Slashdot reader thegarbz writes: While a lot of focus has been on the TPM requirements for Windows 11, Microsoft has since updated its documentation to provide a complete list of supported processors. At present the list includes only Intel 8th Generation Core processors or newer, and AMD Ryzen Zen+ processors or newer, effectively limiting Windows 11 to PC less than 4-5 years old.

Notably absent from the list is the Intel Core i7-7820HQ, the processor used in Microsoft's current flagship $3500+ Surface Studio 2. This has prompted many threads on Reddit from users angry that their (in some cases very new) Surface PC is failing the Windows 11 upgrade check.
The Verge confirms: Windows 11 will only support 8th Gen and newer Intel Core processors, alongside [Intel's 2016-era] Apollo Lake and newer Pentium and Celeron processors. That immediately rules out millions of existing Windows 10 devices from upgrading to Windows 11... Windows 11 will also only support AMD Ryzen 2000 and newer processors, and 2nd Gen or newer [AMD] EPYC chips. You can find the full list of supported processors on Microsoft's site...

Originally, Microsoft noted that CPU generation requirements are a "soft floor" limit for the Windows 11 installer, which should have allowed some older CPUs to be able to install Windows 11 with a warning, but hours after we published this story, the company updated that page to explicitly require the list of chips above.

Many Windows 10 users have been downloading Microsoft's PC Health App (available here) to see whether Windows 11 works on their systems, only to find it fails the check... This is the first significant shift in Windows hardware requirements since the release of Windows 8 back in 2012, and the CPU changes are understandably catching people by surprise.

Microsoft is also requiring a front-facing camera for all Windows 11 devices except desktop PCs from January 2023 onwards.
"In order to run Windows 11, devices must meet the hardware specifications," explains Microsoft's official compatibility page for Windows 11.

"Devices that do not meet the hardware requirements cannot be upgraded to Windows 11."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCGamesN: Microsoft has finally debuted Windows 11, and it's not just packing auto HDR and native Android apps. The long-teased DirectStorage API that's meant to cut down loading times on gaming PCs much in the same way the Xbox Velocity Architecture speeds things up on Microsoft's consoles is on its way, and it won't be coming to Windows 10 like we originally thought. The Windows 11 exclusive feature improves communication between your storage device and graphics card, allowing assets to load quicker without having to pass through the CPU first. Naturally, this means more time spent gaming and less time reading the same hints as you move from area to area.

It'll work best with systems that are dubbed 'DirectStorage Optimized', containing the right hardware and drivers for the job. If you're more of the DIY type that prefers to build the best gaming PC yourself, requirements demand an NVMe SSD with 1TB of storage or more. PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs and the latest GPUs from Nvidia and AMD will offer a better experience, but DirectStorage will still work with older standards like the third generation PCIe 3.0 -- you won't have much luck with 2.5-inch SATA drives, though. DirectStorage will only work with games built using DirectX 12, so there's no telling how many titles will support the feature when you upgrade to Windows 11 for free later this year.

PuceBaboon writes: Ars Technica is reporting that some owners of Western Digital's My Book network-connected disk drives are experiencing data loss on their devices. The as yet unverified problem appears to be an externally initiated factory-reset, resulting in a loss of all existing data. At this early stage, Western Digital is warning users that they should disconnect their devices from the internet to protect their data. A thread on Western Digital's support forum alerted Ars Technica of the problem. Western Digital representatives write in an email: The incident is under active investigation from Western Digital. We do not have any indications of a breach or compromise of Western Digital cloud services or systems. We have determined that some My Book Live devices have been compromised by a threat actor. In some cases, this compromise has led to a factory reset that appears to erase all data on the device. The My Book Live device received its final firmware update in 2015. At this time, we are recommending that customers disconnect their My Book Live devices from the Internet to protect their data on the device. We have issued the following statement to our customers and will provide updates to this thread when they are available: https://community.wd.com/t/action-required-on-my-book-live-and-my-book-live-duo/268147
UPDATE (6/26): Western Digital wrote Friday that "Some customers have reported that data recovery tools may be able to recover data from affected devices, and we are currently investigating the effectiveness of these tools." After reviewing logs from their affected customers, the company now believes the affected devices were directly accessible from the Internet, allowing attackers to remotely install a malicious Trojan file.

"Our investigation of this incident has not uncovered any evidence that Western Digital cloud services, firmware update servers, or customer credentials were compromised. As the My Book Live devices can be directly exposed to the internet through port forwarding, the attackers may be able to discover vulnerable devices through port scanning."

MojoKid writes: AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) PC graphics up-scaling technology is ready for prime-time and the company has allowed members of the press to showcase performance and visuals of the tech in action with a number of game engines. AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution is vendor-agnostic and doesn't require specialized hardware to function like NVIDIA DLSS, which relies on Tensor cores on-board NVIDIA Turing or Ampere GPUs to accelerate neural network models that have been specifically trained on game engines. In contrast, AMD FSR utilizes more traditional spatial upscaling to create a super resolution image from a single input frame, not multiple frames. AMD FSR then employs a library of open-source algorithms that work on sharpening both image edge and texture detail. In game testing at HotHardware, frame rates can jump dramatically with little to no perceptible reduction in image quality, and the technology even works on many NVIDIA GPUs as well. There are currently 19 titles that are available or planned with support for AMD FSR, but with the open nature of the technology and cross-GPU compatibility, game developers theoretically should have significant incentive for adoption to breath new performance into their game titles.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Today's announcement from SiFive comes in two parts; this part is significant as it recognizes that Intel will be enabling SiFive's IP portfolio on its 7nm manufacturing process for upcoming foundry customers. We are expecting Intel to offer a wide variety of its own IP, such as some of the x86 cores, memory controllers, PCIe controllers, and accelerators, however the depth of its third party IP support has not been fully established at this point. SiFive's IP is the first (we believe) official confirmation of specific IP that will be supported. Announced earlier this year by Pat Gelsinger, Intel Foundry Services (or IFS) is one prong of Intel's strategy to realign itself with the current and future semiconductor market. Despite having attempted to become a foundry player in the past, whereby they build chips under contract for their customers, it hasn't really worked out that well -- however IFS is a new reinvigoration of that idea, this time with more emphasis on getting it right and expanding the scope.

Last Thursday, a Canadian company backed by Jeff Bezos, called General Fusion, announced it's building a nuclear fusion facility in the UK. Insider reports: General Fusion and the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) announced the project together, which will see General Fusion build a fusion demonstration plant in the village of Culham, near Oxford. The facility will be a proof-of-concept, allowing General Fusion to demonstrate its Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF) technology before going on to build its first commercial facility. According to General Fusion, construction will begin in 2022, and it is expected to be about three years before the plant is able to open.

"This new plant by General Fusion is a huge boost for our plans to develop a fusion industry in the UK, and I'm thrilled that Culham will be home to such a cutting-edge and potentially transformative project," the UK science minister, Amanda Solloway, said in a statement. The BBC reports Bezos has been an investor in General Fusion for over a decade, and the company raised $100 million in its latest funding round.

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, and leaker Jon Prosser say Apple is working on a completely new, high-end version of the MacBook Air. MacRumors reports: The high-end MacBook Air will feature two USB-C ports and a more powerful Apple silicon chip, according to Gurman. The chip will apparently be a direct successor to Apple's M1 chip, featuring the same number of computing cores, but it will run faster. It is also expected to see an increase in graphics cores from seven or eight to nine or 10. This high-end MacBook Air would sit above the current MacBook Air models with the M1 chip, but below the MacBook Pro. Prosser recently unveiled renders that purport to depict the next-generation MacBook Air based on leaked images.

Prosser says that the MacBook Air will be available in a range of color options, much like the 24-inch iMac, and will feature larger function keys, a smaller trackpad, and redesigned feet on the underside of the machine. The biggest change in terms of design from the current MacBook Air seems to be the loss of its iconic tapered design. Instead, the MacBook Air will become considerably thinner as a whole, Prosser explained. Other features rumored to be coming to next-generation MacBook Air models include a mini-LED display and a MagSafe charging port. Gurman believes that the high-end MacBook Air could launch in the second half of this year at the earliest or in 2022, a timeframe that has been echoed by Prosser.

Boston Dynamics has been purchased by Hyundai in a deal valued at $1.1 billion. According to Motherboard, the deal "sees Hyundai assume an 80 percent controlling stake in the robot company. Softbank will retain a 20 percent stake." From the report: It is hard to tell what Hyundai wants out of Boston Dynamics from the press release, which is laden with technobabble. Robots in car manufacturing are nothing new, but Hyundai says the acquisition is "another major step toward its strategic transformation into a Smart Mobility Solution Provider" such as "autonomous driving, artificial intelligence (AI), Urban Air Mobility (UAM), smart factories and robots," which seems to speak to the company's ambitions beyond car manufacturing. Hyundai says it hopes to "develop advanced technologies that enhance people's lives and promote safety, thereby realizing the progress for humanity."

Apparently, the "progress of humanity" means a lot less of it. To celebrate the purchase, Hyundai released a bizarre hype video featuring a seeing-eye robot dog, a nurse robot dog with a tablet mounted on its head that allows the patient to nod at a doctor who is somewhere else, and a teen dancing with a robot in the street. In other words, Hyundai envisions a lonely future in which social cohesion between humans has broken down and robots are our only friends. That's all bad enough, but why anyone would want a seeing eye robot dog instead of a real dog is beyond comprehension.

According to ComputerBase, graphics card prices have begun to drop as much as 50% in Europe. From a report: Availability has also improved significantly, with sales of most GPU models from both AMD and Nvidia doubling month-over-month. This report comes on the heels of ASRock, a GPU maker, noting that GPU pricing is easing as demand from Chinese cryptocurrency miners wanes. More budget-oriented cards like the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 and AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT are seeing the most positive results, with a near 50% drop in price compared to last month. For flagship cards like the RTX 3080 and RX 6800 XT, however, prices haven't moved as much. They have dipped a respectable 10-15% which is still a very positive change considering the shortage issues plaguing the technology industry. In the United States, GPU pricing is slowly catching up to Europe, but it's still going down nonetheless.

Long-time Slashdot reader cusco shares an interesting report from IEEE Spectrum: In 2017, we first wrote about the Chinese startup Unitree Robotics, which had the goal of "making legged robots as popular and affordable as smartphones and drones." Relative to the cost of other quadrupedal robots (like Boston Dynamics' $74,000 Spot), Unitree's quadrupeds are very affordable, with their A1 costing under $10,000 when it became available in 2020. This hasn't quite reached the point of consumer electronics that Unitree is aiming for, but they've just gotten a lot closer: now available is the Unitree Go1, a totally decent looking small size quadruped that can be yours for an astonishingly low $2700.

Speedy, good looking gait, robust, and a nifty combination of autonomous human-following and obstacle avoidance... There are three versions of the Go1: the $2700 base model Go1 Air, the $3500 Go1, and the $8500 Go1 Edu... The top of the line Edu model offers higher end computing, 2kg more payload (up to 5kg), as well as foot-force sensors, lidar, and a hardware extension interface and API access... Battery life is a big question — the video seems to suggest that the Go1 is capable of a three-kilometer, 20-minute jog, and then some grocery shopping and a picnic, all while doing obstacle avoidance and person following and with an occasional payload.
Unitree later provided the reporter more detailed specs:

• The battery life of the robot while jogging is about 1 hour
• It weighs 12kg
• The Super Sensory System includes five wide-angle stereo depth cameras, hypersonic distance sensors, and an integrated processing system
• It's running at 16 core CPU and a 1.5 tflop GPU

Slashdot reader quonset writes: With the heat wave gripping Texas, and in an effort to prevent another collapse of the power grid as happened in February during cold weather, Texas is, for the third day in a row, asking residents to conserve electricity. Some people in the Houston area have come home to find the temperatures in their homes are still warm (in the high 70s to low 80s) despite their air conditioning running all day!
A local Texas reporter tells the tale: The family's smart thermostat was installed a few years ago as part of a new home security package. Many smart thermostats can be enrolled in a program called "Smart Savers Texas." It's operated by a company called EnergyHub. The agreement states that in exchange for an entry into sweepstakes, electric customers allow them to control their thermostats during periods of high energy demand. EnergyHub's list of its clients include TXU Energy, CenterPoint and ERCOT.
They spoke to one Texas resident who obviously wasn't even aware of what he'd agreed to when the smart thermostat was installed. As soon as he found out, he immediately unenrolled from the program, complaining "If somebody else can manipulate this, I'm not for it."

Check out this video footage of the sleek Mayflower 400 slicing through the water, hoping to retrace the historic 1620 journey of the famous ship which carried pilgrims to America. Unfortunately, unlike the real Mayflower, this robotic 21st-century doppelganger "had to turn back Friday to fix a mechanical problem," reports the Associated Press: Nonprofit marine research organization ProMare, which worked with IBM to build the autonomous ship, said it made the decision to return to base "to investigate and fix a minor mechanical issue" but hopes to be back on the trans-Atlantic journey as soon as possible.

With no humans on board the ship, there's no one to make repairs while it's at sea.

Piloted by artificial intelligence technology, the 50-foot (15-meter) Mayflower Autonomous Ship began its trip early Tuesday, departing from Plymouth, England, and spending some time off the Isles of Scilly before it headed for deeper waters.

It was supposed to take up to three weeks to reach Provincetown on Cape Cod before making its way to Plymouth, Massachusetts. If successful, it would be the largest autonomous vessel to cross the Atlantic.

A month ago, Amazon-first gadget brands Aukey and Mpow suddenly and mysteriously disappeared from the giant online retailer's storefront, with almost all their electronics vanishing from Amazon's shelves. Today, popular battery and charger brand RavPower has completely disappeared as well. From a report: All of the company's product listings have disappeared, leaving blank white spaces in RavPower's Amazon storefront. Searches for "RavPower" don't bring up any listings for products made by the company. Existing links to RavPower products either point to Amazon's "Sorry, we couldn't find that page" cute 404 dogs, or listings that read "Currently unavailable." By and large, this is exactly what happened to Aukey, Mpow, and other lesser-known electronics retailers last month -- except here, whoever did this has been a bit more thorough.

CNET News : We'll let Razer have its 5 minutes of E3 glory for the "world's fastest 14-inch gaming laptop," the Razer Blade 14. Razer's simply the first to announce one this size with an AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX -- also Razer's first AMD CPU in the Blade line -- and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 crammed inside. But a svelte, small, no-compromise (well, minimal compromise) gaming laptop from Razer is always welcome. Along with the laptop, the company launched a new wall charger, based on Gallium Nitride rather than silicon, its USB-C 130W GaN Charger. No weird names for that one. The last 14-inch Razer Blade debuted in 2017, and it makes sense that Razer would revive it for the 14-inch laptop renaissance that began around 2020. The 2021 Blade 14, as you'd expect, looks like a somewhat shrunken version of the 15-inch, though it's roughly the same thickness as the 15-inch at 16.8mm.

There will be three models of the Blade 14 at launch. All use the Ryzen 9 5900HX, with the same 1TB SSD, 16GB RAM and 720p webcam, as well as Razer's THX Spatial Audio, HDMI 2.1 and other ports and so on. The entry-level $1,800 model incorporates a 144Hz 1080p screen and an RTX 3060 GPU; for $2,200 you upgrade to an RTX 3070 with a 165Hz 1440p display, and $2,800 bumps that to an RTX 3080. The SSD is upgradable but the RAM is soldered to the motherboard, which is kind of a bummer. The screens support FreeSync Premium adaptive refresh through G-Sync compability mode. Razer rates the battery life at up to 12 hours, though it's likely in the ballpark of 10 hours based on what we've seen elsewhere. As you'd expect, the RTX 3080 isn't being pushed to the max in this system; the GPU power draw can range anywhere from 80 to 150 watts, and Razer takes the middle road at 100 watts. In comparison, the hefty 15-inch Asus ROG Strix Scar we're testing pulls down 130 watts.

Slashdot reader Charlotte Web writes: The "Group of Seven" (or G7) nations are some of the world's largest economies — the U.S. and Canada, the U.K., France, Germany, and Italy, and Japan. On Sunday they pledged $2 billion to help developing countries pivot away from fossil fuels and pledged an "overwhelmingly decarbonized" electricity sector by 2030. The New York Times calls these "major steps in what leaders hope will be a global transition to wind, solar and other energy that does not produce planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions."

Politico's Ryan Heath argues "The language on a 'green revolution' is quite strong — there's plenty of detail missing, but it gives climate campaigners a lot to hit leaders with if they fail to deliver. And it's a big deal for the G-7 to agree to 'to conserve or protect at least 30 percent of our land and oceans by 2030.'"
Other reports from Politico's writers:

• "Boris Johnson admitted that the world's richest economies had not managed to secure a widely advertised 1 billion vaccine doses to send to developing countries. The final communique says the group will deliver 870 million doses over the next year."

• "The G-7 nations called for a 'timely, transparent, expert-led, and science-based WHO-convened' investigation into the origins of Covid-19, including in China. WHO's first crack at an investigation — released in March — called a lab leak 'extremely unlikely,' but China didn't grant access to key documents and Secretary of State Antony Blinken called that investigation 'highly deficient' this morning. The U.S. government remains split between two origin theories."

Bloomberg Businessweek reports on "renewed interest in cables that can power consumers in one country with electricity generated hundreds, even thousands, of miles away in another" and possibly even transcontinental, submarine electricity superhighways: Coal, gas and even nuclear plants can be built close to the markets they serve, but the utility-scale solar and wind farms many believe essential to meet climate targets often can't. They need to be put wherever the wind and sun are strongest, which can be hundreds or thousands of miles from urban centers. Long cables can also connect peak afternoon solar power in one time zone to peak evening demand in another, reducing the price volatility caused by mismatches in supply and demand as well as the need for fossil-fueled back up capacity when the sun or wind fade. As countries phase out carbon to meet climate goals, they'll have to spend at least $14 trillion to strengthen grids by 2050, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. That's only a little shy of projected spending on new renewable generation capacity and it's increasingly clear that high- and ultra-high-voltage direct current lines will play a part in the transition.

The question is how international will they be...?
The article points out that in theory, Mongolia's Gobi desert "has potential to deliver 2.6 terawatts of wind and solar power — more than double the U.S.'s entire installed power generation capacity — to a group of Asian powerhouse economies that together produce well over a third of global carbon emissions..." The same goes for the U.S., where with the right infrastructure, New York could tap into sun- and wind-rich resources from the South and Midwest. An even more ambitious vision would access power from as far afield as Canada or Chile's Atacama Desert, which has the world's highest known levels of solar power potential per square meter. Jeremy Rifkin, a U.S. economist who has become the go-to figure for countries looking to remake their infrastructure for the digital and renewable future, sees potential for a single, 1.1 billion-person electricity market in the Americas that would be almost as big as China's. Rifkin has advised Germany and the EU, as well as China...

Persuading countries to rely on each other to keep the lights on is tough, but the universal, yet intermittent nature of solar and wind energy also makes it inevitable, according to Rifkin. "This isn't the geopolitics of fossil fuels," owned by some and bought by others, he says. "It is biosphere politics, based on geography. Wind and sun force sharing...."

If these supergrids don't get built, it will be because their time has both come and gone. Not only are they expensive, politically difficult, and unpopular — they have to cross a lot of backyards — their focus on mega-power installations seems outdated to some. Distributed microgeneration as close to home as your rooftop, battery storage, and transportable hydrogen all offer competing solutions to the delivery problems supergrids aim to solve.

A total of 15 potential sites are in the running to host the UK's first prototype fusion power plant. The BBC reports: Fusion is seen as a potential source of almost limitless clean energy but is currently only used in experiments. An open call for sites was made last year and nominations closed at the end of March this year. Following checks for compliance with key entry criteria the UK Atomic Energy Agency (UKAEA) has published a long list of possible locations. The sites, from north to south, with nominating body, are: Dounreay, East Airdrie, Poneil, Ardeer, Chapelcross, Moorside, Bay Fusion, Goole, West Burton, Ratcliffe on Soar, Pembroke, Severn Edge, Aberthaw, Bridgwater Bay, and Bradwell (Essex).

The UKAEA said that acceptance of the sites did not indicate that they were "preferred or desired" or that it believed they were "in all cases, possible." It stressed it was simply that the procedural entry criteria had been met and assessment had now begun. It said a shortlisting process would take place in the autumn with a final site decision likely by the end of next year. UKAEA is hoping to have such a plant operating in the early 2040s, with an initial concept design ready by 2024."

Chip floorplanning is the engineering task of designing the physical layout of a computer chip. In a paper published in the journal Nature, Google researchers applied a deep reinforcement learning approach to chip floorplanning, creating a new technique that "automatically generates chip floorplans that are superior or comparable to those produced by humans in all key metrics, including power consumption, performance and chip area." VentureBeat reports: The Google team's solution is a reinforcement learning method capable of generalizing across chips, meaning that it can learn from experience to become both better and faster at placing new chips. Training AI-driven design systems that generalize across chips is challenging because it requires learning to optimize the placement of all possible chip netlists (graphs of circuit components like memory components and standard cells including logic gates) onto all possible canvases. [...] The researchers' system aims to place a "netlist" graph of logic gates, memory, and more onto a chip canvas, such that the design optimizes power, performance, and area (PPA) while adhering to constraints on placement density and routing congestion. The graphs range in size from millions to billions of nodes grouped in thousands of clusters, and typically, evaluating the target metrics takes from hours to over a day.

Starting with an empty chip, the Google team's system places components sequentially until it completes the netlist. To guide the system in selecting which components to place first, components are sorted by descending size; placing larger components first reduces the chance there's no feasible placement for it later. Training the system required creating a dataset of 10,000 chip placements, where the input is the state associated with the given placement and the label is the reward for the placement (i.e., wirelength and congestion). The researchers built it by first picking five different chip netlists, to which an AI algorithm was applied to create 2,000 diverse placements for each netlist. The system took 48 hours to "pre-train" on an Nvidia Volta graphics card and 10 CPUs, each with 2GB of RAM. Fine-tuning initially took up to 6 hours, but applying the pre-trained system to a new netlist without fine-tuning generated placement in less than a second on a single GPU in later benchmarks. In one test, the Google researchers compared their system's recommendations with a manual baseline: the production design of a previous-generation TPU chip created by Google's TPU physical design team. Both the system and the human experts consistently generated viable placements that met timing and congestion requirements, but the AI system also outperformed or matched manual placements in area, power, and wirelength while taking far less time to meet design criteria.

Graphene can be used for ultra-high density hard disk drives (HDD), with up to a tenfold jump compared to current technologies, researchers at the Cambridge Graphene Center have shown. Phys.Org reports: The study, published in Nature Communications, was carried out in collaboration with teams at the University of Exeter, India, Switzerland, Singapore, and the US. [...] HDDs contain two major components: platters and a head. Data are written on the platters using a magnetic head, which moves rapidly above them as they spin. The space between head and platter is continually decreasing to enable higher densities. Currently, carbon-based overcoats (COCs) -- layers used to protect platters from mechanical damages and corrosion -- occupy a significant part of this spacing. The data density of HDDs has quadrupled since 1990, and the COC thickness has reduced from 12.5nm to around 3nm, which corresponds to one terabyte per square inch. Now, graphene has enabled researchers to multiply this by ten.

The Cambridge researchers have replaced commercial COCs with one to four layers of graphene, and tested friction, wear, corrosion, thermal stability, and lubricant compatibility. Beyond its unbeatable thinness, graphene fulfills all the ideal properties of an HDD overcoat in terms of corrosion protection, low friction, wear resistance, hardness, lubricant compatibility, and surface smoothness. Graphene enables two-fold reduction in friction and provides better corrosion and wear than state-of-the-art solutions. In fact, one single graphene layer reduces corrosion by 2.5 times. Cambridge scientists transferred graphene onto hard disks made of iron-platinum as the magnetic recording layer, and tested Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) -- a new technology that enables an increase in storage density by heating the recording layer to high temperatures. Current COCs do not perform at these high temperatures, but graphene does. Thus, graphene, coupled with HAMR, can outperform current HDDs, providing an unprecedented data density, higher than 10 terabytes per square inch.

New submitter DaveV1.0 shares a report from CNBC: At 10 McDonald's locations in Chicago, workers aren't taking down customers' drive-thru orders for McNuggets and french fries -- a computer is, CEO Chris Kempczinski said Wednesday. Kempczinski said the restaurants using the voice-ordering technology are seeing about 85% order accuracy. Only about a fifth of orders need to be a taken by a human at those locations, he said, speaking at Alliance Bernstein's Strategic Decisions conference.

In 2019, under former CEO Steve Easterbrook, McDonald's went on a spending spree, snapping up restaurant tech. One of those acquisitions was Apprente, which uses artificial intelligence software to take drive-thru orders. Kempczinski said the technology will likely take more than one or two years to implement. "Now there's a big leap from going to 10 restaurants in Chicago to 14,000 restaurants across the U.S., with an infinite number of promo permutations, menu permutations, dialect permutations, weather — and on and on and on," he said. Another challenge has been training restaurant workers to stop themselves from jumping in to help.