat preserved so you can go back to it if you need to (and maybe start another branch). It’s a simple way to go off on a tangent with a discussion. Click or tap the three dots at the end of any ChatGPT response and you’ll see the Branch in new chat option. A new chat is then created, based on the first.

Trick ChatGPT into returning shorter, more effective results

You can specify what kind of target audience you are to ChatGPT.
Credit: Lifehacker

The internet is awash with ChatGPT prompt “hacks” of varying quality and effectiveness, and they all really boil down to the specificity of the instructions you’re giving the AI. From the length of the responses to the data format they’re outputted in, tell ChatGPT what you want in precise terms, and it will oblige.

One of the best of these prompt hacks I’ve seen lately is from u/AdCold1610 on Reddit, and all you have to do is put “extremely lazy person here” somewhere in the prompt. It often has quite a profound effect on the response: Answers get shorter and to the point, and if there are instructions involved they become simpler and more straightforward. You get less fluff and more action in general, though obviously how much impact the lazy prompt has will vary on what you’re asking of the AI.

Use Voice Mode to record memos or thoughts

You may well have seen the little sound wave icon down in the bottom right corner of the ChatGPT prompt box and given Voice Mode a try, without really knowing how to make use of it or why it works better than typing in your prompts. One potentially helpful idea, though, is to use it as a voice memo recorder for stuff you need to get done; another is to use it as an audio-based personal journal for thoughts and reflections. You can keep them all together in one chat, or spread them out.

There’s no shortage of mobile apps that will record audio clips for you, but they don’t come with ChatGPT’s AI analysis brain attached. Once you’ve built up a library of recordings, you can get it to prioritize your to do list, remind you about something you’ve forgotten, summarize the main themes of your reflections, sum up your mood changes over the week, or whatever else you can think of.

Use “Personalization” to tailor ChatGPT’s answers towards your interests

Delve into the Personalization settings.
Credit: Lifehacker

You can tailor the answers ChatGPT gives you by telling it more about yourself: what you know about a certain topic, how you best absorb information, how verbose or succinct you’d like the AI’s responses to be, and so on. But entering these details for each and every prompt can get tiresome quickly.

There’s actually a place to put details like this in ChatGPT’s settings, as long as you open the panel on the web or desktop: Click your account profile avatar (bottom left), then choose Personalization.The next screen not only lets you set some guidelines for the personality ChatGPT should use by default, it also lets you tell the AI a bit about yourself—which it will keep permanently in its memory. You can add details including your occupation, your ethical values, your preferred learning style, and your main interests.

Use Photoshop to edit photos within ChatGPT for free

ChatGPT comes with mini-apps you can connect to via the prompt box, and one of those apps happens to be Photoshop—meaning you can carry out some pretty advanced edits using Adobe’s software technology, free of charge.

The plug-in is currently available in all the ChatGPT apps except Android and Windows. Pick Apps from the navigation pane, then search for “Photoshop” and click Connect to add it to your ChatGPT tools. You can then call it into action via the + (plus) button in the prompt box, or by typing “@” in your prompt followed by the app name.

With Photoshop enabled, you can perform all kinds of edits: blur backgrounds, remove objects, and tweak brightness and contrast, for example. Just use the same natural language as you would in any ChatGPT conversation. You do need to upload an image to edit, or provide a public web link to one. If you don’t do this before you submit your prompt, you’ll be asked to do it after.

Use your phone camera for live help

Don’t neglect the Camera option on mobile.
Credit: Lifehacker

ChatGPT for Android and iOS comes with a superpower: access to your phone’s camera, so you can feed it photos in real time as you explore the world and go about the business of daily life. Just tap the + (plus) button by the prompt box, then Camera.

Even if you’ve realized the feature is there, you might not have realized how much you can do with it. It’ll translate signs in a foreign language for you, identify movies and TV shows from images posted to social media, pick out the route you need to take from a picture of a timetable or transit map, and explain what’s in a particular dish on a menu.

Ask ChatGPT for questions rather than answers

Back to a bit of prompt hacking: Another trick that I’ve used a lot recently was taken from Reviewracoon on Medium. It’s a debugging prompt, which means you don’t ask for answers; instead, you ask ChatGPT for questions that are going to help you get to the answers yourself.

This works best when reviewing your own writing, code, or ideas. For a draft of a short story, for example, you might say: “Don’t tell me what’s wrong and how to fix it. Instead, act like a detective, asking questions that will help me figure out how to improve it.” What you’ll get back will encourage you to review the thinking around your own process, what you’re trying to achieve, and why you’ve taken the approaches you have.

Use temporary chats to run ChatGPT in incognito mode

Launch temporary chats on mobile or desktop.
Credit: Lifehacker

Another feature you might not have come across is the very handy temporary chat tool, which works like an incognito mode for ChatGPT. Nothing in this chat will be saved—it’ll be instantly forgotten as soon as you close it. To start a temporary chat, open up a new chat and then click or tap the dashed speech bubble up in the top right corner.

Reduce your messaging limits to block ads in ChatGPT Free

If you’re on the Free or Go tiers of ChatGPT, you’re going to see ads by default to help pay OpenAI’s data center bills, but there is a way to remove them: You just have to put up with lower usage limits in return.

Get to your profile page by clicking or tapping on your username, then select Ads controls > Change plan to go ad-free > Reduce message limits to make the change. (You can reverse it any time you like.) OpenAI doesn’t actually specify how restrictive this will be in terms of a daily message allowance, but it’s an option you can try out. The other ways to remove ads are to switch to a Plus, Pro, Business, or Enterprise account (starting from $20 per month), or to register for an Education account. These subscriptions come with other benefits too, including access to smarter models.

Use ‘Study and learn’ mode to pick up new skills and concepts

Study and learn mode will feed you knowledge and then test you on it.
Credit: Lifehacker

You can employ ChatGPT as a learning tool in all kinds of ways, but there is a specific Study and learn mode built right in. OpenAI describes it as “a learning experience that helps you work through problems step by step instead of just getting an answer”.

To enable it, tap or click the + (plus) button on the prompt box, then choose Study and learn (it might be behind a More menu). Specify the topic you want to learn, and submit the prompt to get started with your tutoring session. ChatGPT may ask you some clarification questions so the bot can narrow down its teaching material.

What you’ll get next is a blend of information and questions to test your knowledge: ChatGPT will mark your answers as you go, then adapt the learning experience to meet you where you currently are.