Articles by Jake Roach, Senior Analyst, CPUs

Jake Roach has been bending pins and busting solder joints since the mid-2000s. From trying to run scratched CDs of Delta Force and Unreal Tournament to spitting out virtual machines on a Threadripper, Jake has been on the hunt for the latest hardware and highest performance for decades. That eventually spun up a career, with Jake serving as Lead Reporter at Digital Trends, as well as contributing to outlets like XDA, PC Invasion, Business Insider, and WIRED. At Tom’s Hardware, Jake is focused on consumer and workstation CPUs. Outside working hours, you’ll find him knee-deep in the latest roguelite taking over Steam, spending way too much money on Magic: The Gathering, or forcing his lazy corgi onto walks.

Articles by: Jake Roach

Get a rare deal on the shuckable 16TB Seagate Expansion Desktop hard drive at $0.02 per GB — save $100 on this big HDD ahead of Prime Big Deal Days

By Jake Roach

The Seagate Expansion Desktop 16TB is a surprisingly decent value at $449.99, at least given where high-capacity HDD prices sit broadly right now.

It's finally a good time to buy a Raptor Lake CPU during Prime Big Deals Day — chips drop to all-time low prices as inventory seemingly stabilizes

By Jake Roach

Intel's 14th Gen Raptor Lake Refresh CPUs are finally getting some good discounts after a year of inconsistent pricing, and some of these chips are even dropping to all-time lows.

Best Amazon Prime Big Deal Days CPU deals 2026 — best deals on AMD and Intel processors

By Stewart Bendle

We're rounding up the best CPU deals available from your favorite retailers.

CPU Benchmarks and Hierarchy 2026: CPU Rankings

By Jake Roach

All of today's desktop CPU benchmarks compared, including Intel's 13th-Gen Core series and AMD's Ryzen Zen 4 and Threadripper.

The Best CPU for Gaming in 2026

By Jake Roach

Here is the best CPU for gaming.

AMD attempts to get ahead of expected RTX Spark launch with Gorgon Halo AI benchmarks — company says it has shipped 'over half a million agentic PCs' to date

By Jake Roach

AMD is getting ahead of an expected RTX Spark launch later this week with a few benchmarks for its flagship Gorgon Halo chip, the Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495.

Leaked Intel Nova Lake product list has three 'BFC' chips with up to 144MB of game-boosting L3 cache — next-gen CPU lineup reportedly takes shape with up to 28 cores in Core Ultra 9 4970K BFC

By Jake Roach

A table rumored to hold Intel's upcoming models for Nova Lake processors as surfaced, now referring to the heavily-rumored bLLC as "BFC."

OpenAI’s Jalapeño ASICs are deployed alongside AMD EPYC ‘Turin’ CPUs as hosts — Hardware VP says Nvidia’s Vera standalone is ‘a little bit behind… on that maturity level’

By Jake Roach

OpenAI chose to pair rack-scale deployments of its Jalapeño ASIC with AMD EPYC Turin CPUs, not the wave of high-performance agentic chips like Arm’s AGI or Nvidia’s Vera.

Micron now has an 88% margin on consumer memory as price hikes drive profits — client business is Micron's only unit that shipped less memory this quarter

By Jake Roach

Micron's consumer business is its most profitable by margin according to the company's fiscal Q4 2026 financial report, despite shipping less memory in the quarter.

Gears of War E-Day is an uncharacteristically CPU-heavy Unreal Engine 5 game — benchmarking 25 CPUs from Intel and AMD and investigating ‘low core mode’

By Jake Roach

Gears of War E-Day is a surprisingly heavy Unreal Engine 5 game on the CPU. We benchmarked the game with 25 processors, as well as investigated what the “low core mode” actually does.

‘This is how AI should be used’ — OpenAI head of hardware breaks down the AI-assisted design of its Jalapeño ASIC

By Jake Roach

OpenAI says AI-assisted Jalapeño chip design "established a new baseline" for the industry, and there is already a lot of interest from others to learn how the company pulled it off.

Intel patent outlines embedding MicroLEDs directly into CPU package to light up wording or work as an 'extra aesthetic component' — MicroLED is embedded with die in glass substrate

By Jake Roach

A recently published Intel patent reveals a system for embedding MicroLEDs directly into a CPU for diagnostic or aesthetic purposes.

OpenAI's custom Jalapeno AI inference ASIC is for OpenAI’s internal use, but company leaves the door open to broader rollout — firm says it will have its ‘hands full’ with Jalapeño for ‘a good long time’

By Jake Roach

OpenAI has danced with the idea of a broader rollout of its Jalapeño ASIC, but hardware VP Richard Ho tells us the chip is for internal use “first and foremost.”

OpenAI Jalapeño design interview transcript — hardware VP Richard Ho explains how AI-assisted design may shape the future of inference ASICs

By Jake Roach

Premium We sit down with OpenAI's Hardware boss to talk about its chart-topping Jalapeño inference chip in this unredacted interview transcript.

Meta Muse runs agents on AMD EPYC Turin hosts with two cores and 8GB of memory — AI agent can pass terminal commands to Ubuntu host system

By Jake Roach

Meta's new Muse AI agent is powered by AMD EPYC Turin hosts, with each user getting a private sandbox with two vCPUs and 8GB of memory.

Nvidia CEO says 'we have to shut the labs down' if AI experiments are unsafe — Jensen cites civil and criminal liability over rogue agents, but says frontier AI lab fears are a 'distraction,' not a call for regulation

By Jake Roach

In a recent interview, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that if frontier labs have unsafe models, they should shut the labs down, calling the current calls for regulation a "distraction."

AMD beats Intel to the trillion-dollar club as stock price soars — firm joins Nvidia, Broadcom, and SK hynix for companies worth over $1 trillion

By Jake Roach

AMD has crossed the $1 trillion market cap mark, joining an exclusive list of less than two dozen companies around the world.

AMD Ryzen 5 5500F and 7500 show up at retail with pricing above MSRP — budget CPUs are $20 more expensive than list price, even from first-party sellers

By Jake Roach

Nearly two weeks after they were announced, AMD's Ryzen 5 5500F and 7500 (non-F) are available for sale, though prices are slightly above MSRP.

MediaTek’s next-gen Dimensity CX C10 Max will power new Googlebook initiative alongside Intel and Qualcomm – 3nm SoC has similar specs to Kompanio Ultra in Chromebook Plus devices, despite claims of ‘elevating’ computing portfolio

By Jake Roach

MediaTek's next-gen Dimensity CX C10 Max will arrive inside Googlebook devices, featuring similar specs as the Kompanio Ultra 910 currently available.

AMD targets Nvidia with first official benchmarks for EPYC 'Venice' CPUs — company claims 256-core chip is more than twice as fast as Nvidia Vera, 96-core model 20% faster per-core

By Jake Roach

AMD has released several benchmarks for its EPYC 'Venice' CPUs in a clear shot at Nvidia.

Details about Intel's next-gen Nova Lake CPUs keep leaking — an attempt to establish a timeline based on what we know so far

By Jake Roach

Premium Over the past two weeks, we've seen an uptick in leaks and rumors about Intel's upcoming Nova Lake CPUs. Here, we piece together what we've heard to try and establish a plausible release timeline.

Balatro fan claims they trained Google fruit fly brain simulation to beat the game — reinforcement learning currently has the model at 20% success rate

By Jake Roach

One Balatro player says they've taken Google's mapped fruit fly brain and trained it to play Balatro, currently at a 20% success rate with plans for further refinement.

Intel reportedly cans 12Xe option for Nova Lake-S desktop — gaming APU design said to resurface with Razor Lake

By Jake Roach

Following rumors of a Nova Lake desktop SKU with 12 Xe3P cores, tipster Jaykihn suggests that Intel has canned the design and moved the target to next-gen Razor Lake instead.

Nvidia's RTX 5090 vanishes from online retail in the US — third-party sellers now demand as much as $9,500 for Nvidia's fastest GPU

By Jake Roach

The RTX 5090 is out of stock from first-party sellers online in the U.S., with third-party sellers now asking for as much as $9,500 for the GPU.

Intel-backed auto-overclocking tool Hypertune optimizes individual systems, not test profiles — tool claims FPS improvement of up to 60% on Intel-based systems

By Jake Roach

Hypertune is an automated overclocking tool built on top of Intel's Extreme Tuning Utility (XTU) SDK and built in collaboration with engineers at Intel.

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