Jon Martindale

Jon Martindale

Freelance Writer

After building his first computers in his teens, Jon Martindale has spent the past two decades covering the latest advances in technology. From displays to PC components, blockchain to AI, and tablets to standing desk accessories, Jon has covered just about every facet of the tech space in his varied career. He has bylines at Forbes, USNews, Lifewire, DigitalTrends, PCWorld, and a range of other sites. He brings that same level of expertise and professional insight to Toms Hardware.Away from writing, Jon is an avid reader, board gamer, and fitness enthusiast. He lives in rural Gloucestershire with his wife, two children, and French Bulldog cross.

Articles by: Jon Martindale

Triangle as a weighing scale
The price of AI is crashing faster than the rate of Moore's Law, report suggests — intelligence costs are in freefall, outpacing comparative technologies like compute, DNA sequencing, and lithium batteries

By Jon Martindale

Premium Vendor loyalty and subscription schemes have limited appeal when prices can fall so fast.

Intel engineers working in a clean room environment.
Intel patent embeds MicroLEDs in chip packaging — technology may enable embedded optical interconnects through TGVs

By Jon Martindale

Premium This follows over a decade of Intel investment in glass substrate technology.

Generated image of a living room using various reference images.
Alibaba claims new Qwen Image 2.1 AI model beats Google Nano Banana 2.0 with minuscule 7B parameter model — benchmarks show open-weight contender is competitive with OpenAI and Meta image models

By Jon Martindale

Premium Alibaba Group's AI division has released Qwen 2.1 Image, an ultra-lightweight image generation model with just 7B parameters, able to run on local hardware like the RTX 3090.

Phone on the Resolute Desk.
US and China propose hotline to de-escalate AI threats ahead of Washington summit — comms channel between both nations to be left open in case of national security threats posed by autonomous artificial intelligence

By Jon Martindale

Premium A red telephone for the 21st century.

Donald Trump and Xi Jingping.
US frontier AI companies warn authorities over sophisticated distillation attacks — China warns of 'countermeasures' if America tries to constrain domestic AI models

By Jon Martindale

Premium Direct attacks may be simple enough to stop, but buying up third-party conversations remains an elusive vector.

Robot holding woman up.
AI leaders clash over safety fears after Anthropic whistleblower says AI could 'kill us all' by 2030 — OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI figureheads call for external governance, while Jensen Huang says worries are 'made up'

By Jon Martindale

Premium Western Frontier model developers are all for it, but Open Weight proponents are far less keen.

Sam Altman talking to a woman who looks unimpressed.
OpenAI claims GPT-6 Astra is an ethereal 'Alien Mind' with AGI-like qualities — company warns of alignment challenges as new frontier leader emerges

By Jon Martindale

Premium Meanwhile, low-cost, intelligent-enough solutions are exploding in popularity.

Phone user choosing which AI to open.
Frontier AI faces pricing reckoning as token volume explodes 25-fold — mid-tier models deliver 90% of flagship capability at one-sixth the cost

By Jon Martindale

Premium As frontier AI developers push for cost savings as much as intelligence enhancements, new models push the boundaries of the pareto frontier, with even small advantages crowning new kings.

Nvidia Quantum-X800 Q3450 InfiniBand Switch featuring Co-Packaged Optics
FCC proposes import ban on Chinese optical transceivers — blockade targets key AI interconnects as China holds 56% global market share

By Jon Martindale

Premium The FCC is drafting a proposal that would expand its list of equipment and services covered by the Secure Networks Act to include imports of new-model optical transceivers manufactured in China.

Man protesting data centers next to a road closed sign.
Over 70% of Americans oppose AI data centers; US protests intensify as more arrests are being made — almost 40 arrested this year in backlash to AI factory buildout

By Jon Martindale

Premium The public pushback against data center construction projects is only growing stronger, even as some protesting local residents have been arrested in the process.

Dario Amodei leaning forward.
Anthropic co-designing custom AI inference chips to bypass costly Nvidia GPUs — Samsung reported as manufacturing partner for Claude maker

By Jon Martindale

Premium It joins Amazon, Meta, OpenAI, and Google with its new "multi-chip" strategy.

Sam Altman and Tim Cook at a White House dinner.
Apple is taking OpenAI to court over alleged theft of trade secrets — ChatGPT maker suggests it doesn't want Cupertino's knowledge anyway

By Jon Martindale

Premium Either way, the legal profession is the biggest winner.

Man riding a shopping trolley down a line.
AI companies are now racing to the bottom — crashing token prices and competitive models push companies to cut costs

By Jon Martindale

Premium For the rest of us, there's now significant AI intelligence to be found in more affordable models.

Jensen Huang looking concerned.
Nvidia employee implicated in escalating AI GPU smuggling scandal, but demand only intensifies for Nvidia hardware

By Jon Martindale

Premium Despite China's push for domestic chip development, Nvidia hardware is still hot enough to be worth smuggling.

Kimi logo at a Moonshot booth.
Kimi K3 rocks the AI industry as Moonshot AI undercuts closed-source American competitors on price — but the huge 2.8T open-weight model still needs serious hardware to deploy at scale

By Jon Martindale

Premium Memory makers are the big winners, regardless of how it works out.

Voxel face with galaxy brain.
Anthropic says it can read Claude's 'thoughts,' as detailed in new research paper — models observed to have a global workspace, revealing more of what makes LLMs tick

By Jon Martindale

Premium The internal "J-Space" opens up opportunities for greater training, oversight, and understanding how LLM's work.

Laptop on a point of sale display
U.S. PC shipments drop 7%, market isn't expected to bounce back until 2029 — price hikes and component shortages take hold as PC market declines, Omdia report suggests

By Jon Martindale

Premium New data suggests PC shipments are already down in 2026 and are likely to get worse in the latter half of the year, but that could be setting the stage for a resurgence in the years to come.

Businessman in panic.
The AI tokenmaxxing party is crashing over spiraling costs — leaked consulting firm audio suggests no one is sure how to measure AI effectiveness

By Jon Martindale

Premium "Leadership [...] are still asking the question of whether they're getting value from what we're spending."

ASML
US Secures Netherlands for Pax Silica Alliance in key win for strategic chip alliance — tension remains over MATCH Act restrictions

By Jon Martindale

Premium Inside the US Pax Silica Alliance with the Netherlands.

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US pulls the 'kill-switch' on Anthropic's Fable 5 AI models, sending global allies scrambling — European and Canadian leaders alarm allies over sudden export bans

By Jon Martindale

PREMIUM World leaders are concerned that projects can be cut off by arbitrary U.S. regulations.

A rally against AI data centers in Michigan, one of six protests held across the state.
AI is set to consume up to 600 billion gallons of water by 2030 — rising energy consumption primarily to blame as data center power demands rise

By Jon Martindale

Premium As GPU power demands almost double with every generation, most water usage will come where the power is generated.

A Qualcomm logo is displayed on a building on their campus
Qualcomm Roundtable Interview transcript — SVP of Compute and Gaming talks Snapdragon C, RTX Spark, and the agentic AI future

By Paul Alcorn

Premium Qualcomm has Snapdragon C to compete in the exciting low-cost laptop market, but it's also looking to build an entire agentic AI ecosystem on Qualcomm silicon.

Acer Predator Atlas 8 gaming handheld on a desk
Intel Arc G3 interview transcript — Intel's Senior Product Director talks new handheld chips, Arrow Lake Refresh, and RTX Spark

By Jake Roach

Premium Intel's Nish Neelalojanan talked with us about Intel's shifting strategy for G3, budget CPUs for more affordable systems, and the state of the PC industry.

Satya Nadella attending the Elon Musk Sam Altman trial.
AI costs begin to bite as agents may increase token demand by 24 times, says Goldman Sachs report — Uber and Microsoft among companies feeling the bite of tokenized billing

By Jon Martindale

Premium Microsoft and Uber are both considering refining their AI strategies as costs mount.

Samsung and other semiconductor officials.
Memory makers brace for hydrogen fluoride pricing shock as Hormuz blockade impacts supply chain — key etching and cleaning material faces sharp cost increase amid trade disruption

By Jon Martindale

Premium Chemical companies have absorbed costs so far this year, but they're about to dump them onto South Korean memory makers.

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