Technologies

AMD and Sony Tease Next-Gen Graphics, Possibly for a PS6

The YouTube video for Project Amethyst teases three new graphics technologies. It’s about more than just the next console, though.

AMD and Sony jointly teased AMD’s approach to improving its future graphics hardware performance in a video posted to YouTube this week: compression, aggregation and dedication. Compressing all the data in the graphics pipeline for lower memory overhead, aggregating the compute units that process the data for faster matrix multiplication (key to improving AI performance, including upscaling) and finally adding dedicated silicon to handle ray and path tracing acceleration, necessary to bump up visual quality.

Sony’s involvement immediately sent everyone’s heads into PlayStation 6 rumorspace: AMD’s chips power Sony’s PlayStation consoles, and that’s pretty much the only place where the two companies intersect, at least for the moment.

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AMD powers almost all consoles, from the Xbox to the Steam Deck, with the Nintendo Switch line one of the few exceptions (it’s based on Nvidia chips). It’s also in laptops and the company’s own graphics cards. If you want to game on a laptop that won’t blow your budget, better integrated graphics are always in your best interest.

The three new technologies teased in the AMD video are:

Radiance Cores: My testing over the years has shown that AMD has long lagged Nvidia with respect to ray tracing performance (which is not just for pretty reflections — it improves lighting significantly), and that’s at least partly because its processing takes place in its main compute unit cores, which are optimized for processing other types of graphics. So ray tracing bogs your frame rates down a lot. And the one-core-one-ray-trace-unit architecture limits the amount of processing you can throw at it to improve. The Radiance Cores handle the ray tracing acceleration separately, similar to the way Nvidia’s RT cores do.

Neural Array: Matrix multiplication is the key algorithm for accelerating AI processing on-device — it’s what Tensor cores handle, for example — and these days, upscaling is driven by AI-heavy, machine learning-informed algorithms, like Nvidia’s DLSS and Intel’s XeSS. Upscaling is important because it’s a major way to run at higher resolutions without taking a performance hit, and in many ways is at the center of a suite of technologies for improving image fidelity and performance. AMD’s version is FidelityFX Super Resolution, and its next-generation of the technology, FSR Redstone (likely part of RDNA 5), will need those arrays, as well as Sony’s variation of it, PSSR.

Universal Compression: The less compressed your data is, the more memory it takes to process and the slower it moves through a pipeline. Traditionally, graphics processors have stuck to compressing only the biggest memory hogs, starting with textures, in part because there was a performance cost to inserting it into the processing pipeline. But silicon is so much faster than it used to be that it likely makes sense to use it for all the graphics data, which is how Universal Compression works. Even if performance is a wash, it probably means less memory is required, an important factor for 4K and higher gaming as well as prices.

This tease is the first of probably a zillion for both new technologies in the PS6 and AMD’s RDNA 5, and I’d expect to hear a lot more about it at CES in January 2026, if not sooner. I’ve reached out to AMD for more details, but didn’t immediately hear back.

Technologies

Google, Meta and Amazon Join Global Pact to Fight Rising Online Scams

The companies will share fraud intelligence and coordinate responses as AI makes scams faster, cheaper and harder to detect.

Modern online scams operate across multiple platforms, perhaps spanning social media, messaging apps, email and online marketplaces. Google, Meta and Amazon are among 11 tech, retail and payments companies that have signed a new agreement to combat online scams by sharing threat intelligence across platforms, Axios first reported Monday.

The initiative, called the Industry Accord Against Online Scams & Fraud, is designed to improve how companies detect and respond to fraud that spans multiple services. Participants say they will exchange signals, such as scam-linked accounts and fraudulent domains, and coordinate enforcement actions.

By sharing intelligence in near real time, companies hope to identify these scams earlier and stop them before they spread.

The effort reflects how modern scams operate. A victim might encounter a fake celebrity investment ad on social media, move to a messaging app where the scammer builds trust, then faces prompts to send money through a fraudulent website, payment app or crypto wallet — spanning multiple companies’ ecosystems.

Google said it now blocks hundreds of millions of scam-related results every day using AI, underscoring how both attackers and defenders are increasingly relying on the same technology. Meta removed more than 159 million scam ads in 2025 and is expanding AI tools to detect impersonation and warn users.

Online scams are growing rapidly, in part because generative AI has lowered the barrier to entry. AI can be used not only to produce realistic phishing emails but also to clone voices and deepfake videos that impersonate executives, public figures and even family members.

The agreement is voluntary and doesn’t create new legal obligations, but it comes after regulators’ increased pressure on tech platforms to address fraud more aggressively. The companies say they will begin building frameworks for reporting and intelligence-sharing, though it’s not yet clear how quickly those systems will be deployed or how effective they will be in practice.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Answers for Wednesday, March 18

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for March 18.

Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? I thought it was a fairly easy one, but read on for all the answers. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword

Let’s get to those Mini Crossword clues and answers.

Mini across clues and answers

1A clue: Word before «card,» flood» or «photography»
Answer: FLASH

6A clue: Joust weapon
Answer: LANCE

7A clue: Brain, heart or lungs
Answer: ORGAN

8A clue: «Frozen» reindeer
Answer: SVEN

9A clue: What can be found on frozen roads or frozen margaritas
Answer: SALT

Mini down clues and answers

1D clue: Follow a dentist’s recommendation
Answer: FLOSS

2D clue: Baby bug
Answer: LARVA

3D clue: Shape made in the snow
Answer: ANGEL

4D clue: Very little
Answer: SCANT

5D clue: Egg layer
Answer: HEN

Technologies

Amazon Speeds Up Delivery Even More With 1- and 3-Hour Options

The retailer says the one-hour option is available in hundreds of cities, with discounted shipping for Prime members.

Same-day delivery apparently isn’t fast enough for some Amazon shoppers. The retail giant said on Tuesday it’s adding new shipping options that will get products to front doors within a one- or three-hour window.

The company said in its announcement that the one-hour option is available in hundreds of cities across the US, while the three-hour option is now live in more than 2,000 areas. Amazon’s web page at amazon.com/getitfast shows whether those options are available to shoppers for their location. More than 90,000 products will be available for those shipping windows, the company said.

For those who can’t get those services (including the author of this post, who lives between Austin and San Antonio in Texas), a message will display: «3-hour delivery is currently unavailable. Check back at a later time or shop products with Same-Day delivery below.»

Pricing for the faster delivery options is not cheap: It’ll cost you $20 for one-hour delivery and $15 for three-hour delivery for those without an Amazon Prime account, or $10 and $5 for customers who subscribe to Prime.

Last year, the company rolled out faster Amazon delivery options to 4,000 additional areas.

In a video of the podcast Learn and Be Curious with Doug Herrington, hosted by Amazon’s CEO of worldwide stores, Kandace Kapps, the director of the company’s same-day strategy team, spoke in more detail about the challenges of fast shipping. Kapps discussed shifts in customer buying habits over the last few years, such as more people buying household essentials like toilet paper on Amazon.

She said that Amazon can deliver so quickly by placing same-day delivery hubs close to customers in metro areas and by getting products ready to ship within 15 minutes, aided by warehouse robots.

«I think customers are going to continue to get magically surprised by how fast we can deliver to their doorstop,» Kapps said.

Herrington said fast shipping increases sales: «When we speed up the service, the probability that somebody buys a product from us goes up.»

Other retailers, including Walmart, have been adding same-day delivery options or exploring other ways to speed up shipping times to compete with Amazon.

Removing buyers’ moments of hesitation

Part of Amazon’s strategy, which has involved a massive buildout of locations, deployment of thousands of trucks, deals with other delivery services and investment in logistics software, is actually pretty simple: being there when people need last-minute items or make impulse buys.

«It’s about removing the last moment where you would’ve reconsidered the purchase,» said Stephanie Carls, retail insights expert at coupon and promotional-code website RetailMeNot, a sibling site of CNET. «It changes how you shop, not just how fast you get things.»

Carls said that Amazon’s super-fast delivery is removing the timeframe when people might change their minds about a purchase.

«There used to be a gap between deciding to buy something and actually having it. That’s when you’d price check, rethink it, or decide you didn’t need it after all,» she said. «This closes that gap.»

The retail expert said that competitors, including Walmart and Target, have been speeding up delivery times in some markets. Still, they’re not matching Amazon’s scale or product range at those speeds or levels of consistency.

«And that’s what starts to make everyone else feel slow,» Carls said. «Amazon’s advantage is how tightly connected its technology, inventory and delivery networks are, which makes this level of speed more repeatable.»