CyberLink, a leader in digital creative editing software and artificial intelligence (AI), attended the Intel Innovation Taipei 2023. As a long-standing Intel independent software vendor (ISV) partner, CyberLink demonstrated how its latest generative AI technology is used for easily creating amazing photo and video content with tools such as: AI Business Outfits, AI Product Background, and AI Video to Anime. During the forum, CyberLink Chairman and CEO Jau Huang shared how Intel's upcoming AI PC is expected to benefit content creators by popularizing generative AI creativity from cloud computing to personal computers, to not only reduce the cost of AI computing but, simultaneously eliminate users' privacy concerns, fostering an entirely new AI content creation experience where it's even easier to unleash creativity with generative AI.

The Intel Innovation Taipei was kicked off by Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger. The event highlighted four major themes: artificial intelligence, edge to cloud, next-generation systems and platforms, and advance technologies, as well as the latest results of cooperation with Taiwan ecosystem partners, including the latest AI PCs, etc.

CyberLink Corp. a pioneer of AI and facial recognition technologies, will showcase several new, cutting-edge applications of its market-leading solution, FaceMe, at CES 2022 in Las Vegas. Learn how FaceMe can be deployed across use cases covering security, access control, health & safety, contactless payment, identity verification, visitor analytics, and more at booth #9543, North Hall, in the Las Vegas Convention Center, January 4-8, 2022.

FaceMe offers a broad and growing set of features and tools powered by CyberLink's highly ranked AI facial recognition engine. It is at the forefront of biometric solutions with innovation that pushes standards for accuracy, performance, security, and flexibility across a wide range of industries. Since the launch of FaceMe in late 2018, CyberLink has collaborated with over a hundred global partners, including hardware makers, solution providers, and system integrators, deploying its technology across multiple scenarios.

Intel today launched its Iris Xe MAX discrete graphics processor for thin-and-light notebooks powered by 11th Gen Core "Tiger Lake" processors. Dell, Acer, and ASUS are launch partners, debuting the chip on their Inspiron 15 7000, Swift 3x, and VivoBook TP470, respectively. The Iris Xe MAX is based on the Xe LP graphics architecture, targeted at compact scale implementations of the Xe SIMD for mainstream consumer graphics. Its most interesting feature is Intel DeepLink, and a powerful media acceleration engine that includes hardware encode acceleration for popular video formats, including HEVC, which should make the Iris Xe MAX a formidable video content production solution on the move.

The Iris Xe MAX is a fully discrete GPU built on Intel's 10 nm SuperFin silicon fabrication process. It features an LPDDR4X dedicated memory interface with 4 GB of memory at 68 GB/s of bandwidth, and uses PCI-Express 4.0 x4 to talk to the processor, but those are just the physical layers. On top of these are what Intel calls Deep Link, an all encompassing hardware abstraction layer that not only enables explicit multi-GPU with the Xe LP iGPU of "Tiger Lake" processors, but also certain implicit multi-GPU functions such as fine-grained division of labor between the dGPU and iGPU to ensure that the right kind of workload is split between the two. Intel referred to this as GameDev Boost, and we detailed it in an older article.

AMD released Catalyst 15.10 Beta drivers. These drivers address issues with Star Wars: Battlefront Beta, and comes with quality and performance optimization for Ashes of the Singularity in DirectX 12 mode. It also addresses a rare crash that occurs when maximizing a minimized web-browser window with a YouTube 4K video playback in it. Issues with Cyberlink PowerDVD playback on 3D displays connected via HDMI are also addressed.DOWNLOAD: AMD Catalyst 15.10 Beta for Windows 10/8.1/7 64-bit | Windows 10/8.1/7 32-bit

Pioneer rolled out what it claims to be the world's lightest portable Blu-ray disc writer, the BDR-XD05J. Tipping the scales at 230 g (or about the weight of a 6-inch smartphone), this drive comes in the clam-shell form-factor, and measures 133 mm x 133 mm x 14.8 mm (WxDxH). It takes advantage of the USB 3.0 SuperSpeed interface, and uses a single cable for both power and host connectivity. The drive can write single- and double-layer BD-R discs at speeds of up to 6X, triple- and quadruple-layer discs at up to 4X, and all kinds of BD-RE discs at speeds of up to 2X. DVDs burn at speeds of up to 8X, and CDs 24X. A suite of Cyberlink-made disc authoring/playback software comes included. The drive will be generally available later this week, beginning with Pioneer's home market of Japan.

Pioneer unveiled the colorful new BDR-XS05J portable Blu-ray XL writer. Its faux-aluminum plastic body can latch on to a selection of four body panels, bushed aluminum, piano black, soft pink, and glossy white. Measuring 135 x 135 x 20.3 mm (WxDxH), and weighing in at 330 g, the drive features a slot-type disc-loading mechanism, and USB 3.0 SuperSpeed. It uses a single cable for both power and data connectivity.

Moving on to its chops as an optical drive, the BDR-XS05J can write single- and double-layer BD-R and BD-R LtH discs at up to 6X, triple- and quadruple-layer ones at 4X, and all kinds of BD-RE discs at 2X. DVDs are written at speeds of up to 8X, and CDs at 24X. Blu-ray discs of all kinds are read at speeds of up to 6X, DVDs at 8X, and CDs at 24X. Bundled software include Cyberlink PowerDVD 10, PowerDirector 10, PowerProducer 5, Power2Go 7 (for pure-read), InstantBurn 5, PowerBackup 2, LabelPrint 2, and MediaShow 6.

AMD posted its first major release of the Catalyst software suite for this year, Catalyst 13.1 WHQL. Much along the lines of its 12.11 "Never Settle" driver, the new 13.1 WHQL brings performance enhancements for a boatload of games, targeting Radeon HD 7000 series GPUs based on the Graphics CoreNext (GCN) architecture. We know that AMD is yet to unlock the full potential of GCN, and 13.1 WHQL appears to be a step in that direction. In addition to performance enhancements and fixes, AMD introduced a new 3D settings and profile management user interface within Catalyst Control Center (CCC).

DOWNLOAD: AMD Catalyst 13.1 WHQL for Windows 8/7/Vista 64-bit, Windows 8/7/Vista 32-bit, Windows XP 32-bit, Windows XP 64-bit

A slice of the change-log follows.

ECS rolled out the HDC-I2/E-350D2, a mini-ITX motherboard running AMD E-350D APU, and AMD A45 FCH chipset. Designed for nettops and HTPCs (supports 1080p video playback), the HDC-I2/E-350D supports up to 8 GB of DDR3-1066 MHz memory, and features a legacy PCI slot. It draws power from a single 24-pin ATX connector. Because it uses the cheaper A45 FCH, it features just two SATA 3 Gb/s ports. Display connectivity includes DVI and HDMI. 6-channel HD audio and gigabit Ethernet make for the rest of it. ECS is including coupons to Cyberlink MediaExpresso 5.1 LE and MediaShow 5.1 LE. Expect it to go for under $100.

Closely trailing I-O Data, Buffalo Japan launched its portable Blu-ray XL writer drive, the BRXL-14U3. The drive implements USB 3.0 to ensure there are no bandwidth bottlenecks to affect buffer overrun protection, which writing discs at high speeds. Speaking of speeds, this drive is capable of writing BD-R single layer at 14X, double-layer BD-R at 12X, triple/quadruple-layer BDXL-R at 6X, and BD-RE XL at 2X. It features DTCP-enabled disc writing, with its bundled Buffalo DiXiM BD Burner 2011 software. Cyberlink-made Blu-ray 3D playback software is included. Slated for late-April, the BRXL-14U3 is priced at 23,205 JPY (US $286).

CyberLink Corp. today launched PhotoDirector 3, a new version of its innovative photography software. PhotoDirector 3 is designed to provide all the features photographers need to manage large batches of photos, adjust images to the best quality and showcase work in their own unique style, in a single application. Now featuring People Beautifying tools and a complete range of cutting edge processing features, PhotoDirector 3 not only enables customers to perfect every detail of scenery photos, but also create professional portraits.

PhotoDirector 3 introduces several new features, including precise editing tools that accurately remove objects, people or backgrounds from images as if they never existed and a complete set of tools to create professional portraits by smoothing out skin whitening teeth, removing wrinkles and much more. Additionally, PhotoDirector 3 provides new adjustment features, including curve-based levels, and is the only workflow application that allows the user to apply a complete range of adjustments to a targeted area of an image with a fine-tuned Adjustment Brush, Adjustment Selection tool and Gradient Mask, including intensifying the color or sharpening details, without touching the rest of the photo.

Auzentech, Inc. announced shipment dates today for the highly-anticipated X-Fi HomeTheater HD sound card. Reviewer shipments of the X-Fi HomeTheater HD will begin the second week of July. According to Auzentech the sound card will also go into full production at that time, enabling customer shipments to begin at the end of July.

"We are excited to officially announce shipment dates of the X-Fi HomeTheater HD sound card," said Stephane Bae, president of Auzentech, Inc. "We appreciate the patience of all our customers, distributors, and dealers who have waited anxiously for this sound card."

Optical drive specialist Lite-On is released a new Blu Ray drive, the iHOS104, which started shipping this week. At US $69.99, the drive provides reading Blu Ray discs at 4x speed, 8x for DVD-ROM, and 32x for CD-ROM. It supports reading known sub-formats of the media. The drive packs 2 MB of cache, and uses a standard SATA interface. It comes with a copy of Cyberlink TrueTheater software.

VIA Technologies, Inc, a leading innovator of power efficient x86 processor platforms, today unveiled the next generation of VIA Vinyl HD Audio codecs, the VIA Vinyl VT1818S and 1828S, with support offered by CyberLink in their latest award-winning DVD player software, CyberLink PowerDVD.

The leading Blu-ray Disc and DVD playback software, CyberLink PowerDVD provides enhanced high-definition audio through the embedded VIA Vinyl HD VIA Vinyl 1828S Audio codecs, which also support Blu-ray Disc audio content protection, allowing for optimal audio output. Without content protection support, audio quality is dramatically reduced to that of a regular CD with a sampling rate of only 16-bit/48kHz.

With advancements in visual-computing technologies on an all-time high, and graphics processing units with immense 3D computational power coming out by the fortnights, consumers benefit the most. In the process of evaluating graphics processors' abilities using the latest 3D games and synthetic 3D benchmark software alone, we are probably missing out on other primary uses of a GPU which when tapped, show just how potent a GPU can be. Both NVIDIA and ATI have had video-transcoding features that until exploited by software are close to rudimentary.

Cyberlink, have been working on technologies that enable their software to harness the video-transcoding abilities of GPU's. Shuichi Takagi, CyberLink's vice president of of business development ran a demonstration of PowerDirector 7 that is capable of GPU-accelerated video-transcoding, on a recently launched ATI Radeon HD4850 512 MB, proving that the hardware and software is capable of converting four HD MPEG-2 movies into MPEG-4 simultaneously, in real time. According to Shuichi, it will take about 30 minutes to process four full-length movies and compress them into handheld-friendly 200+ MB files.

CyberLink claims significant performance gains for playing, analyzing, and producing high-quality video content using the Intel Core 2 Quad processors. CyberLink said that PowerDVD Ultra improved performance by up to 66% when playing HD material such as Blu-Ray and HD-DVD while resulted in smoother playback, achieving frame rates up to 80.54 fps for high-definition H.264 video content. Automated video editing software PowerDirector improved editing and transcoding times by up to 68% according to Cyberlink.