Much has been written regarding the questionable economics of the AI space, but most of the discussion revolves around high-level concepts like market shares, datacenter investments, and power expenditure. The general expectation of technology is that it gets cheaper as it improves, but the AI space has a rather peculiar problem: Usage costs are actually soaring even as models get better, as detailed in a write-up at VentureBeat.

With all the advancements in models over the last two years, having a bot that answers questions of simple-to-moderate difficulty is now old news, as they all do that with reasonable accuracy. Agentic workloads are where the real potential is at, letting bots loose on multi-stage, repeatable tasks that would previously take a human days, if not weeks, to perform. Grant a bot access to your billing system, some Excel spreadsheets, and your CRM, and ask it something like "who are my profitable customers by category and what are their trends" becomes child's play.

While it's trivial for you to ask that question and get a fairly accurate answer back in a couple minutes, behind the scenes there is a lot of processing going on, and far more than you'd expect. AI computing time is measured in tokens — a short question and answer might take somewhere between 200 to 2,000 tokens, and one that requires the models to do some internet research might be around 1,000 to 4,000. An agentic task, though, can easily spend millions of tokens on a seemingly innocuous request. How? Token amplification, a recently coined term.

In a simplified manner, because a model has no memory or cognition, every time you ask it another question in a conversation, it will re-load and process the entire exchange — everything you wrote, everything the bot replied with, and every file you uploaded. That means that additional questions in a long conversation progressively get more costly. Each question in a conversation might only need 500 tokens by itself, but reprocessing all the previous information adds up, so the second one might spend 600, and so on and so forth. The conversation as a whole uses up the cumulative number of all individual interactions, and as an added penalty: Response speed also tends to get slower as chats drag on.

The aforementioned task of generating a report will have to be run in stages, say three for looking up Excel sheets, four for the CRM, perhaps a half-dozen web searches for contextual information about products, and a good dozen intermediary processing and calculation steps. Each step tacks on potentially several thousands of tokens, and by the end of it, you may be looking at millions of tokens cumulatively spent for all the steps combined.

Costs, then, can spiral out of control very quickly — and that's assuming a best-case scenario where all of the data is easy to interpret, the model won't need any retries, and you're using a moderately powerful model rather than something like Claude Opus.

In financial terms, this means that one innocent question might spend 280,000 tokens and cost $1, with ballpark estimates at current prices. That may not sound like much, but it was just one task. If you have this scheduled to run every 15 minutes for a dashboard, then suddenly this costs $96 per day, or $2,880 in a month. And that task example was fairly simple; a tricky multi-stage report might need millions of tokens, turning that $1 into, say, $10, or a grand total of $28,800. For the one report, for a limited number of users, in one department of a corporation.

That's the key reason why Anthropic, Microsoft, OpenAI, and almost every other player moved their major offerings to usage-based billing back in April, and severely limited token spends in fixed-rate plans. This generated many sticker shock events, as developers around the globe found out how much their vibe coding actually cost and were left in a daze.

In a large company using many AI agents, such costs can become prohibitive and oftentimes costlier than standard-issue human employees. Firms like Uber, Microsoft, Amazon, and Walmart, among many others, have responded by curbing AI spend. Token expenditure is suddenly an issue for both financial and engineering departments, as cost control becomes paramount. As VentureBeat succinctly puts it, for agent-heavy companies, "a prompt redesign is a margin event," and more illustratively, "a poorly bound agent loop is an outage with a credit card attached."

Although most AI outfits still offer fixed monthly pricing plans, they often come with harsh token limits. As is often the case with most fixed-pricing services, however, the most capable bot-wranglers will also inevitably be the ones burning through the most tokens, not just due to their intensive usage per se, but because the type of tasks they will perform will be precisely the ones hardest hit by token amplification.

This throws a wrench in the usual financial model of the casual users easily offsetting the cost of the small percentage of professionals — the pros' usage can take a serious bite off monthly profits, or chew through them entirely.

The AI companies aren't sitting still, and getting the per-token cost down is likely to be the primary task for most of their engineering teams, at this point. Prompt caching, model routing, batch processing, semantic caching, and context window management are among many technical measures that can massively cut down on token spend, each of those netting a two-digit percentage drop.

And yet, costs keep soaring for the simple reason that the smarter the models get, and the more adept people become at using them, the more complex and long-running the agentic tasks will become, adding multiple orders of magnitude to token counts.

For the time being, it looks like a losing race, despite recent advancements like Deepseek V4 Pro and V4 Flash deeply undercutting comparable Western models at up to a reported 17x for the former and 25x for the latter. Out of the major Western players, only Anthropic has predicted its first profitable quarter, though much like anyone else, it's still in the hole for many a billion for cumulative spend.

Taiwanese prosecutors indicted a former TSMC deputy manager on Monday for allegedly copying 21 confidential documents, some covering technologies Taiwan designates as national core technologies, intending to use them in China. Prosecutors are seeking a sentence of up to seven years for the man, surnamed Chen, who has been detained since late May, and describe the indictment as the first under Taiwan's National Security Act to involve an alleged attempt to leak the island's most sensitive chip technologies to China.

However, that alleged transfer never happened. TSMC's internal monitoring systems flagged irregularities, with the company reportedly recovering every improperly copied document after its own investigation, according to the prosecutors' office. A High Prosecutors' Office spokesperson told Nikkei Asia that despite the failed attempt, the case "remains highly significant" as the first of its kind.

Prosecutors found Chen while investigating a separate Chinese espionage case centered on a Hong Kong national named Ding Xiaohu, Taiwan's Central News Agency reported. Investigators allege Ding was acting on instructions from the Nanning station of the Chinese Communist Party's Central Military Commission Political Work Department, entering Taiwan repeatedly to recruit agents and collect intelligence on the island's critical technologies, and that he recruited Chen through an intermediary surnamed Huang. Ding died earlier this year and was never charged.

Chen and Ding allegedly worked together between May 2023 and February 2024 to set up CSMAC, a semiconductor materials analysis company in China. Chen drafted several proposals for the venture, including one called the "Blue Ocean Plan" that aimed to recruit workers from Taiwan's chip industry to join CSMAC, and took the copied TSMC documents home to study for use in China, prosecutors said.

The state-directed recruitment allegation separates this case from the trade secrets disputes TSMC has fought over the past year, which involved employees allegedly taking confidential data to other chip industry employers.

Taiwan's National Security Act, in force since 2022, makes it a crime to copy, use, or disclose trade secrets tied to designated national core technologies, a list that includes chipmaking processes more advanced than 14nm. Prosecutors brought the first charges under the law last August, when three current and former TSMC employees were arrested over an alleged attempt to leak 2nm process data. That case grew to ensnare Tokyo Electron's Taiwanese unit, which prosecutors charged with failing to prevent the theft.

TSMC is also pursuing a civil case against Wei-Jen Lo, the former R&D executive who joined Intel last year, with Taiwanese authorities running a parallel national security inquiry into his departure.

It is now possible to monitor every thermal aspect of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 50-series (codenamed Blackwell) products, renowned for being some of the best graphics cards you can buy. Thanks to the efforts of Overclock.net (OCN) member asder00, users can now monitor the temperatures for each memory module on Blackwell graphics cards in addition to the recently exposed hotspot sensor.

Nvidia grants direct access to the company's graphics cards and drivers through Nvidia API (NVAPI). Game and software developers employ NVAPI for a range of advanced features. Developers of monitoring tools, specifically, leverage NVAPI to retrieve real-time thermal sensor data so users can keep a close eye on their graphics card's conditions.

While there is a world of information through NVAPI, there are certain sensor readings that Nvidia intentionally kept hidden from developers. Yet, Nvidia's safeguards have not stopped resourceful enthusiasts from discovering creative workarounds to tap into the previously inaccessible sensors. Skilled modders recently managed to gain access to the hotspot sensor, which was only available on internal Nvidia tools like MODS, and now collaboration within the community has enabled individual memory module monitoring.

The new plugin, aptly named Hotspot.dll, is specifically for MSI Afterburner. It exists because MSI Afterburner is software from MSI, an Nvidia partner, so it cannot legally poll sensor data not officially made available through NVAPI. Nevertheless, third-party software solutions such as AIDA64 and HWiNFO are not bound by the same partner agreements and will likely add the functionality for individual memory module monitoring the same way they previously adopted support for the hotspot sensor. The latest beta version (v8.51-6304) of HWiNFO already has the function and had no issues reporting the temperature of all 16 of the GDDR7 memory modules inside our GeForce RTX 5090.

While asder00 developed the plugin, it is important to highlight that it is part of a collective effort. The list of contributors to the breakthrough includes Alexey “Unwinder” Nicolaychuk, the developer behind MSI Afterburner; olealgoritme, known for his work on the open-source Linux GDDR6/GDDR6X temperature reader; Brazilian hardware modder Paulo Gomes; and Martin “Mumak” Malík, the creator of HWiNFO.

The Hotspot.dll plugin reveals the GPU hotspot temperature, die thermal channel readings, average die temperature, GPU memory junction temperature, and per-chip DRAM thermal data. It is compatible with GDDR6, GDDR6X, and GDDR7 memory modules, so it works with the entire Blackwell product stack from the GeForce RTX 5050 to the GeForce RTX 5090. While the original focus of the development was Blackwell, it should work on previous generations of GeForce RTX graphics cards, including the GeForce RTX 40 (codenamed Ada Lovelace) and GeForce RTX 30 (codenamed Ampere) series.

Access to these new sensor readings opens a new level of transparency and control for Nvidia graphics card owners. They will be very beneficial for those who want to fine-tune their graphics card to maximize performance or those who are diagnosing problems.

The U.S. government may be back on track to ban leading Chinese AI models, following the release of Kimi K3 — a powerful AI model developed by the Chinese startup Moonshot AI —last week. According to an Axios report released July 20, Trump's administration is reigniting its push for a ban, citing cybersecurity concerns. Chinese models such as DeepSeek and Kimi K3 are open-weight, meaning their trained model weights are published for public download. This gives enterprises the option to keep their data in-house by self-hosting the models on private infrastructure, while slashing inference costs — characteristics that have led to rising adoption by U.S. companies.

Citing several sources close to the administration, the Axios report says that the government had earlier made a series of attempts to curb growth and expansion of Chinese models in the U.S. over cybersecurity concerns, a move critics say will stifle competition and innovation and encourage monopolies. The U.S. Department of Commerce last year considered adding multiple Chinese AI labs, including DeepSeek, to its "Entity List," a trade blacklist maintained by the department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) that limits foreign companies, research institutions, governments, and individuals from purchasing sensitive American hardware, software, or technology.

U.S. officials also considered a joint National Security Agency/Office of the National Cyber Director advisory to discourage the use of Chinese AI models, and drafted an executive order holding U.S. companies liable for security breaches involving hosted Chinese models. While these measures were initially paused due to internal pushback regarding market impacts, they have been revived following the release of new Chinese open-weight models.

According to the report, critics of the potential ban — such as former White House adviser Sriram Krishnan and David Sacks, an outside White House AI adviser — say the move would negatively impact innovation, while handing a monopoly of the market to leading U.S. AI labs, OpenAI and Anthropic, which the report implies may have a hand in the push for a ban. “We are at a critical inflection point in AI policy. The leading closed labs, already a duopoly in terms of AI model revenue, want the government to eliminate their open-source competition,” wrote Sacks in an X post on Sunday.

Chinese AI models are being increasingly used by numerous American companies due to their relatively low cost and perceived matching capabilities with domestic alternatives. The open-weight nature of Chinese models such as DeepSeek V4 and Kimi K3 — which allows companies to download the models locally and host them on private servers — is driving adoption by giving enterprises data privacy and slashing API costs compared to closed Western alternatives. Conversely, self-hosting shifts the cost of GPUs, electricity, maintenance, networking, and model operations to the company, making it generally most economical for organizations with substantial and sustained AI usage.

Chinese open-weight models price their APIs well below comparable U.S. systems, with DeepSeek-V4-Pro charging $0.87 per million output tokens, compared with $50 for Anthropic’s frontier Claude Fable 5 model. This aggressive undercutting has caused a massive surge in developer adoption. CEO Brian Armstrong noted that Coinbase runs models like GLM-5.2 and Kimi in production, cutting their overall AI spending nearly in half even as their actual token consumption spiked.

Despite the rising adoption, the U.S. government cites cybersecurity concerns as a reason for a ban. Now, the question of whether a ban on Chinese AI models can be practically enforced arises, as blocking open-weight technology presents a technical and regulatory hurdle. For an individual or a small company just wanting to use DeepSeek via the website or the app despite a U.S. block, a VPN works fine. However, limited app availability and payment restrictions remain effective restrictions.

For enterprises that self-host rather than use the hosted app or API, enforcement gets harder for several reasons. Unlike closed-source APIs that require data to leave a company's network by sending it to a third-party provider's servers, open-weight models exist as downloadable files mirrored across public repositories like Hugging Face and independent torrents, making them hard to fully recall once released. Once an American enterprise downloads the weights, it can run the model entirely offline inside a private, air-gapped data center, which limits U.S. regulators' ability to monitor which model is running locally.

Modifications further complicate enforcement. Companies routinely fine-tune, quantize, or distill these models, blending the Chinese base with domestic corporate data until provenance blurs and it becomes difficult to define where the foreign model ends and a new domestic one begins. Even under strict download bans, firms could host the models through subsidiaries, although that vector runs into know-your-customer rules at cloud providers and the extraterritorial reach of U.S. export controls.

However, the U.S. government may not need an outright ban. According to the Axios report, the strategy appears to be getting U.S. firms themselves to drop the models. Axios-cited government sources say that procurement rules, Entity List threats, and public pressure campaigns aimed at the companies using Chinese models may do the trick. The sources also say the government will “push to highlight potential backdoors and lack of security with Chinese models, and the governance issue that brings.”

Any ban or restrictions would be yet another event in ongoing broad trade tensions between the U.S. and China that have since extended into the AI industry. Washington had earlier placed export restrictions on critical computing hardware and equipment to China. It later eased restrictions, but Beijing now appears to be focused on developing domestic technologies, while urging Chinese companies to utilize them. The Trump administration has also made known its intention for the U.S. to dominate the AI race.

The evolution of hardware has gotten to a point where tiny devices, such as mini-PCs, can offer excellent computing power in a small form factor. Kamrui, a specialist in mini-PCs, currently has the H1 and Hyper H2 for sale on Amazon. For a limited time, you can save up to 20% off these high-performance mini-PCs, which are also energy-efficient and designed to fit in even the smallest spaces.

• Check out the Kamrui H1 deal on Amazon
• Check out the Kamrui Hyper H2 deal on Amazon

The Kamrui H1 is a budget gaming mini-PC with a Ryzen 7 7735HS with integrated Radeon 680M graphics. The Zen 3+ chip rocks an octa-core, 16-thread configuration with a boost clock speed up to 4.75 GHz. Meanwhile, the Radeon 680M wields 12 RDNA 2 CUs that boost up to 2.2 GHz. The combination is perfect for eSports-grade titles and even some modern AAA games if you keep the resolution at 1080p (1920x1080) and use moderate to low graphics settings.

The mini-PC also has 16GB of LPDDR5-5500 memory and a 512GB PCIe 4.0 SSD. The former is not upgradeable since it is soldered, but you can expand the latter with a larger SSD if you ever need it. The H1 offers great connectivity, including Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.2, a 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet port, and speedy USB ports.

The Hyper H2 leverages the Core i5-14500HX, a high-performance mobile chip with 14 cores, 20 threads, and a maximum boost clock of 4.9 GHz. While it is a beefier processor than the Ryzen 7 7735HS, it lacks the integrated graphics power to run games. Therefore, the Hyper H2 is more of a productivity mini-PC than a gaming one.

Kamrui pairs the Core i5-14500HX with 16GB of SO-DIMM DDR4 memory, enabling future upgrades. The mini-PC also features a fast 512GB PCIe 4.0 SSD for storage. For connectivity, the Hyper H2 maintains the Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 features found in the H1. However, it’s important to note that while the H1 includes a high-speed 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet port for wired networking, the Hyper H2 omits this feature.

The H1 and Hyper H2 from Kamrui are great mini-PCs tailored to different needs. Right now, both models are on sale at significant discounts on Amazon. The H1 and Hyper H2 are 13% and 25% off, respectively. That means you could save up to $60 on the H1 and up to $170 on the Hyper H2. These mini-PCs offer good value and features for anyone looking for a space-saving computer.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, Gaming Chair, Best Wi-Fi Routers, Best Motherboard, or CPU Deals pages.

The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies has rated the Dutch semiconductor industry as being at very high risk of Chinese foreign interference in a recent report, placing it above the maritime and aerospace sectors, and citing years of espionage against ASML and NXP. Written by Benedetta Girardi and Hans Horan for the China Knowledge Network, a body funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the study calls for stricter vetting of personnel at sensitive chip sites and a public-private fund to swap out high-risk foreign hardware, including server motherboards and baseboard management controllers. Both authors expanded on the findings in interviews with Nikkei Asia last week.

The report sorts Beijing's methods into five categories: economic statecraft, digital and information operations, physical interference, legal pressure, and talent-based technological espionage. ASML said in 2023 that a former China-based employee stole data about its lithography tools from an internal product lifecycle management system, one of several insider theft cases at the company stretching back to 2015, and the Dutch military intelligence service MIVD named all three sectors as Chinese espionage targets in its 2024 annual report.

China restricted rare earth exports through 2025, and ASML's complex optical systems depend on those materials. The EU holds an anti-coercion instrument designed to counter economic blackmail by non-member states, but leaders treat it as a last resort. The tool was "created with China in mind," Benedetta Girardi, program coordinator of the HCSS Europe in the Indo-Pacific program, told Nikkei Asia.

Dutch anti-discrimination law prohibits screening policies that target only Chinese nationals, and the standard VOG background certificate doesn't account for an applicant's conduct or connections outside the EU. The report proposes a tiered system instead, whereby companies identify their "he Hague Centre for Strategic Studies has rated the Dutch semiconductor industry as being at very high risk of Chinese foreign interferencejewels" and apply deeper screening, weighing factors such as susceptibility to blackmail or bribery, to staff with direct access, while junior hires and contractors get lighter checks.

A proposed resilience fund, built with the EU and NATO, would pay to replace equipment such as server motherboards, BMCs, and large ship-to-shore cranes with European-made equivalents. The mechanism would sit alongside Project Beethoven, the €2.5 billion Dutch government effort to expand domestic semiconductor production capacity, and would include surge funding that unlocks during crises such as sanctions escalation or major cyber campaigns.

ASML denied a U.S. government concern in June that one of its EUV machines had reached China in breach of export controls, telling Tom's Hardware the claims were baseless and harmful to its reputation.

The Nexperia dispute, in which the Dutch government seized the chipmaker from its Chinese parent, and Beijing responded by blocking exports from its Guangdong site, played out while the report was being written. In a crisis such as a confrontation over Taiwan, the researchers assess that Chinese leverage over strategic industries would likely constrain Dutch policy choices and limit participation in allied responses.

The demand for AI compute is already insatiable, and it seems only poised to grow in the wake of the introduction of frontier-class open models like Kimi K3 that anybody can potentially fine-tune and serve. Against this backdrop, Microsoft and AMD are teaming up to get Redmond more AI FLOPS for both internal and external use. The two companies announced this morning that Microsoft will commit to adding AMD's Helios rack-scale AI accelerator in volume to run frontier-model workloads in its own data centers, as well as for Azure AI infrastructure customers and services.

The partnership makes next-gen AMD AI compute available to Azure customers like AI labs for AI training and inference serving workloads, and it’ll also underpin managed compute for enterprise customers looking to deploy AI workloads through Microsoft Foundry.

The two companies didn't indicate the exact size of Microsoft's Helios deployment in either watts or dollars, but the commitment would seem to be another major win for AMD as it seeks to grab data center GPU share from Nvidia. AMD has struck massive partnerships with OpenAI and Meta in the past year with gigawatts of compute installations and hundreds of billions of dollars potentially hanging in the balance.

For a quick refresher, the Helios rack-scale accelerator will take the fight to Nvidia’s Vera Rubin NVL72 system when it arrives later this year. Helios joins together 72 next-generation Instinct MI455X GPUs with an aggregate of 31.1TB of HBM4 memory capacity across the system. Those GPUs offer as much as 1.4 exaFLOPS of FP8 compute and 2.9 exaFLOPS of FP4 for AI models using those OCP AI data types.

AMD is targeting 260 TB/s of scale-up bandwidth within the rack, on par with Nvidia’s Vera Rubin NVL72 rack-scale system, and 43 TB/s of scale-out bandwidth using UALink over Ethernet, or about twice that of Vera Rubin, although the performance of UALink over Ethernet in practice remains to be seen.

Microsoft and AMD also announced that Azure will add two new VM series built on AMD's upcoming sixth-gen Epyc Venice CPUs: the HDv2 series for "agentic AI and data pipelines," and the HXv2 for semiconductor design workflows. Microsoft will also leverage its existing deployment of AMD Pensando DPUs to integrate that hardware into its Azure Boost offerings to accelerate networking and storage processing operations.

Tom’s Hardware will be on the ground at AMD’s Advancing AI event this week, where we expect to learn more about AMD’s AI ambitions for the second half of this year and beyond. Stay tuned for our coverage from that event.

A report by The Conversation has claimed that the government can seize private land to make way for new transmission lines needed to meet the surging electricity demand of data centers. According to the July 16 report by Aaron Walayat, Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Dayton, power companies can use eminent domain — the legal authority that grants the government the power to take private property and convert it to public use in exchange for compensation — to implement the takeovers.

The AI boom has led to a surge in data centers in the U.S., with thousands already operational and several more planned or under construction. While the massive superclusters are necessary for the technological revolution AI has brought about, there's growing opposition to their construction over several concerns. Among them are land use, noise pollution, water usage, and the impact of immense electricity consumption, issues that have reportedly made 70% of Americans opposed to building data centers nearby.

In many instances, data centers draw the required electricity from the grid. As the industry enters the gigawatt era, utility companies are under pressure to increase supply to meet surging demand. This requires building new power infrastructure, such as transmission lines, which often have to cross private land. When this happens, the power companies try to buy the land. Should the owner refuse, the government can force a sale through the eminent domain law.

The law grants the government the power to take private land, regardless of the owner's consent, provided that the land is for public use and the owner receives just compensation. The government can also delegate the power to “private entities or common carriers,” such as utility companies. It is this legal authority that power companies can enact to implement the takeovers.

According to the report, the law does not automatically grant infallible authority. The company must prove that the infrastructure will be for public use. Several states also reserve the right to interpret eminent domain laws according to their own constitutions.

The report highlights another layer of legalities amid ongoing data center tensions. Opponents have successfully blocked 75 planned data center projects in the first quarter of 2026, including the 2,100-acre Digital Gateway project, eventually canceled over a newspaper-notice technicality. On the other hand, several other projects have gone ahead, often with community support. Meta recently announced plans to expand its Hyperion AI supercluster from 2 GW to 5 GW.

Samsung Display has announced that it is now supplying its first mass-produced VESA DisplayHDR True Black 1400 monitor panels to laptop makers including Lenovo, Asus, Dell, and MSI. Get ready for the brightest and punchiest portable displays yet as these big-name laptop brands integrate Samsung’s latest tandem OLED displays into their designs. VESA only introduced this new standard earlier this month, and it is notable for requiring panels with at least 40% higher brightness than the previous top tier.

The VESA DisplayHDR True Black 1400 specs are rather strenuous. Earning this certification means that your display must “reproduce black levels of 0.0005 nits or lower while achieving peak brightness of 1,400 nits at a 10% On Pixel Ratio (OPR),” notes Samsung. Peak brightness is also boosted by 40% compared to VESA’s previous highest certification level, True Black 1000. In terms of actual brightness readings, Samsung’s new tandem OLEDs offer up to 1,600 nits, which is 40% higher than the 1,100-nit peak brightness of conventional OLED panels with a single emissive layer.

In case you haven’t heard of tandem OLED display panels, a big clue to their boosted visual performance is in the name. This display architecture stacks two organic emissive layers to improve light-emitting efficiency and achieve higher brightness. Another benefit is that the dual operation of the panels means a “tandem OLED can produce greater brightness using the same current or reduce the load on each emissive layer at the same brightness level, extending the panel’s lifespan,” notes Samsung in today’s press release. Thus, this kind of panel isn’t necessarily going to crater your laptop battery life when you only require modest brightness levels, as in a typical home/office environment, for example.

Lenovo’s Yoga Pro 9i Aura Edition was the first device to feature Samsung’s new tandem OLED panel. Meanwhile, devices from Asus, Dell, and MSI are going to hit retail sometime in H2 this year.

We’ve already seen tandem OLED-enhanced desktop monitors launched from brands like Alienware, Gigabyte, and MSI. Samsung Display’s local rival, LG Display, is also gearing up to compete in this premium market segment.

Mere weeks after dbrand announced it would have to shelve its Steam Machine Companion Cube because it didn't get permission to use Valve's intellectual property, a 3D printing enthusiast has created a DIY version that you can make for yourself at home. Printables user Jaron's Steam Machine Companion Cube Case is "An unofficial Portal Companion cube case for your Steam Machine" that you can create using a single-extruder printer, if you have the right model.

According to a user post on X, the fan-made tribute to the dbrand project was made "from scratch," and is based entirely on images of dbrand's design. Ironically, whether that will incur any copyright wrath from dbrand itself remains to be seen.

As you can see, the project looks exactly like dbrand's companion cube. According to the Printables listing, it can be printed using a single-extruder printer as long as it lets you pause at specific layers to swap filament for other colors. Jaron says a slicer is required to get the multi-color look for the panels, but otherwise provides an extensive parts list of screws, inserts, and magnets you can acquire from Amazon to piece the project together. You will, of course, also need a Steam Machine for the full effect, as well as a soldering iron, tweezers, and a couple of screwdrivers. Helpfully, they even list the specific Sunlu and Overture filaments used to get the look.

At first glance, this is definitely not a beginner 3D printing project, but Jaron has provided extensive assembly instructions as well as multiple YouTube videos to detail the assembly process. As you might expect, popping a 3D-printed shell on your Steam Machine might impact thermals. Jaron says that they have not done any extensive thermal testing of the design, but has ensured that no airflow or vents are blocked. In fact, the additional vent in the faceplate may even aid cooling.

dbrand unveiled its Companion Cube on November 12, the day of the Steam Machine's announcement. Following extensive interest, the company says it poured thousands of hours into industrial design and injection molding, as well as promoting the Companion Cube. Unfortunately, it forgot to ask Valve for permission. "They stated that the Companion Cube is Valve intellectual property, for which dbrand does not have a license," the company admitted in a statement last month. Despite appeals, the company in the end gave up and shelved the project.

Valve's Steam Machine is the company's somewhat beleaguered in-home console alternative, which finally launched last month. The diminutive desktop gaming PC is a lot pricier than Valve had anticipated, owing to the AI pricing squeeze on RAM and SSD parts. As such, at $1,049, it's decidedly more expensive than console alternatives, somewhat limiting its appeal. With a semi-custom AMD Zen 4 six-core chip, RDNA3 graphics, 16GB of DDR5, and up to 2TB SSD capacity, it's pretty good value when compared to equivalent PC hardware.

If you have got your hands on one and would like a version of dbrand's Companion Cube to match, this enthusiast 3D-printed project — which Jaron says is not affiliated with Valve or Steam, nor features any official assets from any game — could be a fun way to spend a weekend.

Building a gaming PC in 2026 is tough given the state of RAM and SSD pricing, but it's not impossible. If you want an AM5 gaming PC with the best gaming CPU on the market, look no further than this AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D bundle with 32GB of RAM, a B850 motherboard, and a 240mm AIO CPU cooler for just $1,039 at Newegg.

• Check out this deal on Newegg

That's a saving of $148 on the list price of these components at Newegg, but crucially, it's also more than $100 less than buying these parts separately at various retailers at their cheapest overall prices. As such, bundling these components will save you more than $100 on your gaming PC.

The star of this bundle is undoubtedly the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D. Despite not quite being the fastest gaming CPU on the market, this behemoth retains its crown as the best CPU for gaming in 2026 thanks to its blistering overall performance and more modest power draw compared to the 9850X3D. This 8-core, 16-thread processor is clocked at 4.7 GHz, with boost clocks of up to 5.2 GHz. With its coveted 3D v-cache and 96MB of LR capacity, this processor ensures much higher frame rates compared to non-X3D models, as you can see in our gaming benchmarks below.

The CPU really needs no introduction. Alongside it, you'll get the Gigabyte B850 Aorus Elite Wi-Fi 7 Ice motherboard, which features support for up to four DDR5 8200 DIMMs and a total of 256GB of RAM. It also has a single M.2 PCIe 5.0 slot, as well as two PCIe 4.0 slots for SSD expansion. As the name suggests, it supports Wi-Fi 7, 2.5Gbps LAN, and 7.1 audio. It also has a myriad selection of ports, including USB 3.1, USB-C, and more. With 14+2+2 power staging and DIY friendly tools like EZ-Latch for M.2 and PCIe, this is a fantastic companion board to start your build, also featuring a striking white aesthetic.

The RAM in this build is Corsair's popular Vengeance 32GB 6000, the sweet spot for gaming on AM5 that will provide all the performance you need for gaming and multitasking. Unfortunately, it's the inflated prices of RAM that are driving up the cost of this build, making that $150 saving all the more important. Finally, you get a free gift: Cooler Master's Elite Liquid 240 CPU AIO. This dual-chamber pump has AM5 support and will fit the CPU no problem, keeping your CPU nice and cool during gaming and even providing some overclocking headroom.

As mentioned, this motherboard bundle is white, so perfect for an icy PC build. Of course, if you'd prefer a darker, stealthier look, an identical bundle with the black version of this board can be found at Newegg for $10 more, at $1,409. As you can see, the total cost of this build would be $1,187 if you bought the parts separately, even with the AIO costing just $39, and a $30 discount on the RAM.

Paired with the right GPU, this would make the perfect start for an AM5 gaming build that will chew through any gaming title at 1440p or even 4K, with the 9800X3D offering some of the best gaming potential of any CPU on the market.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, Gaming Chair, Best Wi-Fi Routers, Best Motherboard, or CPU Deals pages.

This is the first time that I can recall seeing a discount on Logitech's latest gaming mouse. It's a mouse I've been keeping a close eye on, as the launch price has not only stayed extremely stable but is also super expensive for a gaming mouse, making it very off-putting for the majority of gamers. However, if you want one of these high-tech gaming mice, then today at Amazon, you can grab $54 off the Logitech G Pro X2 Superstrike, bringing it to $125.99. The $54 discount is automatically applied when you click through to the checkout. This is the lowest price the mouse has ever been on Amazon.

● Check out this deal at Amazon

The Superstrike’s standout feature is that it blurs the lines between the worlds of gaming keyboards and gaming mice. It's done away with the traditional analog mouse switch, and as a side effect, has removed mouse clicks. With the latest hall-effect tech beneath the left and right mouse buttons, click feedback is now produced by a haptic engine that Logitech calls H.I.T.S. (Haptic Inductive Trigger System). It combines tiny haptic motors with inductive sensors to create a customizable rapid-trigger system that can cut up to 30ms off your response times.

The Logitech G Pro X2 Superstrike packs all the latest and greatest tech in a very familiar chassis. See our review of the Logitech G Pro X2 Superstrike for more details. Keeping the shape and size of previous Superlight mice. The G Pro X2 Superstrike weighs 61 grams and uses magnetic sensors with a haptic trigger system for the left and right mouse buttons. The sensor is the Logitech Hero 2 sensor, with a DPI of up to 44,000, 888 IPS, and 88 g-force acceleration. The wireless dongle supports a very fast, lag-free 8 kHz polling rate for the lowest latency possible. To use the adjustable H.I.T.S system to the full, you must use the Logitech G Hub software to alter and customize any mouse settings to your preference.

This is the cheapest I've ever seen this mouse, and having only been released in February of 2026, the $125.99 asking price for the Logitech G Pro X2 Superstrike makes it much more attractive.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, Gaming Chair, Best Wi-Fi Routers, Best Motherboard, or CPU Deals pages.

You can also join the Tom's Hardware deals Discord for up-to-the-minute hardware deals.

If you’re interested in 3D printing and are looking to get a new entry-level 3D printer, now’s your chance to get into the hobby while saving money. The Creality K2 SE is currently on sale on Amazon, with its price dropping to just $248.99. This means you’re getting a $50 discount on this Creality device, cutting 17% off its original $299 selling price. This is one of the lowest prices for this basic unit in the past few months, but it’s only for a limited time, so you should check out the deal before it’s gone.

• Check out the Creality K2 SE 3D printer on Amazon.

The Creality K2 SE specs are better than the Ender 3 V3 SE found in our list of the best 3D printers because it offers a much faster print speed of 500 mm/s (versus the latter’s 250 mm/s) and is even compatible with the CFS for multi-color and multi-material printing. More importantly, this deal makes the K2 SE just $30 more expensive than the Ender 3 V3 SE’s MSRP of $219.00. So, if you can spare the extra dollars, you’ll get more supported filaments, a remote control, lighting kit, power loss recovery, and several other features to make your 3D printing projects run much more smoothly and efficiently. Unfortunately, we haven’t had the chance to look at the K2 SE yet, but its siblings, the K2 Plus and K2 Pro Combo, both received high marks from our reviews. While these units offer greater capability, they cost more than triple (or even quadruple) this 3D printer.

The K2 SE has a generous build volume of 220 x 215 x 245 mm, while its modular extruder ensures that you can easily service it during maintenance and printing. You can see this with its quick-swap nozzle, which the brand claims to be clog-free and could be quickly replaced as needed. And even though it’s an open-frame 3D printer, it features a sturdy metal build for greater stability, ensuring that it would deliver the best possible print quality. It also has a vibration sensor and input shaping algorithm, so that your 3D prints will look as smooth as possible.

Even though the K2 is a step-up over the Ender 3 V3 SE, it still lets you get started quickly with its 5-minute set up and included boot-up quick guide. This means that you don’t have to dive into complicated 3D printer assembly — you can just start churning out your 3D projects as soon as the K2 SE arrives on your doorstep. So, if that sounds like a good start to you, go ahead and get the Creality K2 SE for just $248.99. Remember, this is a limited deal, so you should buy it now if you’re really set on starting your 3D printing hobby today.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, gaming chair, or CPU Deals pages.

AMD is expected to refresh both its desktop and mobile lineups with Zen 6 next year. Ryzen AI 500 series, codenamed Medusa Point, will be the company's next-gen mobile family and we've already seen a 10-core part leak from it a couple of times. Now, that same SKU is back with another Geekbench listing, this time posting its best results that put it ahead of any mobile chip currently made by Intel or AMD (in one way).

AMD's upcoming chip ended up scoring 3,329 points in the single-core test and 16,555 points in the multi-core test. The Geekbench page once again shows the platform name as "AMD Plum-MDS1," which we've known to be associated with Medusa Point for a while now. The SKU is listed as "AMD Eng Sample 100-000001713-33_N," which is identical to how we saw in the last leak, basically confirming we're looking at the same chip.

The single-core result is almost 5% higher while the multi-core score is about 9.7% higher compared to the numbers we saw previously. In fact, the single-core result is better than any mobile part on Geekbench apart from the new Snapdragon X2 Elite lineup. Compared to desktop equivalents, it's very close to the 9900X and the 9800X3D — two absolute desktop powerhouses carrying 12 cores and 8 cores, respectively.

The multi-core score puts this 10-core SKU right alongside the Ryzen AI Max+ 390, which is just a tier below the top-end AI Max+ 395 from Strix Halo. Since this is a 10-core part, we can infer it's the Ryzen AI 9 565 because the Ryzen AI 9 365 (from Strix Point) and Ryzen AI 9 465 (from Gorgon Point) share the same configs. The Ryzen AI 9 365 has an average score of 12,410, so Medusa Point's offering is 33% faster in this regard.

The Geekbench listing also reports the correct clock speeds this time — 2.0 GHz is still lasted as the base frequency, but the boost frequency is marked at 5.37 GHz, which makes a lot more sense. Moreover, the listing shows 10MB of L2 cache and 32MB of L3 cache while the Ryzen AI 9 465 had a combined cache tally of 34MB.

Overall, this benchmark is an incredibly promising showing for Medusa Point. The Red Team's next-gen mobile lineup seems to benefit heavily from an architectural jump thanks to the Zen 6 silicon. Keep in mind that this is the company's mainstream mobile offering that's supposed to compete with Intel's Panther Lake, while Nova Lake mobile and AMD's own Gator Range (Ryzen 10000) will serve only as high-end CPUs.

The Zilog Z80 has just turned 50 years old. This iconic 8-bit processor first went on sale in July 1976 and stayed in production for 48 years until Zilog, now a Littelfuse subsidiary, stopped accepting orders in June 2024. However, there’s an open-source replacement closer than ever to shipping in the chip’s original 40-pin DIP package thanks to community-funded fabrication.

The original Z80 packed 8,500 transistors on a 4μm process and typically ran at 2.5 MHz, with later CMOS variants reaching 20 MHz. Binary compatibility with the Intel 8080 let it absorb the existing CP/M software base, with an on-die DRAM refresh counter that cut the number of support chips a system needed. Development of working prototypes cost roughly $400,000 against $500,000 in funding from Exxon, per the Computer History Museum.

The chip powered the ZX Spectrum, TRS-80, MSX machines, Nintendo's Game Boy, Sega's Master System, the Pac-Man arcade cabinet, and Texas Instruments' graphing calculators, then shipped in industrial controllers for decades after home computing moved on to more powerful successors. Zilog's end-of-life notice, dated April 15, 2024, told customers its wafer foundry was discontinuing support for the Z84C00 family, and last-time-buy orders closed that June.

However, Renaldas Zioma's FOSS Z80 project, launched shortly after the end-of-life notice, now has working silicon. The first version, fabbed on SkyWater's 130nm node through Tiny Tapeout 7 on a die of just 0.064mm², has been confirmed as functional via the project’s GitHub repository. A QFN64 version with all 40 pins exposed followed on the Efabless CI2406 shuttle, two further runs then went through IHP's 130nm process, and the current run targets the classic DIP40 form factor using chip-on-board assembly on GlobalFoundries' 180nm GF180MCU node via Wafer.Space. The end goal here is to fab a drop-in replacement for machines like the ZX Spectrum and RC2014 kits.

The design is built around Guy Hutchison's TV80 Verilog core, and the project's Tiny Tapeout page says the 130nm CMOS implementation should support clocks up to 50 MHz, against 4 MHz for the original NMOS part.

Zilog is trimming the Z80's official successor line as well. A product change notification from last October put the eZ80L92, along with several Z8F-series microcontrollers, on end-of-life, citing "little to no demand." Last-time-buy orders closed on January 20 this year, with shipments scheduled through April 20, on non-cancelable, non-returnable terms. The eZ80L92 is the only eZ80 part named in the notice; the pipelined eZ80 architecture, introduced in 2001 and still inside TI's current TI-84 Plus CE calculators, otherwise remains in Zilog's catalog.

Hobbyists keep finding work for the original chip regardless. For example, earlier this year, a developer ran a tiny conversational AI on a Z80 with 64KB of RAM.

The head of the SK Group, which owns SK hynix, said in a press briefing that memory semiconductor prices are “abnormally high,” and that the industry must take steps to increase supply and help lower prices. The Chosun Daily writes that SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won delivered this statement during a press briefing at an industry forum, where he also noted that the group is looking at building a memory chip plant in the U.S. to increase production.

“Memory prices are currently at an abnormally high level. While AI companies can absorb increased costs through investments, PC and smartphone manufacturers have no choice but to pass rising semiconductor costs onto product prices,” Chey told the media. “Since most customers for these products are individuals, there are limits to how much prices can be raised. To prevent 'chipflation'—where rising chip prices drive up finished product costs—supply must be expanded.”

Aside from expanding supply and easing memory prices for consumer products, extremely high memory prices brought about by limited supply could negatively impact the big three companies. That’s because the high margins could lead to the entry of new players or give smaller manufacturers the opportunity to grow their presence and challenge the established firms. We’re already seeing this, as some Chinese brands have ditched them for domestically produced CXMT and YMTC chips. While this could be driven by Beijing, even major multinational brands like Corsair and Lenovo have started sourcing from these companies just to get chips. Even Apple is asking permission from Washington to buy memory chips from CXMT. Aside from that, he also cited Elon Musk’s interest in building his own fab as a potential threat to existing memory semiconductor companies.

This isn’t a problem at the moment as there is more than enough demand to go around for incumbent memory and storage chip manufacturers and new entrants. In fact, memory companies can use this as a defense against price-fixing lawsuits, with the massive AI demand and the higher margins it offers standing as a plausible reason why memory chip companies focused on HBM production and reduced DRAM output. But before the AI boom, the memory industry was actually suffering from one of the worst memory downturns to hit the industry for over a decade. So, if and when the memory shortage is over and the memory industry resumes its boom-and-bust cycle, more manufacturers jockeying to find customers in a tight market would make it that much harder for these companies to survive and thrive.

Researchers from Northwestern University in Illinois have built a drone that rotates so fast that it is cloaked by motion blur. The new Phantom Twist drone spins at 25 times per second, which, thanks to a quirk of human vision, makes it appear like a faint smudge in the air. The video below shows it off to great effect, but I hope they can do something about the whiny noise.

The first demonstration of the Phantom Twist took place as part of a Robotics: Science and Systems 2026 presentation on Thursday. “Most efforts to hide drones focus on making them look like their surroundings,” said Northwestern’s Michael Rubenstein, who led the work. “Instead, we asked whether we could design the drone itself around the way humans perceive motion. This idea of low visibility through persistent motion is something few people have explored.”

The stationary photo of the Phantom Twist reveals a rather unique drone design, far removed from the now traditional quadcopter. It has just one motor and one propeller, and while the propeller spins in one direction, and the rest of the drone spins in the opposite direction, explains the Northwestern University blog.

AI was used to refine the design

The researchers tasked a computational model to generate roughly 20,000 drone configurations capable of stable flight. Subsequently, they applied AI and other optimization algorithms to repeatedly rearrange the drones’ major components, including a motor, propeller, circuit board, counterweight and batteries.

After narrowing down the candidates to around 500, the engineers superimposed simulated drones in flight over a hundred real-world backgrounds. A perception model then whittled down the designs based on their visibility scores. According to Rubenstein this entire process was automated, and only “when we were confident that a drone met all our criteria, we built it.” The demonstrated Phantom Twist drone is apparently “10 times less visually perceptible than a conventional quadcopter” according to the researcher’s visibility metrics.

Yes, the team knows that the Phantom Twist drone is rather noisy, and the visual impact of its wires and support rods could be reduced. Thus, work is planned to utilize more transparent materials and / or quieter propulsion systems in upcoming revisions.

Samsung has cut jobs across its U.S. consumer electronics business as it prepares to move Samsung Electronics America's headquarters from New Jersey to Texas by the end of the year, with a WARN notice listing 739 affected roles at its Englewood Cliffs offices and roughly 100 workers let go at its Plano, Texas, site, according to a Reuters report.

Samsung told the outlet on Sunday that a majority of the affected New Jersey employees received relocation offers, while others were let go. SEA runs U.S. sales and marketing for Samsung's smartphones, TVs, displays, and home appliances, and doesn't include the company's semiconductor operations. The Plano figure, which covers workers in the mobile division among others, came from one laid-off employee who spoke to Reuters anonymously.

SEA employs about 1,200 people in New Jersey, according to U.S. Rep. Josh Gottheimer's office, which said the Englewood Cliffs campus opened last September, replacing the Ridgefield Park headquarters Samsung had occupied since 1992. The WARN notice covers over 60% of that workforce, roughly 10 months after the site opened. Internal documents reviewed by Reuters show employees were notified of an “enterprise-wide reduction in force” on June 30.

Samsung said in its statement that the relocation is intended to foster "stronger collaboration and optimize the organization," and that there's currently no broad global restructuring underway in its consumer products business. A current SEA employee told Reuters that workers are nonetheless worried about further cuts and a possible consolidation of the appliance, home entertainment, and mobile divisions as the company concentrates resources on chips.

Samsung's chip division booked a preliminary $58.5 billion in second-quarter operating profit, a 19-fold year-on-year jump that passed Nvidia's most recent quarter and put Samsung on track to out-earn its entire 40-year semiconductor history in 2026. Its mobile division is expected to post its first-ever quarterly loss over the same period, squeezed by competition from Apple and by the memory price increases its own chip unit is charging. Conventional DRAM contract prices rose 58% to 63% in Q2, and smartphone makers are raising handset prices to offset persistently high memory costs.

The consumer arm's relocation puts it alongside Samsung's existing chip footprint in Texas, which includes two fabs in Austin, the delayed Taylor fab, and a mobile hub in Plano. Samsung employed 11,770 people in the U.S. at the end of 2025, including its chip division. Samsung's IT services affiliate, Samsung SDS America, warned in a separate June notice that 179 roles could be cut in Ridgefield Park, New Jersey.

Ukraine, which is fighting a years-long war of attrition against Russian aggression, has seen a lot of combat innovations, especially in drone warfare. But even as modern technologies like Starlink-powered long-range drones and jam-proof fiber optic drones enter the battlefield, troops on both sides are also relying on their own ingenuity and deploying “field upgrades” on their equipment. Just like during the Second World War, when some American tankers welded thick metal plates to increase the armor on their vehicles to counter the feared German Panzers, the Defence Blog reports that Russians are crudely installing $2 magnetic compasses on some Molniya drones to combat electronic warfare.

The Molniya is a cheap, medium-range drone that relies on the open-source ExpressLRS radio control system, which lets operators control it from a potential maximum range of up to 62 miles (100 kilometers). Some versions also used Starlink connections to combat the jamming efforts of Ukrainian electronic warfare units, but Ukraine’s requirement to register Starlink units in the country before they can be used has supposedly made this strategy unviable.

The drone can also be equipped with a fiber optic cable, which renders it impervious to any sort of electronic interference. Although this limits the potential range of the Molniya to just 18 miles (30 kilometers), it allows the drone to be more effective as it reduces the chances that the operator will lose control of the unit.

GPS jamming is also a common occurrence in Ukrainian airspace. This means that drone operators could potentially get lost on their way to their targets. Because of this, many frontline Russian units have started crudely installing magnetic compasses on their drones. This navigation tool is typically installed just below the FPV camera, allowing the operator to glance down to confirm their bearings. When combined with other telemetry data, the drone pilot could locate their relative location even without GPS.

One leaked image shows that the compass is just attached to the panel near the FPV camera with five Philips screws, suggesting that this isn’t a factory modification. Some people are mocking the development of this “add-on,” saying that it’s a step backward for the supposedly “advanced” Russian arsenal. But no matter how rough and primitive it looks, the fact that it helps the Russians achieve their missions means that it’s still a cheap, effective, and rather deadly modification.

An engineering student has demonstrated a piece of music being played via coil whine. In the PC world, this electronic noise pollution is usually an unwanted side effect from running high-performance components at full pelt. However, keen electronic DIYer Battery Potato has videoed an inductor coil playing a catchy chip tune.

Sorry I don’t recognize the tune being played. It sounds like it could be a classic Nintendo Game Boy game music track, but almost anything played through a coil may sound like that.

Many of you will have bought or built a high-performance PC that is afflicted with components that produce audible coil whine. In my long computer tinkering history, I only remember two coil whine emitting components: a Zotac RTX 4080, and a (recent) lesser-known Chinese brand NVMe SSD. Other components that might have noisy coils are PSUs and motherboards.

Coil whine is an audible phenomenon that occurs when inductors (and sometimes capacitors) vibrate in response to rapidly changing electrical loads. For PC enthusiasts this can be maddening if you have what is otherwise a pleasingly quiet machine. PCs most often exhibit coil whine when you are hitting very high frame rates (GPU) or transferring oodles of data files (SSD). It is usually a high-pitched audible effect, so coil whine can be particularly bothersome to those who can hear high-pitched sounds clearly and are sensitive to them.

Battery Potato, an electrical engineering student at Nagaoka University of Technology, has sought to make coil whine a feature instead of an electronics bug. You can see from the video that a simple toroidal inductor has been constructed, and the electronics DIYer is running current through it. Perhaps this simple homebrew inductor was chosen for this ‘music’ project as it produced clearer sound than off-the-shelf components. A modulated current waveform is likely being fed directly to the coils to make them 'sing' as intended.

The OCCT stress tester introduced musical coil whine last year

The above story of music being squeezed out of a coil whine noisescape isn’t unprecedented. Last October we reported on stress tester OCCT version 15 release, which included a coil whine detection tool that can output "three pre-defined tunes."

The OCCT devs reasoned that pushing components with a coil whine pattern that has musical characteristics would help users more easily recognize the issue. It especially helps listeners pick out actual coil whine in noisier environments.

How cheap can you build a hardware-based ad-blocking DNS filter? "Free," if you're willing to salvage some used hardware that's being thrown away. What if you aren't so lucky? In the era of the RAMageddon, even a Raspberry Pi will cost you a couple hundred bucks. But you know, you don't even need something that powerful. In fact, you can use a $5 microcontroller to build a fully functional ad-blocking filter with over 500,000 domains blocked and around 10ms latency.

We know that's possible because Egyptian full-stack developer ZedAxis (@M-Abozaid on GitHub) has already built one. Using an ESP32-C3 "SuperMini" board, he's created a backup DNS for his home network that still provides ad blocking. His primary router is a Pi-hole, which is a Raspberry Pi running specialized software to manage DHCP addressing and DNS resolution with integrated ad-blocking. The SuperMini serves as a backup when the Pi-Hole is rebooting or otherwise unavailable.

Strictly speaking, we haven't seen ZedAxis' creation in action, but there's no reason to believe it doesn't work. The ESP32 family of embedded Wi-Fi-enabled microcontrollers is a well-known quantity, and this functionality is by no means outside the realm of its capabilities. In fact, this specific trick allows the use of the ESP32-C3, which is a cost-reduced version of the chip that doesn't have the 8MB of PSRAM found on some higher-end models. (There are MANY variants of the ESP32.)

Instead, the ESP32-C3 used by ZedAxis has just 400KB of RAM, and 4MB of flash memory. With these limited specifications, he wasn't able to store a plaintext blocklist of any real size; it's simply too much data. So, he did what any enterprising hacker would do: he started hashing the data to reduce its size. Using 40-bit FNV-1a hashes, because 32-bit would give too many collisions and 64-bit wastes too much space, he can store some 537,000 domains in the flash memory of the device.

The clever part isn't really the hashing, though. Rather than storing the domains themselves, the build process downloads one or more public blocklists, strips out duplicate entries and comments, hashes each remaining domain into a 40-bit value, sorts the resulting list, and writes the finished database into the ESP32's flash memory. When a DNS query arrives, the device hashes the requested hostname the same way and performs a binary search against the sorted hash table. If it finds a match, the request is blocked. Otherwise, the query is forwarded to an upstream resolver. According to ZedAxis, the finished firmware uses only around 50KB of RAM while answering blocked lookups in roughly 10 milliseconds.

There's another neat compromise hiding in the design, too. The ESP32 normally reserves enough flash memory to hold two complete copies of its firmware, allowing over-the-air (OTA) updates without risking a failed flash leaving the device unbootable. If you don't care about wireless firmware updates, you can reclaim that second firmware partition for the blocklist database instead. With OTA support enabled, the project tops out at around 250,000 blocked domains. Give up OTA, and that jumps to roughly 537,000 domains on a microcontroller that you can usually buy for the price of a fast-food lunch. ZedAxis describes the price as $2; I wasn't able to find SuperMini boards any cheaper than about $5 US, but at that price there's not much need to quibble about the difference.

Of course, this isn't meant to replace a proper Pi-hole or AdGuard Home installation. The ESP32 project has a rudimentary dashboard, but it doesn't provide detailed per-client statistics, historical query logs, or all the knobs and dials that make those platforms attractive. Instead, it's designed as a tiny insurance policy. It sits quietly on the network, sips only a few dozen milliamps of power, and if the primary DNS server disappears for a reboot or a power outage, clients still get filtered DNS responses instead of falling back to whatever resolver the router happens to have configured.

My favorite detail is that ZedAxis powers the whole thing from the USB port on the back of his ISP-provided fiber gateway, a Huawei OptiXstar home fiber gateway. The USB connection isn't carrying any data; the totality of the integration is the router saying "here's 5 volts" and the ESP32 replying "thanks." It's just that the port is a convenient power source for a device so small it practically disappears behind the router. All communications are carried out through the ESP32's integrated Wi-Fi adapter.

I have no idea whether projects like this will ever become common. Probably not, because most people who want network-wide ad blocking will still buy a Raspberry Pi, a used mini PC, or run AdGuard Home in a virtual machine. Still, it's refreshing to see somebody look at a $5 microcontroller with 400KB of RAM and decide, "Sure, that'll do."

We've seen a few battery-powered PCs around here — after all, what are laptops but small computers running on Lithium-ion cells? When it comes to fueling actual desktop systems, though, the story is always one of compromise, however, this field of cutting-edge shenanigans has hit a new milestone thanks to creator Uwoslab. He just built an interconnected power bank out of 192 AA cells, enough to run a modern AM4 system without jeopardizing its performance.

The build is rather straightforward and actually started with 400 AA batteries as the creator had bought four separate packs containing 100 cells each. His plan was to wire up 8 cells in parallel, then connect those little banks in series until he had 50 of them. Simple math tells us eight multiplied by fifty is 400, but ultimately, he only ended up wiring 192 batteries together, split across 3 large wooden boxes.

The boxes were used as anchor points to connect the batteries together and provide structural rigidity. They were laser-cut to fit the cells perfectly and were made out of wood. The creator put clips and contact pads at either ends of the apparatus to serve as the negative and positive terminals, respectively, with four cells going into each slot. He then duct-taped the whole thing together to make it even more secure.

Each box held 64 batteries and Uwoslab built three of them, so that's how we get to the 192-count mentioned earlier. This same creator has actually tried to power a PC off of 9V zinc-carbon batteries before, but that experiment failed for the most part since the PC wouldn't stay on for more than a few seconds. His prior experience informed him to switch to Alkaline batteries instead that carry a higher voltage — 1.5V, to be exact.

Since PCs work on 12V, wiring together eight 1.5V cells gets you exactly 12V needed for stable operation, hopefully. Uwoslab was also using "high-drain" Pookell AA Alkaline batteries that trade capacity for higher voltage ratings. If you were to combine 400 of these bad boys in a perfect hypothetical, you'd generate about 160 watts of power for ten straight hours.

Unfortunately, AA batteries are not the most efficient and they drop in voltage over time as they're drained, which makes powering something as (relatively) sensitive as a modern x86 computer a lot more difficult. But it can still be done. The biggest mistake people make at this stage (as if this is a common occurrence) traditional wall-plug power supply attached to a 12V-to-220V inverter. Instead, he ran his parallel battery grid directly into a 12V DC-to-ATX adapter board plugged straight into the motherboard.

We don't know much about the PC itself apart from the fact that it's an AM4 system without a dedicated GPU, so it's a G-series chip. There's no storage device either; we're booting straight from a flash drive. And what are we booting into? Hanna Montana Linux. Yes, you're reading that correctly. The popular Linux distro from 2009 based on Disney's teen popstar was recently revived and given a modern makeover.

Not only does the battery-powered PC easily boot into Hanna Montana Linux on first try, but it even passed the built-in Linux CPU stress test (stress-ng) with flying colors. The CPU was pegged at 98% usage and dropped down to a stable 11.95V during the testing, while the battery bank was reading out at 13V initially. The experiment was a raging success, perhaps better than any Alkaline-powered PC that came before it.

A Grand Theft Auto (GTA) modder has developed a mod that lets you run Grand Theft Auto III (GTA 3) and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (GTA VC) as mini games right inside Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (GTA SA). The modder, DryxioGTA, demonstrated the feat in a video posted on YouTube on Thursday, running the game on a Windows virtual machine on macOS.

In the video, GTA SA’s main character, CJ, can be seen stepping up to a TV, apparently inserted into the game by the mod. Once in front of the TV, the option to start either GTA VC or GTA 3 appears. The selected mini-game immediately starts running on the TV.

Gamers can switch between controlling the main GTA SA game or the mini game, using the F10 key. When controlling the mini-game — say, GTA 3, as in the video — players can play it as normal while the rest of the outer SA game continues to run, with characters roaming about. Similarly, switching control back to the outer SA game leaves the mini-game running on the TV.

Just a few hours after uploading a brief gameplay video, the modder released another video demonstrating an even more mind-blowing mod, this time running GTA Vice City inside GTA 3, inside GTA San Andreas!

As shown in the clip, the game starts with GTA SA, where players can walk up to a large screen to activate and start running GTA 3. Within GTA 3 — now running on the large screen inside San Andreas — gamers can drive to another specific screen and launch GTA VC. So you can be playing GTA SA, switch to a fully functional GTA 3 within SA, and then switch again to play Vice City right inside the GTA 3 sandbox, all while the other games are simultaneously running.

The remarkable mods are just one of thousands that developers have created since the game was first released on PC over 20 years ago in 2005. There are also several Mods for other GTA titles. Older GTA games have seen renewed interest as anticipation builds for GTA 6, which is scheduled to be released on consoles on November 19 after several postponements.

AMD launched the Ryzen 7 7700X3D a couple of days ago to universal acclaim, with reviews praising its consistently excellent gaming performance while critiquing the price point. It's officially priced at $329, which is just shy of what the Ryzen 7 7800X3D goes for these days, rendering the newest X3D chip a bit pointless. However, thanks to a new promo code on Newegg, you can purchase it for as low as $279 right now.

• Get the Ryzen 7 7700X3D on Newegg

Just add the CPU to your cart, and at checkout, the promo code "PKC337" will be automatically applied to give you a $49 discount. That should bring the price down to just $279 before tax. At that price, the Ryzen 7 7700X3D suddenly becomes much more feasible thanks to its improved value proposition. Now, there's at least $120 separating the Ryzen 7 7700X3D from the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, freeing up money you can put toward other upgrades.

For context, both chips are essentially the same; you can look at the Ryzen 7 7700X3D as the binned-down version of the Ryzen 7 7800X3D silicon that couldn't be used for the more expensive SKU. Both are 8-core, 16-thread parts with 104MB of combined cache and 120W TDPs. The Ryzen 7 7700X3D can boost up to 4.5 GHz, while the Ryzen 7 7800X3D has a 5 GHz boost clock. That's enough to just barely edge the Ryzen 7 7700X3D in gaming performance.

On the other hand, if you're looking for an all-rounder that also excels in professional workloads, then Intel's latest Arrow Lake refresh chips are better. Both the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus and the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus are faster at productivity tasks than the Red Team's offerings in the same class. But now that there's a clear price distinction among them, the Ryzen 7 7700X3D makes sense if you're just gaming.

The Ryzen 7 7700X3D is also a Newegg exclusive in North American markets till Q4 2026 so it makes sense that the retailer can discount it this quickly. The Ryzen 7 7800X3D is also on sale, but it has not received any promo codes on the site as of now. So, if you're looking to finally jump on the X3D train and on the AM5 socket, but don't want to spend over $300, this is your chance to grab the Ryzen 7 7700X3D for as low as $279.

TrashBench recently decided to test whether adding more and more fans to what used to be one of the best graphics cards would improve its performance. The result wasn’t significantly faster performance, sadly, even when the thermal headroom was used for overclocking (vs. stock OC). Nevertheless, lessons were learned, and the self-described “punk-rock GPU death lab” was still proud of the temperature reductions, plus the GPU contraption's “awesome” looks and sounds.

The experiment began with an overview of the Asus ROG GeForce RTX 3080, a nice example of the breed. But it was a choice that would perhaps end up making the 11-fan wonder look like less of an accomplishment. TrashBench stated the goal was to add more and more fans, plus duct tape and cable ties, then see whether the reduced temperatures from the boosted airflow result in more frames.

After cleaning and repasting the guinea pig GPU, a baseline was set with the stock cooler. Running 100% fan speed on the Asus ROG resulted in a stable temperature of 63°C (down from 70°C) during stress testing with the Unigine Heaven benchmark.

Replacing the Asus ROG cooling shroud with a trio of Arctic case fans dropped the reported GPU temperatures to a stable 52 degrees Celsius. That’s a decent result. Next, the trio of case fans was swapped for thicker server fans, shaving another 2 degrees Celsius off the GPU temperature, bringing it to 50 degrees Celsius precisely. Duct tape was added to prevent air venting from the sides of the server fans. Oops, the GPU temperature actually stabilized at a warmer 54 degrees Celsius.

So, that was the end of fans-at-the-front modifications. TrashBench next looked at adding a quintet of tiny Arctic server fans that run at up to 15,000 RPM along the top of the card. This jet-engine-soundalike configuration didn’t shift the needle, though. The RTX 3080 still wouldn’t hold below 50 degrees Celsius when tested for any length of time.

Trying backplate fans was the next idea. After another ineffective endeavor, though, TrashBench decided to upgrade the backplate fan to an AiO 360mm cooler. Wow - a new best was recorded with this setup, with the GPU reporting a top stable temperature of just 41 degrees Celsius in Heaven.

Momentarily happy with this low-temperature achievement, the tech tinkerer decided to check whether benchmark runs in Shadow of the Tomb Raider showed any benefit. There were some performance uplifts charted, but only very modest, as you can see from our results table, which even includes cases where the newfound overclocking headroom was taken advantage of.

TrashBench concluded with some positives. “It nearly cut the temperatures in half. It looks awesome. It sounds awesome,” underlined our hardware hacking hero. However, the tech tinkerer kept it real by adding “And it got me 2 FPS. So, not worth it.” In some ways, then, the good quality of the stock triple-fan Asus ROG RTX 3080 graphics card detracted from the 11 extra-fan hijinks.

Fabien Sanglard, who currently works as a Software Engineer at Google, has meticulously detailed every computer he can find in the original Jurassic Park movie, finally letting interested fans and viewers know what computers they need to get if they want to recreate the park.

The complete list and corresponding details are available on Sanglard’s website, which shows a total of six unique working computers, a PDA, two large CRT monitors, and a classic mechanical keyboard. He also covered the software that received screen time, including the meteorology software used in the movie to show the hurricane about to batter the island, which was also used in actual newsrooms at the time.

Most of the equipment listed can actually be found in the Jurassic Park Control Room, and even though most were only found in this particular set, they were all real, and most actually worked.

Sanglard also quoted the film’s special effects coordinator, Cory Faucher, from the book The Making of Jurassic Park. According to Faucher, “Everything in the set was real. We couldn't fake any of it, because audiences are so sophisticated now in their knowledge of computers. All told, $875,000 worth of computer hardware loaned by Silicon Graphics, $350,000 worth from Apple and some $500,000 in additional hardware and software went into equipping both the set and off-stage control room.”

This meant that all the gear the crew and cast were working with cost $1,725,000 back in 1992 — that’s worth more than $4 million in today’s money. The only non-working unit in the set was the Thinking Machines CM-5, which one commenter said was only the front panels of the supercomputer with red LED lights. Most of the software that we see on screen was actually working, except for the scene where Nedry was supposedly talking to his getaway driver while looking at him from a security feed on his Macintosh. Eagle-eyed viewers have long noticed that this wasn’t an actual video feed but a prerecorded video playing in QuickTime; you can even see the mouse cursor hiding the pause button.

It’s nice to see all these high-end computers that actually work the way they were meant to, unlike the nonsense that we see in many Hollywood films and TV shows that have a person (or two) typing gibberish to counter a “hacker” and then stopping the attack by just unplugging the terminal from the power source. So, if you want to see all these vintage machines in action, go ahead and watch Jurassic Park again this weekend. You can also check out this 3D-printed retro PC that looks like it's from the '80s and '90s or this M4-powered iMac G3 if you want to see more classic PCs (but running on modern hardware, this time).

Thanks to the ongoing component crisis caused by the AI boom, it's a particularly difficult time to build a gaming PC. Despite ample supply, most parts are overpriced, forcing consumers to resort to patience or finding deals. We've done the latter and found an enticing AM4 bundle on Newegg consisting of a Ryzen 7 5800X3D, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, and a feature-rich B550 motherboard — all for just $529.99 right now. You'll be saving over $100 in this combo compared to buying these items separately.

• Check out this deal on Newegg

The star of the show is the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, the CPU that kickstarted AMD's gaming dominance, as it was the first X3D chip the company ever made. Newegg is bundling the 10th Anniversary Edition here with a Carbide Ice Pad that you can use in place of thermal paste. The specs remain unchanged; it's an 8-core processor with 16 threads that can boost up to 4.5 GHz. It has a total cache of 100MB, 64MB of which is the extra L3 cache stacked atop the CCD, and a 105W TDP.

Then there's the motherboard, which is an Asus TUF Gaming B550-Plus Wi-Fi II. As the name suggests, it's a full-sized (ATX) AM4 motherboard using the B550 chipset. It features a robust 8+2 phase VRM for power delivery. There are four DDR4 RAM slots onboard, along with two M.2 slots, including one PCIe 4.0-capable. The board has Wi-Fi 6, 2.5 Gbps Ethernet, USB 3.2 Type-A and Type-C, and more in terms of connectivity. You also get 2x ARGB headers.

Finally, we have the RAM, which is by far the hardest component to source for a reasonable price these days. Thankfully, you're getting a solid kit from TeamGroup here: T-Force Delta RGB 16GB (8x2) DDR4-3200 running at CL16. This combination strikes a great balance for AM4, and since X3D chips rely more on their extra 3D V-Cache, even slightly slower RAM doesn't lose performance. Not to mention, this kit has some nice-looking RGB, too.

Newegg is bunding all of these parts together for just $529.99, but they'll cost you a lot more separately. We put the CPU, RAM, and motherboard on PCPartPicker and got a total of $629 before tax, which means you're saving about $100 by choosing this bundle. And it's not like these are bargain-bin components either, you're getting basically the best that DDR4 and AM4 have to offer, but without breaking the bank.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, gaming chair, or CPU Deals pages.

The upcoming Super refresh of the Nvidia RTX 50-series GPU is reportedly on hold due to the high cost of 3GB GDDR7 memory chips. A VideoCardz source confirmed that one board partner already has RTX 50 Super GPUs on hand, but Nvidia has allegedly told the company that the products are on hold because of the price of 3GB GDDR7 memory chips.

This means that the AI GPU giant has already set an internal release date but is reportedly pushing it back because of memory pricing. If the cost of GDDR7 chips becomes too high, then the RTX 50 Super GPUs would either have a selling price that’s way above Nvidia’s targeted MSRP or, if it forces its partners to stick with or remain close to its set prices, GPU board manufacturers wouldn’t just make any units at all, as they’re going to lose money with every sale.

The RTX 50 Super GPUs are rumored to have 3GB GDDR7 chips, which offers 50% more capacity than the 2GB found in current-gen RTX 50-series graphics cards. This would allow the upcoming GPUs to have more memory without needing to increase or change their memory bus configurations.

According to the publication, the cards expected to be released soon include the RTX 5080 Super, RTX 5070 Ti Super, RTX 5070 Super, and RTX 5050 9GB. The first two will each receive 24GB of GDDR7 VRAM with a 256-bit bus width, while the RTX 5070 Super will have 18GB of VRAM with a 192-bit bus width. Unfortunately, these chips cost twice or thrice as much as their 2GB variants, which will likely push the retail price of these cards beyond Nvidia’s envisioned MSRP.

Nvidia used to supply VRAM chips alongside GPU dies to its board partners, but it changed this policy in late 2025 as the memory chip crisis unfolded. Because of this, the companies that complete the final assembly of the graphics cards are forced to source their own memory chips in an increasingly competitive market. SK hynix, one of the big three memory chip manufacturers, even says that 2027 is set to be the “worst year” for the memory shortage and said that the crunch will last until 2030.

Even Nvidia, one of the biggest winners in the AI race, has been affected by the RAMpocalypse, with the company not announcing a new GPU at CES 2026. This is the first time this has happened in five years, with Jensen Huang releasing the 30-series, 40-series, and their respective mid-generation refreshes despite supply chain limitations and several other issues that arose during that period. Its latest AI systems are now more expensive than ever, with memory accounting for 25% of the BOM, as costs have soared by nearly 500%.

It’s still unclear what Nvidia and its board partners plan to do about the memory situation, especially as things don't seem to be improving. While it could delay the launch of the RTX 50 Super, it can only do so for so long, especially if it’s true that its dies are already in the hands of its board partners.

‘The Jensen Jacket: Jensen Huang's Tom Ford Leather Jacket’ achieved a hammer price of $960,000 this weekend. High-end auctioneer Sotheby’s listed the leather garment, which was claimed to have been worn at least once by the Nvidia CEO, with a far lower price estimate of $40,000 to $60,000. Happily, the bountiful proceeds of the auction are going to charity.

Bidders could be quite confident that this Tom Ford jacket was genuinely worn by Jensen Huang at one or more landmark product launches, thanks to the work of the PSA [Professional Sports Authenticator]. Specifically, PSA photomatched this jacket and its unique leather wrinkles to the Hon Hai (Foxconn) Tech Day in Taipei on October 18, 2023, where Huang wore it on stage and met with other execs. Various close-up photos in the sales catalog showed telltale signs that this was/is the real deal. Separately, a signature on the garment was authenticated by James Spence Authentication.

The near $1M hammer price achieved is many multiples of the estimate. In our earlier reporting on the sale, we guessed this would happen for a number of reasons. Firstly, we thought Sotheby’s ‘low’ estimate was intentional to draw in the crowds and stoke excitement. Secondly, we mustn’t neglect the importance of the not-so-secret ingredient - Jensanity. And, right now, the AI boom with Nvidia at its center is still growing apace.

You can buy a brand new Tom Ford SS2023 menswear collection jacket, like the one shown, without any infusion of genuine Jensanity, for around $9,000. However, we can’t begrudge the success of this auction as the proceeds are earmarked for charity. The Sotheby’s page says that the auction was organized by Long Journey Ventures to benefit the Edge Institute, a non-profit that convenes people working at the frontiers of tech, science, culture, and society in pop-up villages (Edge Cities) to live together and experiment towards a brighter future. Fellowships, grants, and residencies for the next generation of young builders will be funded by this bumper lump of cash.

In the modern age, password cracking is an activity that generally begets quite powerful hardware, usually high-powered GPUs. Hashing algorithms have gotten trickier, and brute-forcing them has become computationally expensive. It's only natural, then, that a new software project has come up to port the common hashcat cracking utility to the mighty... Gameboy Advance (GBA).

The gba-hashcat software is the brainchild of security engineer solstICE (Ice), to whom the question of "why" is seemingly answered with "why not." Running on an original GBA, the app can power through SHA256 hashes at 727 h/s. At that rate, the author estimates that one year's worth of gba-hashcat would be equivalent to one second of a modern GPU-accelerated rig.

The GBA's main processor is an ARM7TDMI chip, a 32-bit RISC affair clocked at all of 16.8 MHz. It connected to most of its data buses and memory on a 16-bit bus, though, and the machine only carried 288 KB of RAM, plus 98 KB of VRAM. Most password-cracking software makes use of precomputed tables to help speed the repeated attempts along, but given that standard GBA cartridges are limited to 32 MB in size, all that Ice could include was the ignis-1M (one million) word list that rings in at 8 MB.

The software itself is quite small, given that Ice made good use of the Butano engine, a library that allows developers to easily write GBA games using plain C++ code. The gba-hashcat user interface is quite sparse, showing only an intro screen, progress statistics, and the current password attempt. It's not like you need much more for this application, save perhaps for a "please be patient" message.

In the GitHub commit, Ice calls gba-hashcat "[their] dumbest app of all time." That's quite the statement, but X commenters were quick to request networking support so they could make a cluster of password-cracking Gameboys, an idea that may have merit considering the price of graphics cards these days. At any rate, joke all you want, but for the one really important password retrieval I was once tasked with — recovering access to an Excel payroll sheet — even the original Gameboy would have sufficed. The password was "123".

AGI is back with another drive, this time with one more oriented at budget shoppers who want different capacity options with a heatsink. The AI828 slots in somewhere between the AI818 – a drive that didn’t impress us at all – and the AI858, a drive that was surprisingly good. The AI828 is a “one size fits all” type of drive that can work in a desktop, the PS5 console, or in a laptop if you don’t use the included heatsink. It’s not the best choice for any of these, but beggars can’t be choosers in this market. After all, we have PCIe 3.0 drives returning and entry-level drives like the TeamGroup NV5000 showing up, as well. The AI828 can outdo those and some of our original PCIe 4.0 favorites like the TeamGroup MP44L. Just don’t expect miracles.

AGI AI828 Specifications

The AGI AI828 covers every capacity you could ever hope for: 512GB, 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, and 8TB. Unfortunately, only 1TB and 2TB units were available at the time of review. These were going for $239.99 and $449.99 which is on the expensive side in both cases. Right now, however, this drive comes in and out of stock and can be priced competitively. It’ll probably be difficult to find the 8TB SKU, though.

The drive can hit up to 7,400 / 6,700 MB/s for sequential reads and writes, with no specification for IOPS given. IOPS tend not to be important for this segment – that is, a budget drive – and AGI is likely mixing multiple controllers and flash types based on availability and cost, which makes it less straightforward to try and nail down performance numbers. However, we would expect it to match the Seagate FireCuda X1070, with more than enough performance for this class.

AGI’s warranty covers the drive for the standard five years, with a bit extra on the writes front: the drive can absorb up to 750TB of data writes per TB capacity. The industry standard is 600TB. You probably won’t need this amount of writes, but it can be reassuring nonetheless, especially when dealing with less well-known brands and drives. It also suggests, but doesn’t guarantee, that TLC flash is used on the drive.

AGI AI828 Software and Accessories

AGI does not offer any substantial, direct software support. We recommend using CrystalDiskInfo for monitoring the health status of your drive. For basic benchmarking, CrystalDiskMark is a good choice. If you’re looking to backup data we suggest MultiDrive for windows and either Clonezilla or Rescuezilla for bootable options.

AGI AI828: A Closer Look

This is a single-sided drive that comes with an optional heatsink. This makes it great for the PS5 and many desktops, with the heatsink, and for laptops without. As this is intended to be a budget drive, that’s a bonus, as often there is no heatsink option. It’s best not to have to worry about a drive overheating in any circumstance, and the heatsink is sufficient for the job, but may not always be necessary.

The drive is pretty barebones with a DRAM-less SSD controller, two NAND flash packages, and a power management IC. As there is room for four flash packages, this drive could very well be single-sided at even high capacities. Not having a DRAM package helps. The PMIC is an Active-Semi or Qorvo part similar to what we’ve seen on some WD drives in the past. Power management can be handled this way, with discrete components, or as an embedded feature of the controller, each method with its own trade-offs.

The use of the PMIC makes sense when we look at the alignment of the drive: the controller is in the center. Leaving enough space for four NAND flash packages is ideal for a budget drive, and having the controller in the middle can be beneficial in some ways. We remember the WD Black having this configuration to help with cooling and to make even-length traces to the flash packages. Cooling is also aided as the heatsink can spread heat out to either side, with flash usually running cooler than the controller. This gives the center, hottest area of the drive a lot of heatsink surface area to dissipate heat before thermal equilibrium is attained.

As for traces, SSD controllers generally have to contend with timing issues to make sure all the flash operates in tandem, and even small differences can impact latency and, ultimately, drive efficiency. While we don’t think you should buy a drive based on this arrangement, it shows attention to detail on AGI’s part, even though that’s probably giving them too much credit with this being focused on the lowest possible BOM cost.

The flash is not directly identifiable through decoding or through utility use. We suspect the flash can vary on this drive, anyway, especially at different capacities. Examples we’ve seen have used TLC flash, and that matches the endurance rating of the drive. On the other hand, the Seagate X1070 with the same controller and TLC levels of TBW is using Micron’s 232-Layer QLC flash. Looking at the performance characteristics of the drive as a whole, we’re limited by the controller and relatively small capacities on hand. Usually, you will have TLC flash with smaller SKUs as it offers higher baseline performance, as historically, QLC flash dies have been denser, which means fewer dies. However, in this era of 1Tb dies for both TLC and QLC, this is less of a certainty.

The flash that can be paired with this drive is somewhat limited to newer generations due to the required I/O speed, but there is still enough variance – especially if you take flash quality into consideration – that nothing is guaranteed. This isn’t particular to this drive, especially in the current market where flash supply is limited. Still, we can be reasonably certain that it won’t be using “bad” flash, which puts it a cut above lower-end drives that are once again becoming common.

MORE: Best SSDs

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Comparison Products

We’re pulling no punches. The AGI AI828 is going up against drives that can match or outclass it and are generally of a higher capacity. This puts the drive at a disadvantage, but we don’t really think it belongs in a lower class, either. Adjust your expectations accordingly.

The drive is up against some of the best DRAM-less PCIe 4.0 drives we’ve tested, with both TLC and QLC flash. These include the Crucial P310 with QLC, the Biwin Black Opal NV7400, the Addlink A93, the Inland TN470, and the WD Black SN7100 with TLC. The last one is using exceptional BiCS8 TLC, which has very low latency and very high power efficiency.

Drives that may be considered a step or half step lower include the Klevv CRAS C925 with different TLC flash, the Biwin NV7200 with QLC, and the Kingson NV3 with variable hardware. The AI828 is more of a match with these drives, but they are all tested at 2TB versus the 512GB and 1TB SKUs of the AI828. With fewer flash dies, the AI828 is at a disadvantage in some sequential workloads.

Trace Testing — 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities, including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams. Future gaming benchmarks will be DirectStorage-inclusive, and an evaluation for future-proofing is included where applicable.

The AI828 is at the bottom of the chart, but it's not as bad as it could be. Poor performance at 512GB is to be expected – remember that most of the comparison drives are 2TB or larger. Such a low capacity for the AI828 does not allow for optimal use of newer, denser flash. Even at 1TB, things are stretched a bit.

We recorded 53µs for latency in 3DMark for the 2TB Seagate X1070, which means the AI828 1TB’s result here is actually not that bad. 50µs is far from a good score, but it's good enough for gaming. 512GB probably isn’t enough space for a gaming drive, but the AI828’s other capacities would work. This is not our first choice for a gaming drive unless it’s the least expensive, but your experience in general will not suffer from using it.

Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is an industry standard trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices. The results are particularly useful when analyzing drives for their use as primary/boot storage devices and in work environments.

Things are significantly better in PCMark 10, which is not entirely surprising, as the flash compatible with this controller is likely to be newer. We want to point out that this doesn’t necessarily help us discern the flash in use. QLC flash, for its part, can have surprisingly good read performance because, for one, you can end up reading hot data from the pSLC cache, and two, QLC tends to be optimized for 4KB reads to compensate for the flash’s slower native speed. So the flash type is not always made clear through synthetic tests.

We consider ~45µs to be an ideal target for drive responsiveness, and both capacities of the drive hit this. We should add that 44µs is the same score we got on the 2TB X1070, so we see nothing unusual here. As always, a drive with BiCS8 TLC or QLC flash – that would be the Black SN7100 here – is optimal for the very lowest 4KB read latency. However, the AI828 is quite fast enough to serve as a primary drive or as the only drive in your system.

Console Testing — PlayStation 5 Transfers

The PlayStation 5 is capable of taking one additional PCIe 4.0 or faster SSD for extra game storage. While any 4.0 drive will technically work, Sony recommends drives that can deliver at least 5,500 MB/s of sequential read bandwidth for optimal performance. Based on our extensive testing, PCIe 5.0 SSDs don’t bring much to the table and generally shouldn’t be used in the PS5, especially as they may require additional cooling. Check our Best PS5 SSDs article for more information.

Our testing utilizes the PS5’s internal storage test and manual read/write tests with over 192GB of data, both from and to the internal storage. Throttling is prevented where possible to see how each drive operates under ideal conditions. While game load times should not deviate much from drive to drive, our results can indicate which drives may be more responsive in long-term use.

Our main PS5 tests show no problems with the PS5. These would be the read test and the game transfer test from the M.2 SSD. The problem comes with the write test – game transfer test to M.2 SSD – where clearly the 512GB drive is not writing or not writing fully to the pSLC cache. Generally, this is not a problem in our testing because pSLC caches are large enough to handle even larger writes, plus drives have sufficient idle time to free up the cache. However, the cache size varies with capacity, so it is smaller at 512GB, and for drives using denser flash, especially that is going to be an issue.

This is not likely to be a real-world problem as a drive, and especially a PS5 drive, probably won’t be taxed this hard, and even if it is, the average speed here is still largely sufficient. This just demonstrates why smaller drives have gone away as the move to denser flash makes performance less consistent – even a 512GB drive lacks sufficient dies for optimal parallelization. In fact, it’s just one die per channel with 1Tb dies. On the other hand, SSD prices scale with flash, especially with the price hikes, which means lower-capacity drives are making a return. Unfortunately, that just doesn’t work well at this performance level. So you are left in a situation where you either have to make do with a much slower drive or spend enough money to get 1TB or more to make a faster drive worthwhile.

Transfer Rates — DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom 50GB dataset. We write 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to the test drive, then make a copy of that data to a new folder, and follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file. This is a real-world type workload that fits into the cache of most drives.

The AGI reads data fine, but struggles a bit during write workloads. This impacts copy performance, as writes are more limited than reads. Write performance can be impacted by the size of the pSLC cache, but if that is not too small, then it is impacted by the amount of parallelization the drive achieves. Smaller drives have fewer flash dies, and therefore less parallelization, and as a result write more slowly, which in turn reduces copy performance. This means the 512GB AI828 struggles to match the larger drives in this list, although, actually, its performance is not terrible for a drive of its size.

When you double the number of dies, you can reach up to double the speed, and with half the dies, you might drop to half the speed. The 512GB SKU here manages to maintain 1.1 GB/s, which, for this type of workload, isn’t world-endingly bad.

The 1TB SKU also struggles against the larger drives. The only other 1TB drive, the TN470, is near the bottom of the list. The budget NV3 is about as fast as the 1TB AI828. So, we can be somewhat happy with the AI828’s result. We’d figure that with at least a slower controller, the AI828 is going to fall behind the TN470. That doesn’t change the fact that this drive should be at a discount as a result. We are merely saying that the performance here is not unexpected, although things should be better at 2TB.

Synthetic Testing — ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes and at different queue depths for both sequential and random workloads.

Fundamentally, we don’t see any issues with the AI828 in ATTO. The dips for 1KiB and 2KiB writes, for example, have little to no impact on real-world performance. This is not only because you mostly feel the reads with consumer workloads, but because writes are preferably combined into full 16KiB pages, and typically your logical page will be at 4KiB. Likewise, the dip for larger writes with the smaller 512GB SKU is expected because you lack sufficient dies for parallelization. This could be an issue if you intend to write or store larger files to the drive, but then a 512GB drive is probably not ideal. One exception might be if it’s used externally, in which case picking a heatsinked drive is odd, but even if that weren’t the case, the typical NVMe to USB enclosure is rated for a meager 10Gbps, anyway.

Read performance is more problematic. The 512GB SKU still has issues with larger I/O for the reason mentioned, although this begins at a smaller size. You will likely have files or blocks at 128 KiB or larger, and your performance may suffer from going with a smaller drive. The 1TB drive is better off except at 2MiB, where we have a dip. We’ve in the past hypothesized this could be a flash alignment issue, which would suggest this drive uses six-plane flash. With the 2,400 MT/s requirement here, that would mean 232-Layer YMTC or Micron TLC.

In CDM, we can move right over to sequential reads and writes to get a fuller idea of performance. For example, both capacities are fine with sufficient queue depth, but at queue depth 1 – which is a realistic workload for file transfers – the smaller 512GB model struggles. It’s still within striking distance of the 2TB NV3, which means it’s actually pretty good for a drive of its size. The 1TB drive has no issues at all. We see something similar with sequential writes, except that the 512GB SKU sees no performance improvement with queue depth. It simply doesn’t have enough flash to eke out more than ~4.1 GB/s.

With random 4KB operations, though, the amount of dies won’t matter at QD1. This is because you’re only hitting one die at any given time. As a result, both capacities have the same latency for both reads and writes. This isn’t always the case, as sometimes a large-capacity model might have more overhead, or you may see different hardware combinations at some capacities. However, in this case, both drives are dead even. While the 4KB write latency is fine, the 4KB read latency is not great. However, this is actually better than the X1070’s 55.44µs we got at 2TB and is better than any of the 5 GB/s budget, PCIe 4.0 SSDs we’ve tested.

Again, we consider ~45µs to be excellent, with ~50µs being a second dividing point. The AI828 is close enough to put it above last-generation drives, but it’s slow enough to be relegated to game duty. The exception would be if you really only need 512GB and have to save money any way you can. In that case, this drive is passable, as you might otherwise be looking at older PCIe 4.0 or even PCIe 3.0 drives. This one still feels more snappy than those. At higher capacities and on a tight budget, if you can find the drive at the right price, it could also work, but would not be our first choice.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of pseudo-SLC (single-bit) programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC (three-bit) or QLC (four-bit) flash. Performance can suffer even more if the drive is forced to fold, the process of migrating data out of the cache in order to free up space for further incoming data.

We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds. This process shows the performance of the drive in various states including the steady state write performance.

The AI828’s first, fastest mode in pSLC writes at ~6.4 GB/s for 51 seconds with a 328GB cache on the 1TB SKU. Given that this is almost one-third of the full capacity, we’re dealing with TLC flash. This is a large cache, which means the drive will struggle once it’s depleted. That is the case with the 1TB drive, averaging below 200 MB/s in the post-cache mode. This is very slow, HDD slow, and even QLC flash slow, but that is not completely unexpected. A modern 1TB drive does not have enough dies to hit a higher speed, and if the cache is very large, as is the case here, the trade-off is slow performance outside the cache. The good news is that the large cache hides this very well in 99% of real-world cases.

The 512GB SKU has even fewer dies, too few to really manage sustained writes very well. It’s better in a read-heavy role, but it's too small for large media. In many cases, you’re better off with an HDD in that case. If, however, you need a smaller option for a primary drive in, say, an older machine, this could do the trick. Older machines benefit greatly from going to an SSD – especially an NVMe SSD – and will usually be read-heavy or even read-exclusive. If you are intending to get a small, 512GB caching drive, this is certainly not the way to go.

We must admit that, in our testing, the smaller SKUs’ cache size is tiny. This is highly unusual and points to AGI using a static cache in that circumstance. Such a small cache means the drive can rebound better, even with half the interleaving or parallelization of the 1TB drive, so it scores higher in steady state write performance testing. The use of static pSLC makes sense here to improve post-cache performance and potentially also to improve flash endurance. Static pSLC can lead to lower effective write amplification if you’re not doing big writes, and it is still ample enough to cache potentially damaging random writes. So, it’s possible AGI is making the best of a bad situation.

Power Consumption and Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade, as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre stock storage in terms of capacity and performance. Desktops are often more performance-oriented with less support for power-saving features, so we show the worst-case scenario for idle.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt, or efficiency, is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

For temperature recording, we currently poll the drive’s primary composite sensor during testing with a ~22°C ambient. Our testing is rigorous enough to heat the drive to a realistic ceiling temperature, but real-world temperatures will vary due to the environment and workload factors.

Power efficiency is rough on the AI828. We also saw this with the X1070, so it must be chalked up to the controller. We suspect it’s because our workload is hard on the drive, and this controller is not as strong. You will likely not have issues with everyday, read-heavy activities. Also, our idle testing is for desktops, and a laptop with proper power-saving states will not be in as bad a shape. That’s all to say that we don’t think these results preclude the drive’s use in a laptop because, frankly, this drive isn’t fast enough to be an issue in most cases. We might recommend a different drive like the Black SN7100 if you're aiming at power efficiency or want/need a cool-running option, though.

Speaking of the heatsink, it kept both drives at a maximum temperature of 54°C. This means plenty of headroom, and the drive should be suitable for any machine that can take it. It won’t overheat. That’s a bonus for PS5 usage because the thermal envelope can be tighter.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications, such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus, disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

AGI AI828 Bottom Line

The AGI AI828, like the Seagate X1070, is not a great drive, but it’s also not one to dismiss. Memory prices have risen greatly within the last year, which impacts SSD prices through NAND flash costs and, sometimes, DRAM costs as well. An SSD’s cost is derived almost entirely from the flash, in fact. We’ve seen budget drives return in force, and we’re seeing low-end PCIe 4.0 and even PCIe 3.0 drives coming back.

This is also a reality for volatile memory markets – DDR4 is coming back, there was a threat that included even DDR3, and, believe it or not, DDR2 prices are increasing as well – with no end in sight. To put it simply, the AI828 would not have gotten far a year or so ago, but in the current climate, it’s not too bad. We feel that Seagate did a better job of presenting and supporting its drive, and, simultaneously, we feel like AGI has made improvements in its SSDs, so our score falls somewhere in between.

Let’s start with the good. AGI offers a wide capacity range for the drive, which is good for people who need 512GB or, theoretically, 8TB at a lower price. We think 8TB luxury buyers might opt for a faster drive like the Sandisk Optimus GX Pro 8100, WD Black SN8100, or Samsung 9100 Pro, or frankly, the less-expensive WD Black SN850X. The lower-end 512GB version of the AI828 perhaps makes more sense, but that’s one area where older technology might make sense. Newer flash is more dense and so really prefers higher capacities. On the other hand, the AI828 is more responsive than older drives, which is probably more important from a user experience perspective. So, despite some of the bad results, the fact that it’s using newer hardware is a bonus.

The drive also comes with a heatsink and runs pretty cool. It should be great for a normal desktop or in a PS5. It’s not very efficient, but that generally doesn’t matter in these two scenarios. Certainly not in most desktops, although there are exceptions. If you do have proper power-saving, it should be fine, though. The drive is designed to pull 5.5W or less at peak, which frankly isn’t concerning. So, we’re willing to give it a pass on the power side, although there are better options for laptops. One thing we have to mention again is that smaller SKUs don’t perform as well, and, since we’re testing at 512GB and 1TB today, the AI828 looks worse than it is. Most of the competition is sitting at 2TB because that was the sweet spot back when prices were sane.

It’s still hard to love the performance on this one. Like the X1070, which uses QLC flash, things are inconsistent across our benchmarks with relatively poor results on the whole. We opted not to put this one up against older or slower drives, even though some of those are making a comeback. The fact is, this drive will beat PCIe 3.0 and many lower-end PCIe 4.0 options and really shouldn’t be compared to those. You’re probably better off going with its newer tech unless budget is your only priority. Against other PCIe 4.0 drives in this range, however, even adjusting for capacity, it’s going to struggle. This drive has to be priced inexpensively to make sense, and if it is, we can recommend it for lighter duty.

MORE: Best SSDs

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There’s a new “open to everyone” floppy disk-size game development competition with cash prizes for the best three submissions. You’ve read that right: the freshly prepared game must be able to squeeze onto a single HD floppy disk- that’s just 1.44MB. Cash prizes look massive, but as the competition is hosted by the Korean games culture site 2P_Game_Arcade, the currency you see is Korean Won, meaning the ₩1.14 million prize pool is only about $750. Remember, it’s the taking part that counts.

There are few restrictions on the new, original game that you submit as an entry beyond the defining floppy disk capacity. All participants must ensure that the games and any resource files, such as game engines and libraries, fit within these severe (for 2026) confines. Also, games that rely on a browser or stream any data aren’t eligible. The whole purpose of the contest is for devs to stretch their skills and ideas within the 1.44MB shackles.

However, your choice of technology such as game engines, development tools, programming languages, and so on, is completely open. Of course, all entrants must also be the legal owners or licensors of the images, audio, and other IP resources used in the game.

2P_Game_Arcade reckons its competition is a good chance for participants to rethink the essence of enjoyment in gaming. It is looking forward to a broad range of entrants from pros, indie creators, and students alike. Entries are submitted via the website, and the competition closes on September 4 at 23:39 Korean time.

In 2018, itch.io ran a similar developer competition dubbed the FloppyJam.

Demoscene developer traditions live on

Older readers who cut their teeth on 8- and 16-bit home computers before PCs stole the show will probably be familiar with the long history of “size competitions” at demoscene coder meetings. The 2P_Game_Arcade is just an extension of this kind of coding philosophy with a fun 1.44MB limit and a complete self-contained game as the goal.

In the tradition of these demoscene competitions, with size limits imposed all the way down to a minuscule few bytes, non-interactive demos were usually the most popular entrants. However, in the long history of such competitions, games have sometimes been the fruits of the skilled coders’ labors.

In terms of more traditional demo releases, my mind was recently boggled by “16 bytes of x86 real-mode DOS assembly” released at the Outline Demoparty in May 2026. Then there was the port of Snake that was only 56 bytes and fit in a QR code. For some more practical size-skillz strutting, take a look at Dave W. Plummer’s RetroPad, a “full-feature-parity version of Notepad from XP” in just 2,749 bytes.

A micro-drone designed to locate and eradicate mosquitoes has passed an important milestone. Tornyol Systems shared a video where the eponymous autonomous drone chalked up its first live air-to-air kill. For some reason (perhaps demonstration visibility), the 40g (1.4 ounce) drone’s first confirmed kill on video features a moth. Tornyol boldly claims that the demo shows a significant stride has been made “towards completely eradicating mosquitoes.”

Tornyol Systems co-founder Alex Toussaint shared the above Tweet, congratulating the engineering team that has worked alongside him on the project. On the company website, there is a mosquito-hostile manifesto laid out, which provides insight into the company’s primary drone development goal.

“Mosquitoes are one of humanity's oldest and worst enemies. They kill more than 700,000 people each year — more than all current wars,” according to the firm’s mission statement. “More than 700 million people contract a mosquito-borne disease each year. They impact many countries, including the West, with thousands of cases of West Nile Virus in the US alone.” It aims to use technology, including this “small, inexpensive, and yet very fast” micro-drone, to “completely eradicate mosquitoes from areas where humans live.”

The underlying motivation of Tornyol Systems first became apparent back at Hackaday Supercon 2024 when Toussaint shared a presentation about How to Detect (and Kill) Mosquitoes With Off-the-Shelf Electronics.

Tornyol's technology

Since those initial presentations, it looks like the tech has been significantly refined and miniaturized. Currently, the platform is dependent on the LeSonar2 phased array sonar base station with 380 smartphone microphones and an Artix-7 FPGA to map the world in 3D.

This feeds the drone enough information to measure 0.1 mm movements and identify mosquitoes through their unique wingbeat signature. The micro-drone is sent commands by a PC, which also leverages “car park assist sensors, and some clever DSP” to seek and kill mozzies up to 8m (~26 feet) away.

We’ve previously reported on ground-based AI-enhanced mosquito zappers, but this is the first time we’ve seen an air-to-air solution. Tornyol says that it is rolling out deployment on embedded hardware “in the next few weeks.” I guess that's removing the need for a PC.

U.S. residents interested in purchasing an autonomous Tornyol drone and base station are being asked to stump up a refundable $100 deposit. Then, there are two payment plans available. Choose a $50-a-month subscription or an “own it forever” $1,100 one-time fee.

ASML is reportedly considering increasing prices of its existing Low-NA EUV lithography tools. The potential price hikes have already upset TSMC, ASML's largest client, reports The Information. But can ASML rapidly raise the prices of the tools it sells to chipmakers? Price adjustments are not going to happen overnight, said Roger Dassen, CFO of ASML, said during the company's quarterly earnings call. But there is one thing to remember about ASML's price hikes: They are going to affect the entire semiconductor industry.

"When it comes to Low-NA [EUV tools] pricing, of course, you know that we keep on increasing the productivity of the Low-NA tool, [which] gives us a pretty strong runway for potential price improvements going forward," said Roger Dassen, chief financial officer of ASML, during the company's quarterly earnings call. […] Given the long order lead times that we have, that does not translate into pricing effects tomorrow."

ASML just reported record results for its second quarter of 2026, with total net sales of €9.326 billion ($10.67 billion) and net income of €2.918 billion ($3.338 billion). The company now expects net sales between €43 billion ($49.2 billion) and €45 billion ($51.5 billion) in 2026, a range that comfortably exceeds its own guidance and the expectations of industry analysts.

More complex, more expensive

ASML has generally increased the average selling price of EUV scanners over successive generations as they increase in complexity and productivity, so the idea of higher pricing of EUV tools is not particularly new. The company calls the concept of 'value-based pricing' and gradually increases its average selling price (ASP) based on the value that its tools provide to its operators.

Early ASML Twinscan NXE systems were commonly discussed in the roughly €100 million–€120 million ($115 million-$137 million) range, while later production models such as the NXE:3400C and NXE:3600D moved toward roughly €140 million–€170 million ($160 million-$195 million). The latest NXE:3800E is climbing even further. High-NA EXE systems represent another major step up, at more than €350 million ($400 million) per machine according to industry reports.

Meanwhile, both productivity and performance of ASML's Twinscan NXE systems have been steadily increasing: While the NXE:3400C and NXE:3600D can process 160 – 170 wafers per hour (WPH) and feature a matched machine overlay (MMO) of ≤ 1.1nm, the NXE:3800E and NXE:3800F increase productivity to 220 WPH and 260 WPH, respectively, while increasing MMO to 0.9nm. With the NXE:4200G and NXE:4200H (which will likely feature an all-new light source), we are looking at productivity beyond 300 WPH and MMO of ≤0.8nm - ≤0.7nm.

ASML makes no secret that more advanced EUV lithography tools carry a higher average selling price than their predecessors.

"You should also recognize that the tool mix that we are going to ship next year is a different tool mix from the tool mix that we shipped this year," Dassen said. "When it comes to EUV in particular, the tool mix that we are going to ship next year will be EXE: 3800E and EXE:3800F [tools], while this year it is a combination of EXE:3600D and EXE:3800E [systems]."

ASML's value-based pricing logic is essentially: if an upgraded Low-NA machine processes more wafers and therefore generates more economic value for a fab, ASML can capture part of that additional value through a higher system price. This is what ASML has been doing for some time. That said, the important nuance in Dassen's statement is that he appears to be discussing further price increases for Low-NA EUV tools.

ASML's EUV dominance

ASML is the only supplier of EUV lithography systems on the planet; every single chipmaker must comeq to the company to get one of these scanners, so the company sells these machines years in advance. This year, the company expects to have the capacity to build 65 EUV tools and intends to increase capacity by 30% next year to around 84 – 85 EUV systems. In 2028, ASML plans to produce 110 EUV scanners.

"For 2027, we are now close to being fully covered with orders for Low-NA EUV, and we are planning to increase our Low-NA EUV capacity by around 30%," Dassen said. "Looking ahead to 2028, we have already received a significant number of Low-NA EUV orders. Strong demand forecasts from our customers have led us to investigate a further 30% capacity increase for that year."

Given the strong demand for ASML's tools, the company is in a position to increase prices, at least according to the rules of the free market. As always, comments on pricing are made in opaque corporate language, so one can make a lot out of it, or nothing at all.

"Clearly, the environment that we live in today, with the [substantial] value that our products bring to customer, of course, gives us flexibility on pricing, more so than what you would have seen in the past," Dassen said. "Of course, we are executing on that as well."

However, it is not that easy for ASML to just hike prices overnight, and there are important things to note. When ASML gets an order, and that order enters the reported backlog (which totaled €38.8 billion as of late Q4 2025), it already carries a sales value (with a possibility of inflation adjustments), so there is necessarily an agreed or otherwise contractually determined price basis attached to it.

This makes Dassen's comments particularly interesting. If ASML is already close to fully booked for 2027 Low-NA EUV capacity and has received a significant number of Low-NA orders for 2028, then much of that capacity is already represented by customer orders with associated sales values. As a result, unless ASML can subsequently renegotiate the fixed price before delivery, it cannot hike prices on tools that it intends to ship in 2027 and part of 2028. This essentially means that ASML could only book new orders that it intends to ship in 2028 (presumably for the second half of the year) and onwards at higher prices. However, ASML has not confirmed this directly.

ASML's next-generation NXE:4200G is on track to arrive in 2029. That scanner is poised to be more expensive than the NXE:3800E/NXE:3800F anyway, so the company's Low-NA EUV ASPs will inevitably get a bump that year. Of course, ASML is set to continue shipping its EXE:3800-series after 2029. The big question is whether the company will adjust the prices of these units that will ship starting in 2028 or not.

We do not know the answer to this question, unfortunately. But during the conference call, ASML's financial chief implied that the company would like to get 'rewards' from its customers not only for improved productivity, but also for other improvements of its tools, which means that ASML will stick to its value-based pricing model, but may adjust the pricing for the EXE:3800 model.

"We have always been able to show customers not just productivity upgrades, but also the value from better imaging, the value of better overlay, etc.," Dassen said. [But] you got this very strong correlation between throughput improvements and ASP. That is just the way things panned out, which, put in another way, customers were paying for the productivity upgrade, and the value that we gave them for free was the value associated with, let us say, overlay improvement, imaging quality […]. In the current environment, with the value that we bring, we are also having conversations with customers on how we get rewarded for that additional value."

TSMC's backlash against the price hikes

As ASML will likely not be able to hike prices on EUV tools that have already been pre-ordered and which are set to be delivered in the course of the next two years, existing chipmakers like TSMC will not feel the effects of the price increase at least over the next 24 months. Of course, if ASML adjusts prices of its EXE:3800-series scanners due to ship in 2028 – 2028, nobody is going to be happy. And yet, TSMC seems to be so upset that the sentiment has made it to the press. There are several reasons behind the reported backlash, but the major one seems to be strategic.

For years, TSMC has said that ASML's High-NA EUV lithography tools were too expensive, and that the company's engineers can continue innovating using Low-NA EUV systems. Also, adopting all-new High-NA EUV scanners will not be an easy undertaking in general, as the transition also requires new photoresists, photomasks, pellicles, metrology equipment, design rules, computational lithography flows, and numerous other supporting technologies and process innovations.

TSMC's mid-term expansion strategy, as well as a leading-edge roadmap through 2030, has been built around extracting more performance and resolution from conventional Low-NA EUV scanners using techniques such as improved masks, computational lithography, and multi-patterning where necessary. If ASML proceeds with its price hikes for Low-NA EUV tools, this can seriously hit one of the key economic foundations of TSMC's strategy.

TSMC's intention to avoid the usage of High-NA EUV scanners until at least 10A-class (1nm) process technology has an important economic advantage. A High-NA EUV system costs more than €350 million, whereas Low-NA systems are substantially cheaper. As a result, TSMC can choose its own trade-off between additional process steps and buying much more expensive lithography equipment. In contrast, Intel, which is set to adopt High-NA EUV lithography for its 14A fabrication process, has much less flexibility: If a particular process technology is designed around High-NA EUV layers, these extremely expensive scanners, along with other ingredients, become part of the manufacturing flow and affect wafer pricing.

One of the reasons TSMC would like to extend usage of Low-NA EUV systems is that it already has the world's largest install base of these tools, as well as mature processes, established flows, and plenty of innovations that enable it to stay ahead of the competition. However, if ASML systematically ties productivity improvements of each new Low-NA EUV generation to higher prices, the cost advantage of staying with Low-NA EUV gradually narrows, which greatly undermines TSMC's strategy.

There are several other reasons for TSMC to be particularly unhappy with ASML. Firstly, TSMC needs an enormous number of tools for its upcoming fabs in Taiwan, the U.S., and Japan. All of the company's leading-edge process technologies through 2029 rely on Low-NA EUV production tools. Even a relatively modest percentage increase applied to dozens of Low-NA EUV scanners can add billions of dollars to the company's capital expenditure (CapEx).

Secondly, ASML is essentially arguing that it deserves a share of its customers' improved economics. From TSMC's perspective, potential price adjustments are very different from charging more because a new scanner is materially more expensive to manufacture. ASML is effectively saying: 'Your fabs are more profitable, and our tools are more productive, therefore we want a piece of that.'

Thirdly, pricing negotiated today determines pricing and TSMC's economy for years to come. Now that ASML is sold out for 2027 and a significant part of 2028, it is negotiating terms for the second half of 2028 and onwards. Accepting a substantial increase now will inevitably carry through to dozens or hundreds of future Low-NA EUV systems, which directly affects TSMC's economics.

TSMC's A14 (1.4nm-class) fabrication process has made rapid progress in the last three months and is well ahead of N2 at the same stage of development, according to the company's update provided at its earnings call this week. The technology also faces strong customer interest and engagement across both smartphone and AI/HPC applications.

"A14 technology development is on track and progressing well. Internal product-like vehicle demonstrated close to 90% device performance and close to 90% 256Mb SRAM yield," said C.C. Wei, chief executive of TSMC, during the earnings call with analysts and investors.

A14 — which is expected to enter mass production in 2H 2028 — is making rapid progress in terms of performance and yield improvements. This April, the company disclosed that the production node achieved >85% target transistor performance and >80% 256Mb SRAM yield. Roughly three months later, both figures are approaching 90%, which suggests a gain of around 5% in device performance and nearly 10% in SRAM yield.

For comparison, TSMC's N2 demonstrated more than 80% of its target device performance and over 50% yield on a 256Mb SRAM test chip in April 2023. By April 2024, the process had advanced to more than 90% of its target device performance and over 80% SRAM yield. While development trajectories are not directly comparable, the figures suggest that A14 is maturing considerably faster than N2 did at a similar stage of development.

The very rapid progress of A14 compared to the relatively slow maturation of N2 at similar stages of development can probably be attributed, at least in part, to TSMC's growing experience with gate-all-around (GAA) nanosheet transistors. Back in 2023, the company barely had enough experience with the production of gate-all-around (GAA) nanosheet transistors, as N2 is its first process technology to adopt such a structure. By contrast, A14 relies on TSMC's 2nd Generation of GAA devices, so it can probably benefit from the transistor-design improvements, process refinements, and manufacturing expertise accumulated during the development and ramp of N2.

It appears TSMC has likely eliminated many of the yield limiters with A14 and N2, though keep in mind that a high 256Mb SRAM yield merely indicates low enough defect density and good process uniformity across a highly repetitive test structure, but it is not directly representative of functional or parametric yield of a commercial processor.

Nonetheless, the close to 90% device performance and close to 90% 256Mb SRAM yield about 2.5 years away from expected mass production start put TSMC's A14 progress well ahead of N2. Such progress can potentially enable TSMC to start high-volume manufacturing (HVM) using A14 ahead of schedule, provided that customer designs are ready, or initiate HVM with better-than-usual functional and parametric yields.

Speaking of customer design readiness, Wei indicated that clients strive to tape-out their A14 designs ahead of schedule, which is a good sign. It is also interesting to note that despite the fact that A14 lacks Super Power Rail backside power delivery (A12 will gain SPR in 2H 2019), it is set to be adopted not only by client processors, but also by AI/HPC applications.

"We are observing a strong level of customer interest and engagement on both smartphone and HPC/AI applications, and customer new tap-out activity is ongoing and ahead of schedule," Wei said.

A14 is TSMC's next-generation process technology that combines the company's 2nd Generation GAA nanosheet transistors with a new standard-cell architecture to improve performance, power efficiency, and transistor density. Compared with N2, TSMC expects A14 to deliver a 10% – 15% performance uplift at the same power and transistor count, or reduce power consumption by 25%–30% at the same frequency and complexity. The node is also projected to increase transistor density by around 20% for mixed designs and by 23% for logic.

Federal agents arrested 21-year-old Zyaire Dontaevious Zamarion Wilkins of North Lauderdale, Florida, on Tuesday and charged him with conspiracy to obtain information by computer for private financial gain, according to a 15-page criminal complaint first reported by WPLG Local 10. The FBI alleges Wilkins helped run an operation that embedded malware in eight video games, infected around 8,000 devices, and stole at least $220,000 from roughly 80 cryptocurrency wallets between May 2024 and February 2026. Investigators put a name to the scheme by following stolen Bitcoin to more than 150 gift cards, most of them spent on Uber Eats.

The complaint identifies the distribution channel only as a "popular digital distribution software company," but the games it lists, including BlockBlasters, Dashverse, Lunara, and PirateFi, match the titles named when the FBI began seeking victims of infected Steam games in March. The case is being prosecuted in Seattle federal court, near Valve's headquarters in Bellevue, Washington, and Wilkins' arrest is the first publicly reported in the investigation.

Wilkins allegedly financed and marketed the malware rather than writing it, with Local 10 reporting that agents had already searched the home of the unidentified developer who built the programs, and that Signal chats seized there tied Wilkins, operating under the handle Sibel.eth, to a $10,000 purchase of a remote access trojan and to discussions about tricking victims into approving transactions that emptied their wallets. That developer isn't named in the complaint and doesn't appear to have been charged.

The conspirators promoted the games on Discord, Telegram, X, and LinkedIn, and used bots to find users with large cryptocurrency holdings and message them directly, according to the complaint. Roughly 80 wallets were drained from 8,000 infections, a hit rate of about 1% consistent with that targeted approach. ZachXBT and vx-underground estimated BlockBlasters alone took more than $150,000 from between 261 and 478 victims, including $32,000 in donated cancer treatment funds taken from a Twitch streamer in September 2025.

Payments from the scheme's Bitcoin wallet went to Bitrefill, a gift card service, where the 150-plus cards were purchased, agents said. A subpoena to Uber matched the cards to an account with deliveries at Wilkins' family home and his addresses at the University of West Florida. When agents searched the North Lauderdale house a week before the arrest, they seized several devices and three cryptocurrency wallet seed phrases, one belonging to a Monero wallet. Wilkins' transaction history showed $382,000 in cryptocurrency sent or received, per the complaint.

Wilkins faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted and was scheduled to appear in Fort Lauderdale federal court on July 15. Valve, whose storefront has seen a steady run of malware incidents over the past two years, including the Chemia Early Access game that shipped with three malware strains, hadn't responded to Local 10's request for comment as of publication.

It may be the peak of summer right now, but it's never too early to start thinking about the new school year or setting off for college. Grab your essentials now before the rush, and don't risk losing out on the best back-to-school deals. This time of year is great for finding deals on laptops, monitors, power banks, and more. Also, if you are already registered with a student ID, you can often grab the best deals at retailers that offer student discounts. Companies like Dell and Samsung often have some amazing student offers to take advantage of.

• $400 off MacBooks at Best Buy
• $599 Dell XPS 13 Laptop for students
• Back to School tech deals at Amazon

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, Gaming Chair, Best Wi-Fi Routers, Best Motherboard, or CPU Deals pages.

Also, you can join the Tom's Hardware deals Discord for up-to-the-minute hardware deals.

The CEO of GameStop — one of the world's largest video game retailers — has said that Sony’s decision to halt the production of physical game discs in 2028 is “totally irrelevant” to the company's business. Speaking to BloombergTech in an interview on Thursday, July 16, Ryan Cohen made the comments while responding to questions on how console makers’ going disc-less might affect GameStop amid the company's controversial bid to buy eBay.

When asked, “If the hardware makers are reportedly moving to disc-less on the console side, future game launches are digital only, where does that fit in for the business plan?” Cohen responded, “It doesn’t matter at all. Software, it mattered in the past. Software today makes up less than 12% of the business, and collectables makes up over half the business. So, it’s totally, totally irrelevant.”

Cohen's characterization doesn't exactly match GameStop's own filings, but the underlying trend does. In fiscal year 2025, the company reported total net sales of $3.63 billion. At $729.3 million, Software — which includes physical game discs, game cartridges, and digital download codes by GameStop’s classification — accounted for 20.1% of the total, the lowest among the company's product categories. Collectibles brought in $1.06 billion at 29.2 percent, while hardware and accessories — including new and pre-owned hardware, accessories, hardware bundles, interactive figures, strategy guides, and mobile/consumer electronics — remained the largest single line at $1.84 billion, or 50.7 percent.

The year-on-year growth figures also appear to support Cohen's stance, with software revenue dropping 27% in FY24 and hardware revenue dropping 12%. Meanwhile, revenue from collectibles — covering apparel, toys, trading cards, gadgets, other pop-culture products, and submission services for authentication and grading of trading cards — grew by 47%.

Much of the Bloomberg interview was focused on Cohen's somewhat controversial bid for eBay. GameStop began accumulating eBay stock on February 4 and delivered an unsolicited, non-binding proposal on May 3 to acquire all outstanding shares at $125 apiece, split evenly between cash and GameStop stock — an offer valuing eBay at roughly $56 billion, against GameStop's own market capitalization of around $10 billion. eBay's board rejected it on May 12, with chairman Paul Pressler writing that the board had determined the proposal was "neither credible nor attractive." Cohen has said he intends to take the offer directly to eBay shareholders.

As Apple and other American companies seek to use memory chips from China-based CXMT and YMTC amid massive supply constraints, U.S. lawmakers want to ban exports of Chinese memory chips to the U.S., citing concerns of weakening domestic and allied suppliers and indirectly supporting the development of 3D NAND and DRAM by Chinese companies, reports the Financial Times.

John Moolenaar, Republican chair of the U.S. House China Committee, and Democratic Congressman George Whitesides asked Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to prevent U.S. companies from purchasing semiconductors from businesses included either on the Pentagon's Chinese Military Companies blacklist or the Commerce Department's Entity List. They also called on the administration to add CXMT to the Entity List and impose additional restrictions on YMTC.

"Dependence on Chinese memory manufacturers creates an unacceptable risk for U.S. national security, economic security, and supply chain security," the letter by Moolenaar and Whitesides reads.

Apple has been seeking approval from the Trump administration to source memory from CXMT amid a severe global DRAM supply crisis caused by the rapid expansion of AI infrastructure. Corsair, Patriot Memory, and some other suppliers of branded memory modules and SSDs have been using DRAM from CXMT and 3D NAND from Yangtze Memory for some time now.

"We are alarmed that Apple and other U.S. tech companies seek to purchase memory from Chinese semiconductor manufacturers, including those with ties to the Chinese military," the U.S. lawmakers wrote.

DRAM maker CXMT is already on the Pentagon's Chinese Military Companies list, whereas 3D NAND producer YMTC is already in the DoC's Entity List. Their presence in the lists does not outright prevent American companies like Apple from buying their products, but at a significant political risk.

Technically, American companies could buy chips from CXMT and YMTC to use inside products bound for China or other countries and continue to use memory from traditional suppliers in products aimed at the U.S. market. To prevent this, Moolenaar and Whitesides also urge the American government to coordinate with Japan, South Korea, and the EU to prevent CXMT and YMTC from taking advantage of the current supply shortage to establish themselves in allied supply chains, which they believe could ultimately leave the West strategically dependent on Chinese memory.

Moolenaar and Whitesides argue that purchases from Chinese memory manufacturers could indirectly support technologies applicable to China's military.

"Leading Chinese memory manufacturers are all closely intertwined with the Chinese military; thus, every memory purchase by a U.S. company will directly subsidize the People’s Liberation Army's development of this critical dual-use technology," the letter stresses.

The lawmakers argue that CXMT and YMTC could repeat China’s playbook in solar, steel, telecom, and EV markets: use state subsidies to undercut foreign rivals, weaken their investments, and ultimately exploit the resulting dependence for strategic leverage. That said, using Chinese memory now could permanently weaken Western production capacity and leave the West strategically dependent on China for a critical component of AI infrastructure, Moolenaar and Whitesides believe.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said that the government is working to establish the “Australian Standards for A.I.,” which would stand as a national framework that AI companies must follow if they want to operate in the country. As backlash against the negative effects of data centers is making it harder for AI hyperscalers to build and expand infrastructure in the U.S. and Europe, the New York Times reports that many of these firms are now eyeing the Land Down Under for its vast lands and abundant renewable energy sources. But even before they start setting up shop in the country, Canberra wants to get ahead and ensure that these developments do not cause any problems for the general public.

“Every country on earth is grappling with these challenges right now. Australia will be the first country in the world to bring these issues into a single, national framework,” the prime minister said in his speech. One part of this policy will enforce a “legal obligation” for data centers to produce the same amount of power that they consume, ensuring that their presence does not put an unnecessary burden on the power grid that would result in increased utility prices for the average citizen. It also wants to ensure that these projects be as water efficient as possible, especially given that Australia is the driest populated continent on Earth, according to the International Groundwater Resources Assessment Center (IGRAC).

Aside from concern for data centers’ use of natural resources, the Australian government also wants to ensure that the intellectual property rights of its people are protected. Albanese said that Australian creators, including writers, musicians, artists, and news reporters, should “retain control of the price and value of their work” when used for AI training. “Anything less is theft. No country has got this right yet,” says the prime minister.

While some business industry groups expressed their support for the government’s goal, they were also a bit cautious, saying that overregulation could mean that Australia will miss out on the opportunities the AI data centers will bring for the company. University of New South Wales in Sydney professor Toby Walsh, who specializes in Artificial Intelligence, also told The Times that the PM is on the right track, as it addresses the concerns that most Australians have regarding AI and the infrastructure behind it. However, these are just planned policies, and the regulation behind them must still be worked out. “The devil will be in the details exactly what they do,” says Prof. Walsh.

Intel was expected to unveil its next-generation desktop processors later this year. The upcoming Nova Lake lineup has been making the rounds online, and a new report from VideoCardz suggests that Intel could introduce it under the Core Ultra Series 400 branding. For context, the current Arrow Lake and Arrow Lake Refresh desktop CPUs follow the Core Ultra Series 200 naming scheme, while Intel's latest Panther Lake mobile processors carry the Core Ultra Series 300 branding.

The report also claims to reveal the review embargo windows and launch timeline for several Nova Lake models. According to the report, Intel will initially introduce a 28-core DS package, which is expected to launch between January and March 2027. The new DS suffix is said to be an internal package designation for processors featuring dual-compute tiles. This will reportedly be followed by 28-core K-series (unlocked) models between March and April 2027, while 16-core and 8-core variants are expected to arrive between late March and May 2027. The flagship 52-core DS model is reportedly scheduled for a much later launch, potentially between late May and September 2027.

While Intel is yet to officially confirm a launch date for Nova Lake, various leaks have suggested that the lineup could be one of the company's biggest generational leaps in recent years. The flagship desktop SKU, featuring a 52-core configuration, is expected to combine 16 Coyote Cove Performance (P) cores, 32 Arctic Wolf Efficiency (E) cores, and four Low Power Efficiency (LPE) cores. This would be a notable jump over the current Core Ultra 9 285K, which features a total of 24-cores. The introduction of Coyote Cove and Arctic Wolf also points to an entirely new CPU architecture, replacing the Lion Cove and Skymont cores found in Arrow Lake.

Nova Lake is also rumored to bring new platform upgrades including support for DDR5-8000 memory, up to 24 PCIe 5.0 lanes for expansion, Thunderbolt 5, and Intel's next-generation Xe3 Celestial integrated graphics. The processors are also expected to feature an upgraded NPU5 for AI workloads along with a 150W Processor Base Power (PBP) and 253W Maximum Turbo Power (MTP) on the flagship model, despite the substantial increase in core count. Earlier reports have also indicated that Nova Lake will transition to a new LGA1954 socket, meaning users will likely need a new motherboard to upgrade from the existing Arrow Lake platform.

Beijing-based Moonshot AI has released Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion parameter model that the company describes in its technical blog as the world's first open 3T-class system and the largest open-weight AI model to date. Moonshot said K3 still sits behind Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT 5.6 Sol on overall performance, but it outperformed every other model in the company's evaluation suite, including Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5, across coding and agentic benchmarks. The model has a 1 million token context window, native vision, and activates just 16 of its 896 experts per token, roughly 1.8% of the pool. Full weights are due by July 27.

Arena ranked K3 first in its Frontend Code evaluation at 1,679 points, ahead of Fable 5, in blind developer testing. API pricing is $0.30 per million cache-hit input tokens, $3 per million on cache misses, and $15 per million output tokens. Kimi K2 launched a year ago at $0.60 per million input tokens, so uncached K3 input costs five times as much.

Moonshot claims roughly a 2.5x improvement in scaling efficiency over Kimi K2, attributed to two architectural changes: Kimi Delta Attention, a hybrid linear attention scheme, and Attention Residuals, which change how information moves between layers. Quantization-aware training starts at the supervised fine-tuning stage, using MXFP4 weights and MXFP8 activations, a combination Moonshot says it chose for broad hardware compatibility. Bank of America analysts led by Alex Liu said in a note cited by CNBC that K3 shows large-scale pre-training plus architectural work can still deliver step-change gains for flagship Chinese models despite compute constraints.

Moonshot's kernel optimization benchmark ran on Nvidia's H200, and what the blog identifies only as a "GPGPU from an alternative vendor," which the company didn't name. MiniTriton, a Triton-like compiler K3 built from scratch, is charted against Triton on an Nvidia L20, the cut-down Ada-based card sold into China under U.S. export rules. Moonshot recommends serving K3 on supernodes of 64 or more accelerators, keeping expert-parallel traffic inside one high-bandwidth domain. The blog doesn't say where the H200 hardware is; Congress passed a bill in January to close the offshore cloud rental loophole that gave Chinese firms remote access to restricted accelerators.

In one case study, K3 spent a single 48-hour autonomous run designing a simulated inference chip for a nano model built on its own architecture, using open-source EDA tools and the Nangate 45nm library. The design closed timing at 100 MHz within 4mm squared, packed 1.46 million standard cells and an INT4 MAC array, and sustained more than 8,700 tokens per second of simulated decode.

At the moment, every published K3 number is a claim made by Moonshot-reported or drawn from API access and can’t be verified until the weights are made public on July 27. Anthropic accused Moonshot in February of using 3.4 million Claude exchanges to train its models through distillation, and K3 now benchmarks within a few points of the models named in that complaint.

If you're headed back to school or college later this summer, or you're embarking on new study endeavours for the first time, then you might well be in the market for a powerhouse laptop that can tackle work and play with ease. This excellent HP Omen Max laptop is currently $1,100 off at Best Buy, netting you an RTX 5070 Ti GPU, 24-core Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX CPU, 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD, all housed under a slick OLED display.

● Check out this deal at Best Buy

This laptop is not only fantastic for gaming, but the powerhouse Core Ultra 9 290HX is Intel's flagship laptop processor, with a massive 24 cores, including eight performance cores and 16 efficiency cores. That makes it great for all manner of productivity tasks, no matter what you're studying.

The HP Omen Max 16 laptop is a model we've reviewed, and we like its general premium feel thanks to its aluminum enclosure, good audio, and decent webcam. The headline here is that Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX CPU. This flagship Arrow Lake Refresh CPU features boost clocks of up to 5.5 GHz. Below is a selection of laptops we've tested running this CPU, and as you can see, it delivers very impressive Geekbench 6 scores.

That CPU is backed up by the punchy RTX 5070 Ti GPU. While it doesn't have the coveted 16GB of VRAM of the desktop variant, it does have 12GB, getting you more than the 8GB configurations you'll mind on the lower end of Nvidia's scale. This Blackwell GPU has 5,888 CUDA cores and should provide ample power at the laptop's native resolution of 2560 x 1600 at 240 Hz. That display is also really notable because it's an OLED panel, rather than IPS, offering much better contrast and response times for gaming and watching content.

Alongside the potent CPU and GPU combo, you get 32GB of DDR5 RAM and a 1TB SSD. The former is crucial for multitasking and gaming, while the latter should be fine to get you started with a few Steam games and your studies.

As always with the Omen Max, you get two USB-A ports, two Thunderbolt 4 with USB-C, a 3.5mm headphone jack, an Ethernet port, and HDMI 2.1.

If you'd like to compromise a little, you could get a 5080 version of this laptop for a little more. Priced at $2,949 ($1,070 off), this model comes with a slightly less potent Core Ultra 9 275HX (still 24 cores), a 2TB SSD, and the aforementioned 5080. That gives you more storage and a better GPU for $150 more.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, Gaming Chair, Best Wi-Fi Routers, Best Motherboard, or CPU Deals pages.

You can also join the Tom's Hardware deals Discord for up-to-the-minute hardware deals.

AMD's latest CPU release is out in the wild and currently has exclusivity with Newegg. So if you want to get your hands on one, it's going to be from the Egg for now, at least. The AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D was only recently announced at Computex 2026, slotting in between the 7600X3D and the 7800X3D in the product stack. But with a suggested retail price of $329, it's turning out not to be a great value for money compared with the prices of the existing 7600X3D and 7800X3D processors, that is, until the 7700X3D started appearing in Newegg's combo bundles. Today, you can pick up the AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D along with the ASRock B650M Pro RS WiFi Micro ATX motherboard and 16GB of G.SKILL Flare X5 DDR5-6000 RAM for just $450 in this Newegg combo bundle.

● Check out this deal at Newegg

The 7700X3D has slightly lower boost clocks than its big brother, the 7800X3D, but it gives you the same eight Zen 4 cores and 104 MB of combined L2 and L3 cache. In this bundle, it works out as a much cheaper 7800X3D alternative, with only a slight drop in overall performance. When paired with the Micro ATX motherboard, this is a great start for a budget-oriented small-form-factor gaming PC.

You're saving a tidy $202.99 (31%) on the price of this combo bundle, thanks firstly to the $153.99 combo discount and then a further $49 when you use promo code PKC337 at checkout.

You can also pick up the new AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D separately for just $279.99, as Newegg has slapped the same $49 discount on the individual CPU. Use promo code PKC337 at checkout to apply the discount.

In our review of the AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D, we found the CPU to fit between the 7800X3D and 7600X3D, as expected. The 7700X3D shaves 200 MHz off the base clock and 500 MHz off the boost clock, but surprisingly performs closer to the 7600X3D, with only a 2% difference in average performance.

Just $450 for an AM5 7700X3D PC bundle that includes a competent gaming CPU, motherboard, and memory is good enough value, and the Micro ATX board means you could construct a small form factor build, or your own Steam Machine-type setup with superior parts. The big downside to this bundle is the single stick of RAM. It will, of course, still work, but you do take a slight performance hit from not using dual channels. However, you can always upgrade with an extra 16GB stick in future.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, Gaming Chair, Best Wi-Fi Routers, Best Motherboard, or CPU Deals pages.

You can also join the Tom's Hardware deals Discord for up-to-the-minute hardware deals.

The latest board from the budget side of the Z890 lineup to land on our test bench is the MSI MAG Z890 Tomahawk Wi-Fi II. This updated Intel board is a streamlined revision of the original, optimized for Intel’s Core Ultra 200S Plus processors. It retains the same aesthetic, core power delivery, and DIY-friendly features, but has two connectivity downgrades: a single TB4 port (down from two) and reduced Wi-Fi 7 speeds. It’s a decent budget motherboard; it’s just that the feature-reduction refresh is a bit curious to me.

Currently listed at $229.99, the Tomahawk Wi-Fi II costs roughly the same as the original Z890 Tomahawk. Aside from the two downgrades, it also tweaks some header locations and, minimally, the aesthetics. Hardware-wise, you still get nearly everything from the original, including capable power delivery (19 phases, 90A MOSFETs), two Type-C ports (one TB4/40 Gbps) and seven Type-A USB ports on the rear IO. There's also Wi-Fi 7 and 5 GbE networking, a last-gen audio solution, along with MSI’s EZ DIY and EZ Overclock features.

Performance on the Tomahawk II was good overall with the MSI Performance setting, landing somewhere in the middle among the boards tested. In short, it’s competent across a wide variety of PC activities, including gaming, rendering, encoding, and office-type work. There’s nothing to worry about on the performance front.

Below, we’ll examine the board's performance and other features to determine whether it deserves a spot on our list of the best motherboards. But before we share test results and discuss details, here are the specifications from MSI.

Specifications of the MSI MAG Z890 Tomahawk Wifi II

Inside the Box

Inside the box, MSI includes a few accessories to help get your system running, hopefully, without a trip to the store. You get the typical array of guides and EU notices, a 1 to 3 EZ Conn-Cable (V2), Wi-Fi antenna, EZ M.2 clip remover, (2) EZ M.2 Clips II, and two SATA cables. There isn’t much here, but it is similar to other budget boards.

Design and Features of the Tomahawk Wifi II

Looking at the Z890 Tomahawk II, it’s tough to discern any aesthetic changes versus the original. It sports an all-black 6-layer, server-grade PCB design with black heatsinks all around. There are bright yellow/green branding accents on the chipset heatsink, the primary M.2 heatsink (for which I wish to see a larger one for the PCIe 5.0 M.2 socket underneath), and the top VRM heatsink. As for RGB lighting, the Tomahawk II, like the original, doesn’t include RGB lighting, though it does have multiple headers to connect your own. It’s not begging to be the showpiece of the build, but it surely looks good with a black build theme.

Focusing on the top half of the board, we get a better look at the capable VRM heatsinks and socket area. What is different on this board compared to many others is that the two 8-pin EPS connectors (one required) are above the DRAM slots instead of above and to the left of the VRM heatsinks. In its place is the first (of seven) 4-pin fan headers. Each header supports PWM and DC devices, with current/power ratings ranging from 1A/12W (SYS_FAN1-6) to 2A/24W for the CPU_FAN1 and 3A/36W for the PUMP_SYS1 header. There’s plenty of power to go around. Header control is managed via the BIOS or MSI's Control Center software.

Below the EPS connectors are the four DRAM slots, each with a single locking mechanism at the bottom. With the CPU power leads so close above, it makes sense to have them on the bottom, where there is more room to access them. The board supports up to DDR5-9200 MT/s, which is plenty fast for the platform. Our own testing showed the board worked fine at DDR5-8800 MT/s with a 2x24GB kit, so there’s some headroom left with 2x16GB sticks to reach the listed peak.

In the upper-right corner and along the edge, we spy three more 4-pin fan headers, along with the EZ debug (4 LEDs, basic troubleshooting) and the 2-character EZ Digi-Debug LED, which offers more details on POST issues and doubles as a temperature display once booted.

Below that is the JAF_2 EZ-Conn-header V2, which allows you to connect ARGB LED strips, fans, and USB 2.0 devices (with the included adapter cable), saving space on the motherboard. Last but not least, on the top half is a front-panel USB 3.2 Gen 1 (5 Gbps) connector.

Power delivery on the Tomahawk II is capable and appropriate for this class of motherboard. It has 19 phases, 16 of which are dedicated to Vcore. Power is supplied to the Monolithic Power Systems (MPS) MPS2477 controller. From there, it heads to 16 MPS 90A SPS MOSFETs. The 1,440A available can handle the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus, and even the Core Ultra 9 285K, even with overclocking. Just be sure to keep air flowing in your chassis, as the components here will get warm with sustained heavy use.

On the bottom half of the board, we’ll start on the left with the audio section. There, we see a couple of dedicated audio capacitors and the last-gen flagship codec, the Realtek ALC1220P. While this isn’t the latest/best audio codec available, it’s a good one and makes sense for most budget-class motherboards. You should still be happy with it, as it’s difficult to tell them apart without seeing the actual specifications anyway.

In the middle of the board are three full-length PCIe slots and four M.2 sockets. Starting with PCIe, the topmost slot has reinforcement, which MSI calls Steel Armor II. It is your sole PCIe 5.0 x16 slot and connects through the CPU. The bottom two slots connect via the chipset and support PCIe 4.0 x4. The top slot does not bifurcate, if you’re wondering.

Among and around the PCIe slots are four M.2 sockets. The top socket, M.2_1 (above the top PCIe slot and under the heatsink that, again, I wish were larger), is your CPU-connected PCIe 5.0 x4 (128 Gbps) socket. The other three M.2s all connect through the chipset and run at PCIe 4.0 x4 (64 Gbps), with M.2_4, the bottom-right socket, also supporting SATA-based M.2 devices. All sockets support up to 80mm modules and can run RAID 0/1/5 modes for redundancy and/or increased speed (RAID is not a backup). Between the PCIe slots, M.2, USB, and SATA ports, there is no lane sharing. You can fill all the slots and sockets and still receive the full bandwidth from each.

Finally, moving past the chipset heatsink to the right edge, are two of the four SATA ports (supporting RAID 0/1/5/10). The other two are mounted vertically along the bottom edge.

We've also captured several images of the IC's used to make this motherboard work consisting of a mix of Genesys Logic for a USB hub, Killer/Intel Ethernet, Realtek audio, and Monolithic Power Systems MOSFETs.

At the bottom of the board is a slew of headers. It offers your typical set of connectivity in this area, with nothing missing or worth a specific mention. Below we’ve listed all the connections across the bottom of the board.

• Front panel audio
• 4-pin RGB header
• 3-pin ARGB header
• 2-pin chassis intrusion header
• TB5 AIC header
• 8-pin PCIe connector
• (2) USB 2.0 (380 Mbps) headers
• (3) 4-pin system fan headers
• (2) 3-pin ARGB headers
• TPM header
• 2-pin Clear CMOS header
• Front panel headers

Flipping the board around to the rear IO, the Tomahawk II provides basic connectivity for the platform. You get everything, but compared to the original Tomahawk, you get one less Thunderbolt (40 Gbps) Type-C port. On the left, there's the HDMI (v2.1) output and the TB4/DisplayPort Type-C port, both of which work with integrated video. Next to that is a 10 Gbps Type-C port, while above that are the seven Type-A ports (3x 10 Gbps, 4x 5 Gbps). Below the USB ports are two buttons (BIOS Flashback and Clear CMOS). Next is the Killer 5GbE, the EZ antenna quick-connect for the slower (2.9 Gbps) Wi-Fi 7 connections, and the 3-plug (2x 3.5mm and SPDIF) audio stack. The next stack holds the 40 Gbps Thunderbolt Type-C port and the only USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) port. Next to that are four USB 2.0 ports, and the Realtek-based 2.5 GbE port stacked on top. Rounding out the USB ports back here are two USB 3.2 Gen 1 (5 Gbps) ports.

There’s nothing particularly notable here, just a difference in TB4/40 Gbps port count (now one).

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Firmware

MSI has updated its BIOS and renamed it “Click BIOS X.” It arrives with improved aesthetics and functionality. The company changed the format to left-aligned headings, middle-aligned details, and right-aligned system status information, and it’s all logically laid out. Like most other board partners, it features an informational EZ Mode that offers high-level functionality, including access to Game Boost, PBO, XMP profiles, and more. The Tomahawk uses a black background with a yellow highlighting theme and is easy to read.

Overall, we like the layout (it's one of my favorites), and maneuvering around is intuitive after a short time, though it does take some getting used to.

Software

MSI Center is a single utility that offers a wide range of functionality. From hardware monitoring to RGB control with Mystic Light, the software has many applets and is a one-stop shop for downloading other utilities, including overclocking and fan control. Those looking to use the Gamebar feature, Super Charger, or any other utilities MSI offers will find them all in MSI Center. This is the latest version from early 2026.

Test System / Comparison Products

We’ve updated our test system to Windows 11 (25H2) 64-bit OS with all updates applied as of late April 2026. On the hardware front, we’ve updated the RAM kits to ones appropriate for the platform. Peripherals, including cooling, storage, power supply, and graphics cards, remain unchanged. We also use the latest publicly available BIOS unless otherwise noted. The hardware we used is as follows:

TEST SYSTEM COMPONENTS:

• CPU - Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus
• Cooling - Arctic Liquid Freezer II 420
• Storage - Crucial 2TB T705 M.2 PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD
• RAM - Kingston Fury Renegade - 32GB DDR5-7600 CL38 (KF576C38RWAK2-32)
• RAM - G.Skill Trident Z5 CK - 32GB DDR5-8200 CL40 (F5-8200C4052G24GX2-TZZ5CK)
• RAM - V-Color 256GB (2x128GB) DDR5-8000 CL64 (TECQ5128G80Q864K)
• GPU - Asus TUF RTX 4080 16G
• PSU - EVGA Supernova 850W P6
• Windows 11 64-bit (25H2 - 26200.8037)
• NVIDIA Driver 595.97

Benchmark Settings

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Benchmark Results

Our standard benchmarks and power tests are performed using the CPU’s stock frequencies (including any default boost/turbo) with all power-saving features at default. We set optimized defaults in the BIOS, then set the memory by enabling the XMP profile. If there are boosts enabled by the BIOS by default, it runs like that. The Windows power scheme is set to Balanced (default) for this baseline testing, so the PC idles appropriately.

Synthetic Benchmarks and Real World Applications

Synthetics offer a valuable method for evaluating a board's performance, as identical settings are expected to yield similar results. Turbo boost wattage and advanced memory timings are areas where motherboard manufacturers can still optimize for stability or performance, though, and these settings can impact specific testing scenarios. We’ve also combined our previous ‘timed’ benchmark applications into this section.

Performance on the Tomahawk Wifi II was average among the tested boards. Nothing really stood out either way in this set of benchmarks.

3D Games and 3DMark

Starting with the launch of the Arrow Lake refresh chips, we’ve updated our game tests. We’re keeping the F1 racing game but have upgraded to F1 25. We’ll continue with the ever-popular and aesthetically pleasing Cyberpunk 2077. We run both games at 1920x1080 resolution using the Ultra preset (details listed in the table above). Both games are set to use DLSS.

The goal with these settings is to determine if there are differences in performance at the most commonly used (and CPU/system-bound) resolution with settings most people use or strive for (Ultra). We expect the difference between boards in these tests to be minor, with most falling within the margin of error. We’ve also added a minimum FPS metric, which can affect your gameplay and immersion.

As has been the case with previous motherboards and CPUs, the 3DMark tests don’t show much separation from worst to first, and we see that again across our varied datasets. 3DMark scores were fine, and gaming results were also comparable, although F1 25 was a bit slower and matched the previous-gen 285K for some reason. Still, it’s a performant board, just like the others. Whether you’re using the machine for office productivity, rendering, encoding, or gaming, the results are on par with others.

Overclocking

Over the past few CPU generations, overclocking headroom has been shrinking on both sides of the fence, while out-of-the-box performance has increased. For overclockers, this means there’s less fun to have. For the average consumer, you’re getting the most out of the processor without manual tweaking. Today’s motherboards are more robust than ever, and an overwhelming majority support power-hungry flagship-class processors, so we know the hardware can handle them.

There are multiple ways to extract even more performance from these processors: manually adjust the settings or use some of the fancy AI overclocking board partners have been touting. Results will vary and depend on the CPU's cooling and quality. In other words, your mileage may vary. Considering the above, we’re not overclocking the CPU for these review articles. However, we will try out our different memory kits to ensure they meet the specifications.

Memory testing went without issue. The board was stable with the DDR5-7600 kit, and we went all the way up to our (new) fastest kit, Kingston Fury Beast 48GB DDR5-8800, without issue during our 30-minute stress test.

Power Consumption / VRM Temperatures

We used AIDA64’s System Stability Test with Stress CPU, FPU, cache, and Memory enabled for power testing, using the processor's peak power consumption value. The wattage reading is obtained from the wall via a Kill-A-Watt meter, capturing the entire PC (excluding the monitor). The only variable that changes is the motherboard; all other parts remain the same. We have moved to using only the stock power use/VRM temperature charts, as this section aims to ensure the power delivery can handle flagship-class processors.

Stress testing with our flagship-class 270K Plus and the Team Group DDR5-7600 kit at stock yielded a peak of 345W at the wall, which aligns with other boards. The Tomahawk II used 61W at idle. There’s nothing noteworthy, otherwise.

VRM temperatures ran warm, but are not a concern on this board. Throughout the 30-minute test, the system (excluding the monitor) averaged 233W, and our sensors on the back of the board, directly under the MOSFETs, recorded temperatures peaking at 58 degrees Celsius, while Hwinfo and the internal sensor showed temperatures peaking a couple of degrees lower at 56 degrees Celsius. That value is well within specification for the MOSFETs doing all the work below. We’re confident that the power delivery can handle anything you throw at it. Chances are, the CPU temperature will limit you before the board does, but always maintain good airflow to keep temperatures down.

Bottom Line

The Z890 Tomahawk II is an interesting new iteration compared to the original. For all intents and purposes, it’s the same board with native Core Ultra 200S Plus support. However, the II moves away from the Killer-based 320MHz Wi-Fi 7 to the slower (less expensive?) Intel/Mediatek Wi-Fi 7 solution and moves to a single TB4/40 Gbps Type-C port. The Wi-Fi speed is something most can overlook, as few have a Wi-Fi 7 ecosystem in the first place. And, again, for the overwhelming majority, it’s fast enough and supports plenty of concurrent connections. I still would like to see the second Thunderbolt port, though. Most users don’t have two devices that can each utilize 40 Gbps bandwidth, either. So while this likely doesn’t affect many, it’s still a small step back from the original – only a problem if you’re one of the few who need it.

Currently (at the time we published the article) priced at $229.99 (was just on sale for $199.99, so keep an eye out!) on Newegg, it’s on shelves alongside the Asus Prime Z890-P ($229.99 and recently reviewed), Gigabyte’s Z890 Gaming X Wifi7 ($219.00), and the ASRock Z890 Lighting Wifi at $211.99. If we look at the specs of competitors at a similar price point, we see that the Tomahawk II is similarly equipped, if not better. It’s the only one with 5 GbE, and all of these have one Thunderbolt 4/40 Gbps port. The Wi-Fi, you ask? These boards have a mix of Wi-Fi 6E and the even faster Wi-Fi 7.

So while we’re disappointed the Z890 Tomahawk II took a step back in some areas (one of the only reasons it didn’t make our best motherboards list), it isn't effectively any different than the more expensive competition. At the current sub-$230 price point, it doesn’t stand out from most others, and the original is still available for $229.99. If you need faster Wi-Fi 7 and an additional Thunderbolt/40 Gbps port, stick with the original Tomahawk. If you don’t need those features, the Tomahawk II is the preferred option if you can find it cheaper than the original Z890 Tomahawk.

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As the semiconductor industry increasingly relies on ASML's EUV lithography tools both for logic and memory production, ASML is considering increasing prices of these systems as they deliver greater productivity and better value for its customers. However, with 2027 production nearly sold out and substantial 2028 orders already booked, meaningful increases may primarily affect systems delivered from late 2028 onward. Nonetheless, the idea has already angered TSMC, ASML's largest client, reports The Information.

"When it comes to Low-NA [EUV tools] pricing, of course, you know that we keep on increasing the productivity of the Low-NA tool, [which] gives us a pretty strong runway for potential price improvements going forward," said Roger Dassen, chief financial officer of ASML, during the company's quarterly earnings call. "Given the long order lead times that we have, that... doesn't translate into pricing effects tomorrow."

Value-based pricing set to persist… in a new way

ASML has long followed what it calls value-based pricing and gradually increased its quotes based on output, patterning costs, power consumption, and other benefits its new tools offer to clients.

Usually, this involved increasing prices once in a while. For example, if early Twinscan NXE Low-NA EUV systems cost roughly €100 million – €120 million ($115 million–$137 million), the more advanced are priced starting at €170 million ($195 million. It is still well below rumored quotes for High-NA EXE scanners that exceed €350 million ($400 million). At the same time, Low-NA productivity has risen from 160–170 wafers per hour (WPH) and ≤1.1nm matched-machine overlay to 220 WPH/260 WPH with NXE:3800E/NXE:3800F at 0.9nm. Future NXE:4200G/NXE:4200H systems are expected to exceed 300 WPH and improve overlay to ≤0.8nm–≤0.7nm.

"Clearly, the environment that we live in today, with the value that our products bring to customer — it's substantial— of course, gives us flexibility on pricing, more so than what you would have seen in the past," Dassen said. "Of course, we are executing on that as well."

However, later during the call, Dassen emphasized that ASML intends to maintain its value-based approach even in the current environment of high demand and limited supply in the semiconductor world. Yet, he stressed that from now on, ASML might want to charge for things beyond just productivity.

"We have always been able to show customers not just productivity upgrades, but also the value from better imaging, the value of better overlay, etc.," Dassen said. "[But] you got this very strong correlation between throughput improvements and ASP. That is just the way things panned out," he said, suggesting that ASML shares value with its clients.

No price hikes in the short term

ASML will be unable to hike prices of Low-NA EUV systems for another couple of years. Since orders that are in ASML's backlog already carry a sales value, subject to inflation adjustments, prices for much of the 2027 and early 2028 output may already be contractually determined. Unless existing contracts can be renegotiated, higher pricing could therefore primarily apply to 2028 shipments and beyond, or for new orders that somehow get squeezed in in 2027. The NXE:4200G, due in 2029, should naturally lift average selling prices anyway as it gets major performance improvements.

TSMC is upset

For TSMC, however, the issue is strategic. The foundry's leading-edge roadmap through 2030 relies on extending Low-NA EUV with better masks, computational lithography, and multipatterning. Until then, TSMC's strategy has always been avoiding High-NA EUV until at least its 10A-class (1 nm-class) technology. If ASML hikes prices of its future Low-NA EUV lithography systems, it will likely affect all of TSMC's plans for the next several years.

TSMC already operates the world's largest Low-NA EUV fleet and needs many more scanners for fabs in Taiwan, the U.S., and Japan as it executes its global expansion strategy. Consequently, even modest increases beyond TSMC's projections could add billions to capital spending, reduce the economic advantage of postponing High-NA, and ultimately raise its manufacturing costs. Moreover, accepting higher prices now could establish the baseline for dozens or hundreds of future systems, which will allow ASML to capture a larger share of the economic value created by increasingly productive lithography equipment.

Can this force TSMC to transition to High-NA EUV tools earlier than planned? Moving to High-NA EUV requires not only €350-million-plus scanners but also new resists, masks, pellicles, metrology, design rules, and computational lithography flows, which are likely not ready at TSMC.

The static recompilation craze has just hit a milestone with developer @patchzyy sharing a slick and smooth-looking version of “Mario Kart Wii, rebuilt for PC.” Mario Kart Wiicompiled, created using the help of AI coding, is being teased now, with a video embedded below, but isn’t expected to become available as a beta until next month. That is, if it doesn’t get whack-a-moled somehow by the notoriously litigious Nintendo.

For context, several developers have been busy with static recompilation projects over recent years. Successes in recompiling games from platforms like the Nintendo N64 (and Xbox 360) have clearly inspired a generational jump, with patchzyy’s claimed “first static recompilation of a Wii game.” From the brief video, it looks pretty good.

Static recompilation transforms the binary machine code into equivalent native code for the target platform, like PC. Digital archivists and retrogaming fans like static recompilation as it can offer higher performance and stability, removing emulation quirks and overheads. It can also make use of the best features of the modern platform, so Mario Kart Wiicompiled is going to run at up to 4K, with an unlocked frame rate. Moreover, in this case, Retro Rewind community mod compatibility is confirmed, which means that recompiled players will be able to access 200+ race tracks.

At this time, the static recompilation doesn’t use 4K or HD textures or character models. However, these are options open to the community/modders, going forward, just like we see with N64 and other console recompilations.

It will be interesting to see if the Wii’s big gimmick of motion controls, which could be used for Kart steering, will work on Mario Kart Wiicompiled. Perhaps it could even work with original Wii Remotes you might have lying around.

So, are Wii static recompilation title floodgates about to open? There is certainly a nice selection of games folks with Wii disk collections might enjoy playing on their modern PCs connected to their 4K TVs. So, Nintendo might not like seeing this kind of project getting popular, but the devs studiously separate the static recompilation code from the game ‘ROM’ files, which retro gamers may or may not actually own.

Many social media commenters point out that AI was used in the development of Mario Kart Wiicompiled, but that was already made clear in the project FAQ. That document clearly states that AI was used to assist with code only, not for the generation of art or other assets.

A security researcher has published a method for lifting the client certificate off a Shark robot vacuum and using it to run root commands on other Shark vacuums across the same Amazon Web Services region, exposing live camera feeds, stored home maps, and Wi-Fi credentials held in plaintext. The researcher, who publishes under the handle tokay0, published the technique on Monday and says he first reported it to SharkNinja on March 1. As of the time of writing, the flaw is still unpatched, requiring a fix that sits entirely on SharkNinja's side of the cloud rather than on the robot.

The problem is an over-permissive AWS IoT policy. The certificate that a Shark vacuum uses to authenticate to Amazon's cloud broker was never restricted to the device carrying it, so a certificate pulled from one unit can subscribe to fleet-wide traffic and publish commands addressed to any device the broker serves. Those commands travel in an ordinary field called Exec_Command inside the per-device state document AWS keeps in the cloud, and a management daemon on the vacuum passes anything under 1,000 bytes from it to a shell.

The researcher tested the technique only on units he bought himself, including a cross-model reverse shell on an AV1102ARUS Shark IQ Robot Vacuum XL, which he then used to pull a live feed off that robot's onboard camera. Watching a single AWS region for 24 hours, he counted 1,517,605 unique Shark serial numbers, of which 673,816, or 44%, replied to a command probe. Those are devices observed responding, not devices he tested or compromised. Certificates are pinned to their AWS region, so a key lifted in one region only reaches devices in that region.

tokay0 says SharkNinja acknowledged his report on March 12, told him on April 27 that it was under review, and on July 3 promised a completion date by July 10 that never arrived. He also says the company downplayed the severity and questioned whether a CVE was warranted, despite a published disclosure policy that commits SharkNinja to "provide regular updates until the reported vulnerability is resolved." The company had posted nothing on the flaw as of July 16.

Remediation in this scenario doesn’t require a firmware update. Per Amazon, a non-compliant IoT policy is fixed by pushing a scoped version inside the operator's own AWS account until SharkNinja rescopes the policy or reissues the certificates.

SharkNinja's timeline is pretty similar to a vulnerability we saw with DJI Romo vacuums back in February, whereby an authorization flaw exposed roughly 6,700 vacuums, handing out camera feeds, audio, and floor plans; DJI patched it within weeks, and the researcher who found it later collected a $30,000 bounty. Cloud-side failures, where a backend fails to scope device access, have driven a run of robot-vacuum breaches and fueled interest in fully offline designs that keep mapping and camera data off any vendor cloud.

AI-generated slop code has been a plague for some open-source projects, namely but not only Gentoo Linux, Curl, and Ghostty, limiting or outright banning LLM-created contributions. And yet, just like both the models themselves get better and the people using them become more considerate, the landscape may be changing. Linus Torvalds, Linux's creator and kernel manager, has seemingly taken an accepting stance of AI-assisted tooling.

In a long comment on the Linux kernel mailing list, Torvalds spelled it out fairly clearly: "I realize that some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where I'm willing to absolutely put my foot down [...] Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it. Or just walk away."

This discussion came regarding the usage of Sashiko, an opt-in (per-mailing-list) and apparently quite effective multi-stage code review tool that analyzes kernel patches. The project page says the tool can find 53.6% of bugs on proposed patches, and argues that that metric already puts it above human level, as the patches in question already supposedly went through human review. The false positive rate "is harder to measure," being pinned "within 20%." Crucially, Sashiko only comments on patches, and does not take action by itself.

Developer Laurent Pinchart suggested that Sashiko's output be triaged before comments were sent out to patch authors, basing the notion on the Software Freedom Conservancy's guidelines on AI-generated code. Google's Roman Gushchin, one of Sashiko's creators, pointed out that doing that would undermine the utility of the tool, and that Pinchart's position was quite anti-LLM — a sentiment echoed by Linus Torvalds in his reply.

Torvalds put it clearly: "AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it's clearly a useful one. It may not have been that 'clearly' even just a year ago, but it's no longer in question today," a statement that reflects his changing stance on the matter since he initially dismissed AI tools as overhyped back in 2024. He also noted that Linux is not a "social warrior" project, and that it's always been about improving technology.

To drive the point home, he remarked that the tool "keeps finding embarrassing bugs," adding that he "will very loudly ignore people who try to argue against other people from using it," while highlighting the software's rapid evolution.

Perhaps quite poignantly, Torvalds remarked that resistant developers could use some self-awareness, as "it's not like natural intelligence is always all that great either," underscoring the fact that while AI tools may not be perfect, they generally only need to be good enough for their respective use cases. The fact that Sashiko seemingly finds errors in code that underwent human review is quite illustrative.

In this installment of our ongoing quantum computing roadmaps, we turn to the area that has arguably made the most significant technical strides in 2025 and early 2026: neutral atom quantum computing. Be sure to familiarize yourself with part one, which covered superconducting qubits – through IBM and Google – and trapped-ion qubits, through IonQ and Quantinuum. Part two examined quantum photonics through Xanadu's continuous-variable approach and PsiQuantum's silicon-photonic architecture.

Like its predecessors, this is a technology and roadmap analysis rather than a technical deep-dive. We'll give you enough context to understand why neutral atoms have recently captured the attention of both the scientific community and major industry players, then look at what three of its key companies – QuEra, Atom Computing, and Pasqal – are building and planning.

What is Neutral Atom Quantum Computing?

Where superconducting qubits build their quantum systems from engineered Josephson junctions on chips, and trapped ions use electromagnetic fields to suspend individual atoms in vacuum, neutral atom quantum computing uses tightly focused laser beams – called optical tweezers – to trap individual neutral atoms in precisely controlled spatial arrangements.

Each trapped atom acts as a qubit: information is encoded in the atom's internal electronic states, and operations between qubits are performed by briefly exciting atoms into what are known as Rydberg states (the neutral atom mechanism for two-qubit logic gates). These are high-energy orbitals where electrons sit far from the nucleus, enabling long-range interactions between neighboring atoms when triggered. Switching a Rydberg excitation on and off is, in functional terms, the quantum analog of a logic gate – laser on, interaction happens; laser off, atoms return to isolated, quiet stability.

The atoms are laser-cooled to microkelvin temperatures during operation, but unlike superconducting systems – which require the entire chip and most surrounding hardware to be cooled to around 10-20 millikelvin – the surrounding hardware operates near room temperature. The cooling infrastructure is limited to a vacuum chamber and optical components, rather than a laboratory-filling dilution refrigerator.

The core quantum hardware is a vacuum cell that, in isolation, is about the size of a science experiment: a small glass chamber housing the atom array, surrounded by the optical tweezers. Pasqal has specifically cited total system power consumption of 4 kilowatts – a figure that would fit comfortably inside a standard server rack allocation.

Neutral atom systems require extremely stable laser sources across multiple wavelengths, precise spatial light modulators or acousto-optic deflectors to steer individual tweezer beams, high-resolution cameras for atom readout, and classical control electronics fast enough to execute real-time feedback loops during computation. The laser stack for a modern neutral atom system is substantial – a different beast from cryogenic engineering, but no less demanding of specialist expertise.

The majority of neutral atom companies – QuEra, Pasqal, and Infleqtion (a fourth player not covered here) - use rubidium-87 as their qubit atom. Rubidium is the well-trodden path: Its laser-cooling requirements are well understood; the required laser wavelengths fall in mature commercial product ranges, and decades of atomic physics research have produced a deep ecosystem of techniques and tooling around it.

Qubits are encoded in rubidium's hyperfine states – two specific energy levels in the ground state separated by a 6.8 GHz microwave transition – which are the same transitions used in atomic clocks, hence their extraordinary stability and coherence in the second-scale range.

Atom Computing elected a harder path: strontium atoms. Strontium's qubit transitions are more weakly coupled to environmental magnetic field fluctuations than rubidium's electron-based hyperfine states – which is technically significant because magnetic field noise is one of the dominant coherence killers in the rubidium qubit. This advantage comes at a cost: Alkaline earth atoms require more complex multi-wavelength laser systems, including ultraviolet laser sources, and the control techniques needed to isolate specific qubit transitions are more technically demanding. Coherence times up to tens of seconds have been demonstrated on strontium-based platforms, compared to the seconds-scale coherence of rubidium – a tangible advantage for deep circuits.

Why only Atom Computing? Part of the answer is expertise: CEO and founder Dr. Ben Bloom came from the NIST and JILA optical atomic clock community, where strontium is a well-developed tool. The research foundations were already in place. For most teams building neutral atom computers, rubidium is the faster, lower-overhead choice; the marginal coherence improvement from strontium doesn't justify the additional laser complexity unless you already have that expertise. It's a choice that illustrates a broader pattern in quantum computing: The optimal qubit technology isn't universal; it's relative to what your team knows how to build and maintain.

Advantages, challenges, and the mechanics of neutral atom quantum computing

Neutral atom systems carry two structural advantages that are difficult to replicate in other modalities.

The first is atomic identity: Every rubidium-87 atom is, by the laws of physics, identical to every other rubidium-87 atom. Superconducting qubits are manufactured devices with individual fabrication imperfections, requiring per-qubit calibration to achieve consistent performance. Neutral atoms need no such process – uniformity is a physics guarantee rather than an engineering achievement.

The second is reconfigurability. Unlike superconducting chips, where qubit connectivity is determined by physical wiring at fabrication time and cannot be changed, neutral atom arrays can be dynamically reprogrammed mid-computation. Atoms can be physically shuttled from one region of the array to another, placing them in proximity for gate operations and returning them to isolated storage afterwards. The processor's connectivity is software-defined rather than hardware-fixed: Any qubit can interact with any other. Readers of part one of this Quantum Roadmaps series will recognize the framing – this is the structural answer to the interconnectivity constraints we noted in superconducting architectures, where routing a gate between non-adjacent qubits requires threading through intermediate qubits (each step adding potential for error). Here, the qubit comes to the operation.

The reconfigurability described above is a result of modern, gate-based neutral atom processors implementing what is known as a zoned architecture, which partitions the atom array into three distinctly functional regions.

Storage zones hold atoms that are not currently being operated on. Because neutral atoms don't interact with each other unless deliberately brought close together, atoms sitting in storage zones remain isolated.

Entangling zones are regions where selected atoms are moved into close proximity, the Rydberg excitation is activated, and two-qubit gates are performed. Multiple entangling operations can proceed simultaneously in different parts of the array, as long as they don't spatially interfere – an equivalent to parallel gate execution in different lanes.

Readout zones are isolated areas where ancilla qubits – the backbone of error correction – are measured using optical fluorescence, without disturbing atoms in the storage and entangling zones.

This spatial separation is what makes mid-circuit measurement practical: You illuminate one region of the array while the rest of the computation continues undisturbed. This measurement occurs repeatedly throughout a computation to offset errors in real time, helping preserve the stability of the quantum state you're trying to compute – an architecturally non-trivial achievement.

One of the main challenges in neutral atom quantum computing relates to atom loss - neutral atoms are held in their tweezer traps by the focused laser beam. If a stray gas molecule drifts into the vacuum and collides with the trapped atom (or if thermal energy fluctuations become large enough), the atom can absorb enough kinetic energy to drift away into the vacuum chamber. Gone, simply – along with whatever quantum state was encoded in it.

This is called an erasure error, and while a whole-atom loss may sound dramatically impactful for any quantum computation you are trying to perform, it is actually easier to handle than most other types of quantum errors: You know exactly where it happened. A detection system continuously images the array, so a missing atom at a specific position is immediately flagged. Knowing the error location is roughly equivalent to knowing which memory address failed in a chip, rather than discovering that a subtly wrong value in the middle of your calculation chain threw the entire result out the proverbial window.

When this happens, a fresh atom is loaded in from a reservoir - a magneto-optical trap that continuously captures and cools background atoms adjacent to the main array. When it replaces the lost atom, it naturally has no memory of its predecessor's quantum state and is essentially a blank slate (called its electronic ground state). What preserves the logical computation is the error-correcting code: By distributing a single logical qubit's information across many physical qubits simultaneously, the code can tolerate the known loss of one physical qubit and reconstruct the logical state from the remaining ones.

The classical computing analogy is perhaps an ASIC versus an FPGA: a superconducting chip's fixed wiring is like an application-specific integrated circuit – high performance in the tasks it was designed for, but its capabilities are determined at manufacture. A neutral atom array's software-defined connectivity is more like a field-programmable gate array – somewhat slower per individual operation, but reconfigurable to whatever a task demands, including tasks the ASIC's architecture simply wasn't built to handle efficiently.

Where classical processors are measured partly by clock speed, quantum’s analogue to processing capability lives and dies by two metrics: coherence times (the window where calculations can be performed, which run to seconds in neutral atom quantum computing), and gate speed (how quickly individual operations execute). This places neutral atom solutions between trapped ions (seconds to minutes) and superconducting qubits (hundreds of microseconds).

Two open engineering questions balance the advantages described above. Rydberg gate operations run at approximately one to ten microseconds – slower than superconducting gates (tens of nanoseconds) and comparable to trapped ions. For very deep circuits requiring millions of gate operations, this matters. And while atom loss is now manageable via replenishment, maintaining the fidelity of the replenished qubit's reintegration into an ongoing error-correcting computation remains an active area of refinement.

QuEra

QuEra was spun out of Harvard and MIT in 2021, built on foundational research from Professor Mikhail Lukin's group and the MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms. The company has raised over $507 million in total funding – including a $230 million Series B in December 2025, backed by Google Quantum AI, SoftBank Vision Fund, and NVIDIA NVentures – and operates from Boston, Tokyo, and the United Kingdom.

Its first commercial system, Aquila – a 256-qubit analog processor – launched on Amazon Braket in 2022 and remains the most-accessed neutral atom system by external user hours. From there, QuEra has consistently executed on its commitments. A 2023 Harvard-MIT-QuEra-NIST collaboration published a demonstration of 48 logical qubits in Nature, a result that remains the field's most-cited paper, and it established neutral atoms as the quantum error correction leader. A January 2026 follow-up pushed that to 96 logical qubits from just 448 physical atoms – the current verified world record, doubling the prior best - and the clearest demonstration yet of the gate-based, zoned architecture described above.

In June 2026, QuEra and AWS announced an expanded partnership to bring Libra – QuEra's first named fault-tolerant system – to Amazon Braket in 2028. Libra targets 256 error-corrected logical qubits at "megaquop scale," or one million reliable logical quantum operations at a 10⁻⁶ logical error rate. A follow-on generation – loosely termed "gigaquop-scale" (one billion reliable logical operations) – is described as the threshold for first commercial applications, suggesting a post-2028 system already in architectural planning.

It's worth noting Google's decision to both invest in QuEra’s $230M Series B and simultaneously launch its own neutral atom program in Boulder, Colorado, in early 2026 – while its superconducting Willow chip remains its production system – constitutes one of the strongest external validation signals that the modality has received. Google placing a parallel bet on its superconducting qubits doesn’t necessarily mean higher faith in one over the other, but it does mean something.

Atom Computing

Atom Computing was founded in 2018 in Berkeley, California by Dr. Ben Bloom, and has raised over $300 million in total funding, including $100 million in Series C and a $100-million Letter of Intent from the U.S. Department of Commerce, contingent on development milestones – both announced in June 2026.

The company's commercial strategy is tightly coupled to a strategic partnership with Microsoft, whose Azure Quantum platform provides the error-correction software stack that sits between the Atom's physical hardware and the application layer. The significance of this co-design arrangement is visible in the results: In October 2023, the company set a world record with a 1,225-site, 1,180-qubit array – the first gate-based quantum platform of any modality to exceed 1,000 qubits. A November 2024 joint demonstration with Microsoft produced 24 entangled logical qubits at 99.6% two-qubit gate fidelity, and 28 logical qubits running a benchmark algorithm with real-time error correction.

The company's most commercially significant development is Magne – currently being installed at QuNorth, a Nordic quantum initiative funded by Denmark's EIFO and the Novo Nordisk Foundation, expected to be operational in early 2027. Magne targets approximately 50 logical qubits from 1,225 physical qubits. It is, per Atom Computing's description, the world's first commercial quantum computer delivered with logical qubits as its primary specification – not a physical qubit headline count, but error-corrected logical qubits as the unit of sale. That shift in the commercial framing – from physical to logical – matters as a signal of where the industry is moving.

Atom Computing has not published a formal public roadmap. From available statements and a 2025 whitepaper, the company plans roughly a 10x qubit count increase per generation (a seemingly Moore’s Law-coded roadmap), placing next-generation systems in 2028 at approximately 10,000 physical and 100+ logical qubits. A June 2026 collaboration with UK company Nu Quantum will explore photonic networking between separate atom array modules – the interconnect approach that would allow scaling beyond single-array limits. Microsoft's own benchmarking framework anchors the targets: 50 logical qubits represents "general simulation advantage"; 100, "scientific advantage for classically intractable problems"; 1,000, "industrial advantage in catalysis and chemistry."

Pasqal

Pasqal was founded in 2019 in Paris, emerging from the Institut d'Optique Graduate School and co-founded by Professor Alain Aspect – awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics for foundational work on quantum entanglement. The company has raised over $300 million in funding, employs 275+ people, and serves more than 25 clients. A SPAC business combination with Bleichroeder Acquisition Corp. II signed in March 2026 at approximately $2 billion pre-money equity value, would bring Pasqal to public markets with roughly $649 million in cash, post-merger.

If QuEra is the scientific pace-setter and Atom Computing's distinguishing move is its Microsoft co-development model, Pasqal's differentiator is commercial and infrastructural: The company has deployed neutral atom processors directly inside high-performance computing centers as co-processors. Systems are installed at GENCI in France, Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany, and CINECA in Italy. Revenue in 2025 reached 16.5M€ in commercial bookings, with clients that include Crédit Agricole CIB (portfolio optimization and derivatives pricing), Thales (satellite constellation planning), EDF (energy systems optimization), and CMA-CGM (maritime logistics routing). In early 2026, the company announced a demonstrated quantum advantage over classical methods in a materials science simulation of magnetic materials – a result being watched for peer-reviewed publication.

Pasqal maintains one of the most transparent public roadmaps in the space. Named hardware generations progress from Vela (2026, 256+ qubits) through Centaurus (2028, ~10,000 physical qubits, early fault-tolerant operation) to Lyra (2029, 100 high-fidelity logical qubits), with a 2030 target of 200+ logical qubits. The company also recently acquired Aeponyx – a Canadian photonic integrated circuit developer – to replace bulk laser optics with chip-scale photonic components, addressing both control precision and the manufacturing scalability of its control systems.

The difference in Pasqal's approach compared to that of Atom Computing and QuEra is that the company isn't yet deploying a digital, gate-based quantum architecture, but an analog one. Rather than executing discrete sequences of qubit operations, Pasqal's deployed systems evolve the entire atom array as a continuous quantum system — programming the physics directly, rather than translating a problem into circuit instructions.

If the earlier ASIC-versus-FPGA analogy held for the configurability question, this is the deeper version of it: Pasqal is currently selling the quantum equivalent of a dedicated hardware accelerator, purpose-matched to specific problem classes like materials simulation and combinatorial optimization, rather than a general-purpose quantum processor. That distinction helps explain both the commercial traction — analog quantum systems excel at exactly the optimization and simulation problems enterprises are already paying to solve — and the roadmap logic: Vela, the 256-qubit system launching in 2026, is where Pasqal begins the transition toward full gate-based digital operation.

Beyond Qubit counts

Raw physical qubit counts have dominated quantum computing headlines for years. But as we've touched on in parts one and two of this series, the metric that increasingly defines the fault-tolerance race is the ratio of physical qubits required to produce one logical qubit – the reliably error-corrected unit of computation that can actually be chained together to solve real problems.

The ratio depends on two things: the physical error rate of individual gates, and the connectivity of the hardware (which determines which error-correcting codes can be efficiently implemented). The ratios between the technologies we’ve already explored in part one (superconducting qubits and trapped ions) stand at around 1,000:1 physical to logical qubits and approximately 2:1 in terms of Quantinuum’s ion trap. Photonics quantum approaches, as explored in part two, are a different beast: Photon loss rates push physical-to-logical toward the 100:1 range or beyond – depending on where in the photon-to-qubit hierarchy you start counting.

For neutral atom quantum computing, QuEra’s approach currently sits at around 5:1. The numbers are more akin to apples-to-oranges than we’d like, but that’s the name of the game across these approaches. Improvements in error correction algorithms can and will change these ratios, but it’s a good approximation of where the technologies currently stand.

The neutral atom field has moved with unusual speed. The modality went from a 256-physical-qubit research system on AWS in 2022 to a 96-verified-logical-qubit world record in early 2026, a first commercial logical-qubit sale being installed in Denmark, and a named 256-logical-qubit fault-tolerant cloud system announced for 2028. That pace was not widely anticipated even two years ago.

As with the previous articles in this series, the convergence point is the same: fault-tolerant, error-corrected systems around the late 2020s to early 2030s, as the horizon for computers that genuinely outperform classical ones on commercially meaningful problems. What distinguishes the neutral atom path is the combination of software-defined connectivity enabling efficient error-correcting codes, coherence times in the seconds, and hardware that – for the first time across the three modalities we've examined – begins to look like something deployable in a conventional data center environment rather than requiring a specialized facility built around it.

DARPA's Quantum Benchmarking Initiative – our recurring external validation metric across this series – has selected QuEra for both Stage A and Stage B, and Atom Computing for its Stage B. That puts the neutral atom field in the same validated bracket as IBM, IonQ, and Quantinuum from part one, and Xanadu from part two. Whether neutral atom eventually takes the lead or the actual answer lies in a multi-modal quantum computing system is a question that the next few years will answer.