Chromebooks may be hot-ticket items, but with its sixth-generation A-series chips for mainstream laptops, AMD is instead placing its bets on Microsoft's Windows 10. The new chips, code-named Carrizo, will appear in laptops priced between US$400 and $800 from Asus, Acer, Lenovo, Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba. The first wave of laptops will become available starting in July, initially with Windows 8, and later in the year with Windows 10.

The new chips include quad-core A8 and A10 processors, which have up to six GPU cores, and the faster FX chips, which have up to eight GPU cores. The chips draw between 15 watts to 35 watts of power. Some new laptops based on the chips were shown at the Computex trade show in Taipei this week. PC makers are considering the new Carrizo chips for Windows laptops, not for Chromebooks, said Adam Kozak, marketing manager at AMD. Laptops also will get thinner and lighter, as Carrizo chips are about 29 percent smaller than their predecessors.

Call it a Roomba for the ocean. The non-profit Ocean Cleanup has come up with an invention to help the Pacific Ocean rid itself of some of the 8 million tons of plastics. The plan is to set up enormous floating barriers in rotating tidal locations around the globe (called gyres), and let the plastics naturally flow into the "corrals," reports Gizmodo.

Unlike nets which entangle and can kill sea life, these enormous, V-shaped buffers anchored by floating booms are no threat to ocean creatures.The current will flow beneath the booms, where animals will be carried through safely. The floating plastic will be concentrated at the surface for easy removal. The system will be deployed next year. The first massive plastics-catching barrier - 6,500 feet wide - will be placed near the Japanese island of Tsushima between Japan and South Korea. If the pilot system works, more of the floats will be placed elsewhere in the Pacific.