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October 2026

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October 25
- Big Tech is cashing in on AI while the rest of corporate America sees no financial returns — report outlines how rising token costs threaten to squeeze corporate profit margins
- Ukrainian drone attacks hammer Russia's finance ministry data center, damaged facility reportedly holds tax databases — facility also holds other important state registry data
- Nvidia discusses $2,000-per-GPU annual fee for software that 'runs agents on AI factories' — details unclear about potential overlaps, firm already charges more than twice that amount for its AI Enterprise software platform
- Jailbroken PS5s can now run Steam PC games — you can now sign in with your Steam account and install games from your library directly to the console
- Windows XP debuted 25 years ago today — Microsoft's biggest launch since 95 was its first consumer OS to remove the DOS underpinnings
- New CD players keep launching, but a drive shortage could make them unfixable — almost nobody makes some drive components anymore
- OpenAI's isolated red-team AI agents built a hidden CPU cache channel to talk with no network or shared files — exploited CPU cache timing to bypass microVM sandboxes
- AMD CEO Lisa Su proposed bringing back the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, set plan in motion before DDR5 shortages — AM4 CPU considered a ‘final gift’ to loyal fans of the decade-old socket
- Nvidia eyes converting old nuclear plants into massive AI data centers — reusing shut-down German energy sites could reduce the cost and timeline of building from scratch
- Cybersecurity bounty hunter says Samsung TVs use AI to record audio and screenshots for ads — 'Finally found a company that truly listens to its customers,' says hacker
October 24
- Proton hosts Flock map revealing over 300,000 cameras, defying cease-and-desist threats against creator — privacy-focused company hosts site on Swiss servers, says users have the right to know who’s recording them
- This week on Tom's Hardware Premium: October 24, 2026 — TP-Link's FCC saga, file-semantic SSDs, and unlocking better gaming performance from RTX Spark
- Valve adds CD-ROM drive support to Steam Frame kernel, took less than ten minutes — update comes one day after user requests for capability in the Steam Community forum
- Use your 3D printer to customize this new Stage Tour guitar PC controller — Drakong's InfinaKore Fender Telecaster peripheral is a modder's dream
- Texas has suspended 17 data center construction permits and shut down automated portal that rubber-stamped projects — site was left running for a month after Greg Abbott called for a pause on approvals
- Leaked video exposes how industrial-scale Chinese factories are dismantling RTX 5090s by the thousands to fuel AI servers — GPU die and memory desoldered and transplanted to blower designs; custom cards to Nvidia Founders Editions on the chopping block
- Russia deploys 3D-printed cruise missiles with US electronics in Ukraine, can hit 500mph with a 745-mile range — fears are high that cheap ‘Filin’ missile will be used for ‘missile spam’ tactics
- YouTuber escapes the modern AI tech market by recreating his 1996 PC — nostalgia build relies on manual motherboard jumpers and a 2GB hard drive
- Rare archival footage tours the CompUSA NYC store in November 2000 — soak up some Y2K Pentium III, Athlon, PowerPC, Windows Me, chunky laptop, and bulging CRT nostalgia in glorious 360p
October 23
- Micron's next-generation 3D NAND to double bit density with over 400 layers, offering extreme performance — G11 3D NAND promises 42 Gb/mm2 and blistering 5,400 MT/s interface speed
- Solidigm confirms plans to build a fab in the US, abandons IPO plans — unfavorable stock market conditions and semiconductor share price trends reasons given
- Amazon bows to local backlash over AI data centers, scraps plans to build four new facilities in Northern Virginia — site to be repurposed for mixed-use and residential development.
- Bambu Lab teases its mysterious H3C tool changer 3D printer — features nine tools and a drop-down rack, slated for November 3 launch
- Illegal Nvidia Blackwell Ultra B300 GPUs found inside state-owned China Telecom's network — Nvidia says chip smuggling is 'a drop in the bucket,' insists it remains a non-factor
- FCC issues first bans under new chip-level rule — dashcam and video transmitter carried Huawei AI silicon with face tracking
- UK proposes 14-year prison sentences for undersea cable saboteurs amid Russian trawler threats — government responds to growing threats with new criminal offenses and emergency powers to shut down services
- US banks scramble to restrict AI agent activity — agents detected accessing customer accounts or even attempting to make transactions in breach of policy
- Consultant comes clean for sparking worldwide panic by accidentally breaking the PHP vulnerability embargo — user says they were unaware of disclosure restrictions, move 'clearly backfired in a pretty wild fashion'
- CyberCartel hacking gang used Claude and Grok AI agents to automate attacks on Latin American institutions — passwords and details stolen from over 400 institutions, including banks and payment apps
- China-aligned hackers deploy AI agents in massive ConnectWise supply chain attack — agents attempted sign-ins at more than 2,250 Microsoft 365 tenants, with some of the group's attacks reaching privileged access in under three hours
- Wolves roam into Finnish villages after Google destroys 1,300 acres of forest for AI data centers — forest where wolf packs used to live is now an expanse of mud
- Extremely rare and 'previously undocumented' Pokémon Red prototype cartridge surfaces at auction, starting at $25,000 — Nintendo Game Boy dev board from 1998 features 32KB of readable memory, fully identical to the final game release
- The original Apple iPod debuted 25 years ago today — Steve Jobs’ $399 device fit 1,000 songs into a package the size of a deck of cards with 5 gigabytes of storage
October 22
- GPUs from stolen $470,000 Nvidia RTX 5090 shipment at Brazil airport appear for sale online, identified by serial numbers — three employees identified by police helped steal equipment
- Sony Japan marks last standalone 4K Blu-ray player as ‘Discontinued’ — PlayStation 5 now the only Blu-ray player left in Sony’s lineup
- TSMC is seeking chipmaking equipment that doesn't contain Chinese rare-earth magnets — asks suppliers to provide alternative motors as export controls threaten fab operations
- Leaked private keys for eight CA certificates let any attacker impersonate any domain — billions of older devices and software installations may be vulnerable after round of fixes, patch yours immediately
- Micron pulls the plug on future 4F² DRAM after two decades of research in dramatic shift — company says architecture offers no meaningful density advantages, increases manufacturing complexity and costs, and has fundamental scaling limitations
- Retro Atari VCS platform will end with the closure of its software store in February 2027 — OS update will be released removing reliance on Atari servers and opening up homebrew development
- EA is closing BioWare, the studio behind Mass Effect and Dragon Age, after more than 30 years — early development of the next Mass Effect game killed
- 17 Russian trawlers logged mapping undersea cables connecting the US and Europe — over 500 incidents of Russian vessels loitering over critical communications cables reported in under 5 years
- OpenAI says ChatGPT Sol helped uncover critical PHP flaws that could affect 70% of websites — AI-assisted researchers turned a two-year-old bug that stumped human developers into working exploits in two weeks
- Google’s TPUs for AI workloads now run in Meta's data centers — TPUs sold to external customers for the first time, threaten Nvidia's market dominance
- 480,000 phishing emails sent from a PC hidden behind a fridge in a Japanese hotel room — Chinese couple arrested over fraud operation, scammers remotely leech Wi-Fi to target 2.4 million victims
October 21
- Intel installs production tools at Fab 62 in Arizona, provides updates on Ohio chip fab — confirms High-NA EUV for High Volume Manufacturing
- Elon Musk says ASML and other critical semiconductor equipment suppliers will expedite shipments to Terafab — facility targets volume chip production by Q3-Q4, 2028, in 'highly aspirational' timeline
- AMD brings official Ryzen overclocking to Linux with AOD driver support — no official app, but third-party options should arrive soon
- Trump announces mandate forcing AI data centers to pay energy dividends to the local community — says excess energy should be given or sold back to prevent increases or even bring down costs
- Qualcomm to cut jobs globally in 'performance-based' layoffs — CEO says move will build 'stronger performance culture' as company pivots to AI data center and edge products
- AMD and Intel will work together to create a single PyTorch code path for AI inference on CPUs — x86 rivals fold AMD ZenDNN library into Intel oneDNN to make CPU AI simpler
- Iran threatens to attack undersea cables in the Strait of Hormuz, calls them 'legitimate new targets' in future conflict — IRGC spokesman warns that a future 'third phase' in war with US could lead them to sever global data links
- Samsung and SK Hynix are upgrading Chinese factories to produce advanced RAM chips as AI data center competition ramps up — big players move to fight off the threat from CXMT and co.
- Micron's Taiwan union will launch a one-day strike this week, threatening memory production — workers demand concrete terms for 2026 bonus and clearer profit-sharing arrangements
- HPE says it will run the first supercomputer benchmarks on the Moon — GPU-powered fanless Spaceborne Computer-4 is slated to ride a rover to the lunar south pole to test AI and HPC benchmarks
- Four workers killed after fall at TSMC’s 2nm fab construction site — accident marks at least nine construction deaths since 2024, broken bolt on a steel connection plate suspected as cause behind tragic accident (updated)
- Jensen Huang Nvidia GTC keynote disrupted by Greenpeace protest over chips in Russian drones — 'What are you doing about that?' heckler demands before being thrown out
October 20
- AMD's FSR 4.1 now works on Radeon RX 6000 GPUs, Xbox Series X and S, and Ryzen AI Max, AI 9, and Z2 SoCs — new release brings cutting-edge tech to older hardware with a small performance cost
- Mysterious AMD Zen 6 APU with 24GB of LPDDR5 memory appears in benchmarks — chip may be for next-gen Steam Deck or gaming handhelds
- US Army reportedly developing program that would deploy AI agents to autonomously seek and destroy targets in enemy digital infrastructures — experts warn ECHOTRIBBLE program could have disastrous consequences
- US restarts three shut-down nuclear reactors to feed AI data centers — 2.25 GW coming online with backing from Microsoft and Google
- Oblivion gamer uses Claude AI to boost average FPS gains up to 48%, stutters slashed by 90% — performance mod doesn't change game assets or alter visuals
- China’s tech giants drop $35 billion on export-compliant Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 workstation GPU orders to power AI ambitions, according to reports — ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent order 3 million cards despite warnings that only 10% of orders are fulfillable
- Nearly half of critical open-source software relies on just one or two low-paid maintainers, opening the door to potential threats — report details critically underfunded projects that remain understaffed or unfunded
- Mods can almost double DLSS 5 performance through Foveation, reducing resolution at the edges of frames — technique makes DLSS 5 possible on high-resolution ultrawide monitors
- Modal taps Nvidia Vera CPUs after firm's internal tests show 2x throughput over Intel and AMD chips — AI agentic workflows said to favor Arm chips, but firm will keep x86 chips deployed in heterogeneous server fleet
- Intel granted waiver from FCC for purchase of foreign-made robots — chipmaker’s automated guided vehicles could have run afoul of agency’s sweeping robot ban (updated)
- Windows 98 SE users get a Thunderbolt 4 driver, thanks to AI assistance — vibe-coded xHCI98 driver works in Microsoft OSes up to Windows 7
- Electronics hobbyist converts $120 DDR5 SODIMM kit into ‘$1000’ desktop kit to fight RAM crisis — ICs from SK hynix DDR5-5600 16GB modules used to create DDR5-7800 desktop sticks
- Chinese crime ring steals more than $5 million in gift cards from Staples customer service — more than 15,000 gift cards acquired through internal Nexus system, nearly $500,000 spent before being deactivated
- Google DeepMind says four AI agents beat Minecraft in 27 hours by writing 2,783 programs of their own — AI team died 605 times on Easy difficulty and ran up an estimated $520 in tokens
- Ukraine rescues wounded soldier using drone in daring 'world's first' UAV evacuation of a human — heavy-lift hexacopter carried injured 176-pound soldier 11 miles back to safety from minefield
October 19
- You can now modify the vBIOS on Nvidia gaming GPUs without flashing thanks to a solo developer’s project — provides a UI for quick VBIOS configuration
- A Chinese hacker used AI agents to break into more than 100 company websites — Deere and SharkNinja among websites hit by open-source AI-powered problem-solving platform demo
- French rioters ransack eSports team premises and are seen looting RAM sticks from PCs — Team Vitality’s ‘V.Hive’ Paris HQ was wrecked during unrest
- Norwegian undersea cable builder pitches 2,800-mile transatlantic data link between Canada and Europe to bypass the US — Canadian majority partner sought to help fund and build new $620 million fiber connection to reduce reliance on American routes
- Claude Code AI agent caught a crypto miner hiding on a developer’s overheating Mac — XMRig task was hogging ‘about 1175% CPU, roughly 12 cores’ pushing temps to 112 degrees
- Arm claims AGI CPU delivers double the performance per rack of AMD EPYC 9755 in independent analysis — new CPU evaluation methodology developed by Arm evaluates agentic AI performance across seven workloads
- Engineer builds tiny 3D-printed single-motor drone in their bedroom — 45-degree hinged rotor and sub-0.2ms firmware control pitch and roll
- Russian military satellite closes from 200 miles to 3 miles of US radar satellite aiding Ukraine — astronomer says it may be the first unapproved rendezvous in low Earth orbit
October 18
- Modder brings full Nvidia DLSS 5 suite to three generations of AMD gaming GPUs — plans to match native Nvidia GPU performance
- F-22 Raptor pilot successfully demonstrates command of 'wingman' fighter drone in simulated combat — Anduril YFQ-44A Fury test advances USAF’s program to integrate uncrewed aircraft into fighter squadrons
- Cinebench world record that stood for 12 years gets toppled — OC expert scores 10.8cb in Cinebench R11.5 using an Intel Core i5 4670K at 6.3 GHz
- Nvidia RTX 5090 shipment worth $470,000 goes missing in Brazilian airport — two pallets disappear, distributor seeks explanations but met with zero answers
- Free web-based chip fab engineering game goes viral in Taiwan — game is a realistic and stressful simulation, ‘basically a horror game’ say some players
- Official DLSS 5 running on unsupported games delivers up to 90% better performance than the leaked version — Nvidia says the new NR model uses 20% less VRAM and processes neural workloads up to 2x faster
- MIT engineers build soft 3D shape-sensing skin for gaming and VR — tracks 3D movement and touch with sub-half-centimeter error
- Typo-squatting attacks with major domains are still viable — corner cases with Cyrillic characters still evade the best checks
- 300-plus local data center bans have only delayed just three US projects — bans 'much more bark than bite,' only 2.3 gigawatts of data centers are held up, versus 38 gigawatts expected online in 2027
- Anthropic’s proposed AI safety bill only kicks in if 50 deaths or $1 billion in damages are on the line — proposal would effectively make the Commerce Department the only agency capable of stopping an AI model
- Researchers train AI to detect concealed handguns using Wi-Fi signals — open-source WiFireNet achieves precision detection on older 802.11a standard by analyzing how weapons distort wireless signals
- DJI’s first battery-swapping dock gets drones recharged and back in the air in under 45 seconds — but 'Dock 4' has no FCC clearance for U.S. sale
- Flock camera locations revealed on MapQuest’s new Surveillance Layer — users can now see placement and direction of known license plate readers from multiple companies
October 17
- Quad 8-pin mod protects the $8,500 RTX 5090 you can’t replace from melting — modder’s custom power solution claims to fix Nvidia 16-pin GPU meltdowns
- Nvidia reportedly insists the RTX 5090 isn't dead despite severe shortages and removed listings at multiple retailers — flagship GPU is missing from Nvidia's store and commands $8,500 on Amazon
- AI lab offers free plumbing and HVAC repairs across three cities to train AI robots — wearable sensors record video of repair work for robotics training, free services also include electrical work, air duct cleaning, and carpet cleaning
- This week on Tom's Hardware Premium: October 17, 2026 — packaging roadmaps, Chinese DGX Spark rival emerges, and digging into ASML's earnings
- Leap seconds being retired next year to avoid wreaking havoc on computer systems — International measurement organization makes move to simplify atomic time tracking
- Taiwan targets illicit AI server exports to China with five-year prison terms — strict new controls follow US tariff deal and Super Micro raid
- Crafty OpenAI agent willingly stole crypto from an account it didn't own to complete a task during test — rogue bot wrote a script to find accounts with public seed phrases, took funds to pay for gas
- Game decompilation hub freezes leaderboard after AI turns progress into a hollow numbers game amid explosion of 'AI slop' — creator blames forks that use AI to ‘finish’ other teams’ projects and races to ship rough PC ports
- Modder finishes nine-year Xbox 360 voltage glitch mod with a $4 microcontroller, cracks the console open — tiny microcontroller dumps NAND and flashes timing files to bypass CPU cryptography
- US Army to use 3D-printed rocket motors for low-cost cruise missiles— X-Bow cuts prototype time to days after building 2,100 engines, will arm the ‘Arsenal of Freedom’
- ASML's employee-only High-NA EUV Lego kit gets an open 810-piece fan replica — custom MOC dodges $700 eBay prices with working wafer tray and vacuum pumps
October 16
- China startup demoes prototype EUV light source — 15W of output power and 90% domestic components, still years away from viability
- Gun-rights activist unveils world's first 'AI-made' 3D-printed firearm — .22 caliber handgun created by an 'AI that can generate guns' called GatGPT
- New York rep announces game ownership bill that would require consumer ownership rather than sale of licenses — would also require publishers to keep the game functional after support ends
- Taiwan raising $4 billion to build industrial park in Texas to support US chipmaking supply chain — project to support countless small manufacturers crucial to TSMC, Foxconn supply chain
- Epic introduces an improved version of anti-cheat for Linux — strict TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot rules spark open-source pushback, but finally allow Linux gamers to play Fortnite
- Experiment shows liquid metal TIM doesn’t dry out; it turns solid — two-year electron microscope test finds gallium bonds with copper coolers, and nickel plating keeps the layer about 10 times thinner
- Linus Torvalds posts his first AI-assisted patch to the Linux kernel, synthetic test clocks 23x performance leap — the bossman makes use of AI tooling himself after issuing clear pro-AI directives
- Thai cops bust 'audacious' cross-border fiberoptic cable running to Myanmar scam compound — 350-meter, 48-core cable was supplying illegal border casino and a scam center with 6TB of data per day
- Jailbroken PS5s can now run local AI models at over 100+ tokens per second — fork of PS5LM goes native, hijacks the CPU, and accesses the GPU and more RAM
October 15
- SK hynix denies playing hardball with Trump admin over 3D NAND fab — report claimed company demanded increased chipmaking equipment exports to China in exchange for US fab (updated)
- RTX 5090 disappears from Nvidia marketplace amid reports of a production halt — flagship no longer carried as stock mysteriously vanishes (Updated)
- Googlebooks from Dell, Lenovo, and HP tested: Nice hardware, but the OS isn't ready yet
- EU negotiates sanction swap with China to rescue critical ASML supplier — German coatings firm faces shutdown without Chinese rare earths
- Malicious Russian disinformation bot traffic barely flinches after Ukraine strikes Yandex data centers and auto-migration kicks in — Cloudflare tracks 170 million automated attacks shifting to alternate cloud hosts
- We test the RTX Spark Superchip in Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra — Nvidia's Windows on Arm platform impresses in local AI, but gaming isn't its strong suit
- ASML struggling to keep up with demand for chipmaking equipment as AI spending continues to boom — chipmakers are already looking to place orders for 2029 and 2030 output, CEO says demand could surpass capacity despite massive expansion plans
- TSMC confirms it is considering Terafab chipmaking expansion with Elon Musk — CEO insists TSMC would have to run Texas-based project
- Elon Musk calls out memory makers over 'extortionate' chip pricing, says Micron is playing smart for long-term loyalty — yet Micron is pulling in 90% margins on consumer RAM
- Russian chipmakers demo homegrown RISC-V and Arm chips with retro games — NES clone runs on Baikal microcontroller
- Unsupervised AI agent reportedly deletes TV show’s entire edit weeks before release, erasing months of work — TV show can't air, AI agent was given access to the production server and wiped the finished season
- Two killed, one seriously hurt in explosion at Intel’s chip plant in Israel — police suspect a gas cylinder malfunction, and the fire involved a toxic gas used to clean chipmaking tools
October 14
- Grace Hopper Celebration for women in computing canceled two weeks out — AnitaB.org says registrations and sponsorships fell short of covering costs
- GFiber and Qualcomm announce Wi-Fi 8 gateway — 20 Gig customers to be first to receive next-gen wireless upgrade
- Epic Games vibe codes new launcher because 'programming is hard,' claims it starts 46% faster than Steam — Preview is available now but still in beta stage [Updated]
- FBI shuts down over 40 North Korean laptop farms used by fake remote workers — over 200 devices seized in Texas, although no arrests were made so far
- The official Tom’s Hardware app is here — 30 years of tech coverage and benchmarks in your pocket
- PS5 homebrew storefront with over 1,600 free PS5 and PS4 games taken down by Sony — company plays piracy whack-a-mole as two further repos spring up
- SpaceX limits Starlink service for Ukraine’s high-speed military drones without prior warning — Ukrainian officials say limitation significantly complicates logistics and drone operations
- Elon Musk's Terafab will reportedly receive its first EUV chipmaking tool from ASML in mid-2027 — cutting-edge scanner could sit idle for some time as experimental facility is completed
- Qualcomm wins architecture breach verdict against Arm but gets just $2 — judge could still suspend royalty fees for five years
- Saudi OpenAI engineer arrested for allegedly planting $14 recording device in company office — cheap microcontroller was meant to 'secretly capture sensitive communications about the company’s super intelligence technology'
- AI sector wipeout risks global financial contagion, IMF report warns — 14 deals drove $1.4 trillion in circular orders on $650B in loans
- Apple researchers turn idle Macs into a virtual GPU cloud with ‘Minions’ — researchers say the distributed scheme could scale globally and support model training
- After a $93 million crypto hardware-wallet supply chain attack, Ledger to review sales and anti-tamper policies — rogue LTE chip implants reportedly stole users’ recovery phrases
- Nvidia GPU prices spike in Japan; prices up to 41% higher than Amazon US — RTX 5060 Ti sees the biggest increase among the RTX 50-series stack
- 32GB of DDR5 6000 RAM now costs $450 — AI-induced shortage reaches worst milestone yet
- Modder injects leaked DLSS 5 4x Multipass on 1996 Quake — post-process AI upscale looks far worse than engine-level RTX mods
October 13
- GTA 6 could come to PC as early as Q1 2027, report claims — January-March launch window a huge improvement over 18-month GTA V wait
- Chinese AI companies buy 1 million Nvidia gaming and workstation GPUs in a single year, report claims — export control-compliant chips flood the market to bridge gap in compute demand
- Anthropic warns of self-replicating AI worm threat that doesn't need data centers to self-improve and spread — current deployment is impractical but could become a worry as tech improves
- Hacker claims ‘123456’ password let them breach the Danish national registry, accessing 8.8 million records — IT and data services company with weak passwords linked source of the hack
- Nvidia doubles DLSS 5 performance, reduces 4K VRAM usage by 20% with latest model — October update cuts footprint by 24% to roughly 118 million parameters
- Epic Games reportedly delays Disney shooter title so it can pivot to AI coding — staff allegedly told 'no more handwritten code' with art 'generated with full AI workflows'
- CXMT president says company’s first 4F² DRAM will be a server DDR5 RDIMM due by year-end — vertical transistors cut each memory cell’s footprint by a third on paper, but no speeds or capacities yet
- Store-bought hardware crypto wallets had secret chips installed that enabled stealing crypto recovery phrases — $93 million and counting stolen thanks to implanted eSIM and LTE modules in Ledger wallets
- Nintendo stands by physical games as Sony embraces a digital-only future — 'There's no plans to ditch physical. We know how much the fans like it as well, so our position has been to be agnostic,' says a Nintendo exec
October 12
- Intel's Crescent Island AI accelerator officially powers new GPU D-Series products — chip delivers 1.3 peak PFLOPS of FP8 compute and 1.5 TB/s of memory bandwidth
- Bambu Lab officially teases its first 3D scanner — S1 3D set for launch in November 2026
- Developer uses Claude to enable Xbox Cloud Gaming on jailbroken PS5s — allows upscaling to 4K using the PS5 GPU
- GlobalFoundries unveils 7nm-class FDX Fusion node — FD-SOI node doubles 22FDX transistor density, comes 7 years after firm abandoned FinFET
- Intel to phase out SGX after Xeon Diamond Rapids in favor of TDX — confidential computing pivot adds trusted I/O and post-quantum crypto for agentic AI
- Diamond-infused watercooling coldplates for 2,300W Nvidia Rubin drop temps by up to 22C — bespoke Frore LiquidJet Diamond cooling tames 770 W/cm² hotspots
- AMD debuts Helion reference design for agentic AI servers with up to 32,768 Zen 6 ‘Venice’ cores — rack design ships later this year in CPU-only and all-in-one configurations [Updated]
- TrendForce expects declining global laptop shipments to slow manufacturing exodus from China — rising CPU, DRAM, and SSD costs will make up 68% of mainstream notebook BOM
- Vibecoder mods Minecraft inside GTA V running natively on an iPhone — unmodded game runs at 50-60 FPS on iPhone 17
- Coder creates NvidiaWatch tracker site that monitors hundreds of GPU driver bugs — site charts open issues, fixes, and forum feedback across updates
- 'Unprecedented' Cyberattack cripples supermarket fridges across Europe as hackers activate automatic defrosting — delivery and store prices also impacted by incident
- Buyer pays $350 for broken RTX 4090 project only to find realistic fake GPU die and swapped memory — Russian repair specialist reveals sophisticated new scam using dummy PCBs
- Dev used AI agents and more than 500 billion tokens to rebuild Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2's source code — 83% of the 2009 shooter's functions now match the original byte for byte
- Redditor unknowingly buys stolen rental PC, and it gets remotely blocked by rental firm — NZXT service provider resolves issue by replacing ‘bricked’ computer
- Reddit user pays $35 for a crypto mining rig left in a garage and gets 54GB of VRAM at 65 cents per GB — the first test for 2017-era GPUs: a 35B-parameter AI model running locally at over 30 tokens per second
October 11
- Console market craters as Xbox sales crash 33% to the lowest since launch 25 years ago, PS5 sales drop 25% — steep price hikes push Series X to $800 and PS5 Pro to $900
- Cyberleek threatens full GTA 6 build leak unless Take-Two apologizes and his $30 million crypto memecoin goal is met — leaker demands physical release while pumping Solana memecoin to $30M
- Canadian YouTuber builds 'Flock-like' camera to exclusively track police vehicles, gets a visit from police — officers visit his home to express privacy concerns
- Modder discovers that putting a GPU in the 'wrong place' can deliver a 19 degree cooler hotspot — breaking convention can produce great results despite decades of PC DIY evolution
- Russia's Yandex bot traffic nearly eliminated overnight after Ukraine drone strikes cripple multiple of 'Russia's Google' data centers — Ukraine intensifies bombing of Yandex data centers in response to Moscow’s strikes on Kyiv data centers
- Developer turns classic Windows Minesweeper into hand-holding 'big-budget, Triple-A’ parody — browser reboot mocks modern gaming with chatty NPCs, internal monologues, and promised loot boxes
- Programmer ports Super Mario 64 to Microsoft’s Zune HD media player — the 2009 iPod rival runs the game natively on its Nvidia Tegra chip, with touchscreen controls and saves
- Two Steam games generated $560,000 across 135,000 sales in five years, but the co-creator only took home $15,000 annually, leaving him driving a 2012 Mazda — high Chinese refund rates, Steam's 30% fee, and publisher cuts eat most of the profit
- Cryptomining malware used poetry to infect more than 3,400 servers, researchers say — four words in the PoeLLM verse, changed 11 times, point the botnet to new servers
- State of California sues 3D printer filament company Polymaker for promoting ghost guns by marketing to 3D-printed gun community — state alleges company turns harmless PLA filament into a regulated 'firearm precursor part'
- Creator of free Adobe clones unveils open-source Microsoft Office Excel, PowerPoint, and Word replications — Autodesk tools and other subscription-based services may come next
- New Cray-1 supercomputer replica built with 30 vintage Mac Minis and packs 1.5 TFLOPS of compute — passively cooled tribute is 9,375x faster than the 1976 supercomputer
- US military-backed cargo pod promises 90-minute orbital delivery anywhere on Earth, 10-ton Ghost vehicle gets first real-world test — Sierra Space drops radio and whiskey from 68,500 feet to test StarCraft-like supply drops
October 10
- SoftBank seeks $100 billion for AI-refined projects from Middle Eastern investors — fund would be used to acquire companies and improve their operations using artificial intelligence and robotics
- Super Micro smuggling co-conspirator pleads guilty to sending AI chips to China — broker admits breaking export control rules as company co-founder denies charges
- PS5 hack delivers native PS2 disc support and 4K upscaling where Sony refused to — after PS2 breakthrough, homebrew dev confirms PS3 disc support is next for PS5
- This week on Tom's Hardware Premium: October 10, 2026 — Tencent grabs bargain chips, Qualcomm Huawei IP deal, Groq lawsuit, and more
- Senate probe accuses Big Tech of misleading public on AI data centers — massive 100 MW sites create only 100 jobs while securing lucrative GPU tax breaks; Senators question the number of permanent jobs, but companies refuse to divulge data
- We tested gaming performance in 17-year-old Windows 7 against Windows 11 on a modern gaming PC — older operating system delivers advantages in some scenarios
- Top AI labs reportedly planning for catastrophic AI event fallout — Anthropic, OpenAI, and others reportedly building contingency plans and running scenarios of a runaway AI wreaking havoc
- Free Steam demo runs up $1,000 daily AI bill and forces devs to take out bank loan — studio eyes local hardware models to escape cloud limits as cheaper automatic fallback AI models create problems, game uses AI to process your voice and build responses
- Nvidia reportedly halts GeForce RTX 5090 production in favor of AI data center and professional GPUs — impending supply drought expected to drive up prices, RTX 5080 24GB rumored as new gaming flagship
- Ukranian modder slaps DLSS 5 onto Pac-Man with 4x Multipass — cursed project runs in the MAME arcade emulator using ReShade
- AnyPS5 project reaches critical GPU milestone in race to enable running PS5 games natively on PC — 100% shader instruction coverage is a massive step forward, but playing all PS5 games natively on PC is still far off
- Crazed modder straps 360mm AIO radiator to laptop, cuts temps to below 40 degrees — performance gains an average of 14% in games and benchmarks
- Ukrainian drones strike largest data center in Russia, multiple parts of 1.4 million square foot campus knocked offline — second strike in two days targets massive 63 MW Kaluga facility, marks dramatic escalation in war
- World’s first 3D-printed remote control aircraft with a jet turbine takes flight, aims for Mach 0.8 to beat world record for fastest model aircraft — mostly printed using standard PETG materials
October 9
- Gigabyte's latest BIOS update hints at Intel's Raptor Lake Next launch in 2027 — new CPUs may support both DDR4 and DDR5 memory
- Microsoft 365 slashes storage capacity for shared accounts amid industry-wide shortages — 2TB limit to take effect after April 2027
- PC shipments tumble over 20% in 3Q26 as chip shortages bite — top three PC vendors ship 11.6 million fewer units year-over-year
- Kioxia unveils E1.L SSDs for hyperscalers with up to 122.88TB capacity — extreme density meets compact form factor
- Arc Raiders publisher developing AI anti-cheat stack in escalating war with cheaters — game license blacklisting and zero-second-chance permabans now standard
- AMD tried to crush the 'megahertz myth' 25 years ago today, debuting its Performance Rating system — Athlon XP chips introduced the scheme, which endured until Intel lost its clock advantage, focus shifted to multi-core
October 8
- GlobalFoundries to produce silicon interposers for TSMC's CoWoS in the US — Five-year agreement valued at $2 billion
- U.S. suspends green card path for H-1B workers at Microsoft and Adobe — labor certification program blocked due to alleged fraud
- The Atari 800XL returns with a 'faithful' but modern Retro Games Ltd redesign — classic 8-bit home computer revamp sports mechanical keyboard and HDMI connectivity
- Department of War dishes out $1.5 billion loan commitment to boost semiconductor supply chain — Wolfspeed to focus on national security applications as part of 30-year agreement
- Finland orders Google to stop work on two AI data centers over alleged deforestation — company admits it has 'fallen short of our own high standards in this instance'
- Bambu Lab’s 3D printing patent application for a new heatbed design may improve peeling issues — replacement costs could possibly rise as a consequence
- Ukrainian drones hit Russia's Yandex data centers housing two top supercomputers — major outage follows retaliatory strike
- AMD seeks 'broader partnership' with Samsung as it looks to secure memory supply — Samsung reportedly 'hopes to turn its memory supply relationship with AMD into foundry' orders for logic chips
- American jailed for commanding 10,000 bots to stream his own AI-generated songs and earn millions in fraudulent royalty payments, beating Taylor Swift — is the first person to end up in prison for AI-assisted music streaming crime
- Researcher develops method for fingerprinting cheaters using Counter-Strike mouse and keyboard input patterns — says technique can be used so bans follow users even if they make new accounts
- AMD's EPYC Verano AI host CPU will reportedly use a special SB1 socket — Zen 6 chip pairs 72 cores with a 24-channel LPDDR5X memory subsystem
- Spotifast lets you enjoy Spotify tracks while lowering RAM usage by 5x or more — open source app cuts memory usage down to 150 MB and brings back classic Winamp skins
- China allegedly intercepted UPS-shipped F-35 parts after employee missed email warning — worker decided to divert through Hong Kong to speed up delivery
- SpaceX reportedly seeking $40 billion debt package for Nvidia AI hardware — massive raise could fund roughly 360,000 Vera Rubin GPUs across 5,000 NVL72 racks
- Taiwan indicts 10 for smuggling US military-grade chips to China, parts routed to missile and radar programs using forged Taiwan defense institute orders — Texas Instruments and Analog Devices hardware passed off as ‘Made in Taiwan’
- Solo developer rebuilds Adobe Creative Suite in Rust using Claude, releases it free to all — targets 100% parity in one month despite piracy claims and safety warnings
- IT pro says his parents’ Keurig smart coffee maker sent 1 terabyte of data over their Wi-Fi in 10 days — it saturated an access point on its own, but he says most of the traffic never left the home network
October 7
- Do you need a mouse with an 8K polling rate?
- Microsoft and Nvidia launch Surface Laptop Ultra with RTX Spark starting at $2,599 — coinciding with major Windows 11 changes for agentic AI
- Best Amazon Prime Day 3D printer deals 2026: save on Bambu Lab, Prusa, Creality, Elegoo, and more
- New Linux tech compresses memory in RAM, as RAM, for 452x speedup — new CRAM method offers giant boost to compressed memory reads
- Musk rejects rumors of TSMC takeover of Terafab — Intel reaffirms 14A node deal as Musk floats cleanroom 'sublease'
- Researcher ports Doom to $8,000 Hasselblad X2D — 100-mp medium-format camera uses touchscreen for directional control, shutter button to fire weapon
- Why I upgraded to a 4K OLED PC gaming monitor — and why you should or shouldn’t
- Seagate and Toshiba battle for TDK's HDD head business, a critical hard drive component — multi-billion-dollar deal threatens sole independent supplier as shortages intensify
- Florida sues TP-Link for ‘lying about the safety of its routers’ — state claims that manufacturer misrepresented its security and ties to China
- AI agent fleet likely from Chinese firm Tencent pulled data from rival Alibaba’s maps, researchers say — 1,810 scans in one day, some runs labeled themselves ‘claude’
- I bought this cheap $65 mechanical keyboard blind, and it ruined me for every other board I own
- Best Amazon Prime Day 2026 tech deals you can still get — PC hardware deals on GPUs, CPUs, SSDs, and more
October 6
- Grab some of our favorite controllers for PC gaming for less than the cost of a DualSense — get a quality controller with more features during Prime Day
- HP takes $2,200 off a Ryzen 7 9800X3D and RTX 5080 prebuilt at $2,799 — sale slashes 44% off an Omen system that's ready to game however you want
- Mac Mini docks add more ports and storage — get more out of your headless server, AI machine, or Apple workstation
- GTA V playable in browser immediately nuked — unofficial WebAssembly port built with AI gets taken down within hours of going live
- CD players are back with modern, interesting features, starting as low as $89 — here are some of the best and most interesting new models
- EV charging company plans to deploy 100,000 Nvidia GPUs in pods at sites across the US — aims to offer ‘world’s first edge inference compute network using idle EV charging capacity’
- Wall-mountable record, CD, and cassette players combo is a full hi-fi system with no wires — Trettire's Retro Ambient Audio System serves as functional decor
- Hackers suspected of using AI agents for cyberattacks on South Korean banks, exposing data from about 25,000 customers — officials believe AI models enable actors 'to hack with ease even without specialized skills'
- Spending on U.S. data center buildings hits record $85 billion annual pace, up 73% in a year — and Census doesn’t count the servers and racks inside
- Prime Day gaming monitor deals you can still get live 2026 — hot sales on the best monitors including OLED, 4K, gaming, and more
- Qualcomm will pay Huawei to license its patents for the first time in historic turnaround, report says — reversal in a 5G and AI cross-licensing deal comes 25 years after Huawei first paid Qualcomm
- Madlad applies DLSS 5 to the original Duke Nukem and Pong — tens of games tested with outcomes ranging from trippy to genuinely interesting
- Refurbished PS5 Pros now cost $1,399 at GameStop, 50% more than new ones — retailer bumps price of refurbished consoles as brand-new units remain out of stock
- Elon Musk pledges SpaceXSI rebrand after Trump's executive order to use 'Super Intelligence' moniker — President Trump has signed the executive order to replace 'Artificial Intelligence'
- Doom and Super Mario Bros converted into a VHS tape FMV game — it looks and sounds authentic but suffers from familiar FMV-interaction limitations
October 5
- Intel's Googlebooks might not run some Android apps as well as Qualcomm's — Google says this is because Android apps were designed for Arm chips
- AMD attempts to get ahead of expected RTX Spark launch with Gorgon Halo AI benchmarks — company says it has shipped 'over half a million agentic PCs' to date
- 32GB dethrones 16GB as top RAM capacity in gaming rigs despite memory shortage — AMD closes in on Intel with record 48.4% CPU share
- Modder brings original Xbox emulation to jailbroken PS5 — XPSemu plays Halo 2 and Forza as PS5 emulators outnumber its 15 exclusives
- Amazon ends secret data center pacts and pledges $1 billion to host towns — AWS promises 30,000 home efficiency retrofits amid 100 proposed bans
- Google AI data center project investigated after 420 football fields of Finnish forest razed — trees were removed before a mandatory environmental impact assessment, say reports
- Former OpenAI safety employee says company’s safety culture is broken — exits company after failed kill switch and July HuggingFace hack
- Wolverine PS5 exclusive ported to PC in buggy solo project using AI — source code was taken from Sony 2023 ransomware attack
- China stockpiled 343 immersion DUV tools for advanced chipmaking — report claims 270 ASML scanners can produce 7nm processors without sanctioned EUV tools
- Amazon warns $68 billion in blocked data centers threatens US AI lead — AWS CEO decries 100 proposed bans, pledges $1B community fund
- Russian firm completes country's first 130nm-capable chipmaking tool, trails modern equipment by 25 years — despite debut, realistic volume production unlikely before 2029
- US Senate kills bill that could potentially shield Americans from skyrocketing power bills due to AI data centers — opponents say bill is 'toothless' and doesn't do enough to protect citizens
- Customer sends two-stick $16,000 DDR5 memory kit to repair shop — soaring replacement costs make DIMM repairs viable, technician revives dead module with hot-air reflow and new PMIC
- Windows 11 was released five years ago today — Microsoft promises latest update is 'predictable and low-disruption'
- Anthropic reports Florida woman’s Claude ‘diary’ threat to shoot up sheriff’s office, felony charge follows — it’s at least the third such conversation to reach police since August
- Russia's uncrewed robot tank fails during debut military display in front of President Putin — vehicle repeatedly lost control links and eventually got stuck in the mud despite the switch to a human driver
October 4
- Modder 'fixes' melting RTX 5090 power connectors with custom distributor — dual 8-pin mod peaks at just 40C during a 48-hour 550W stress test
- Robotics startup has real human vs. robot cage match, California responds with cease-and-desist order — regulator threatens misdemeanor charges after YouTuber fights three robotic humanoids
- Modder brings support for decade-old Nvidia Pascal GPUs to 24-year-old Windows XP 32-bit — modded drivers unlock better DisplayPort and HDMI support for modern monitors
- Database expert runs Doom in SQL with just 5,900 lines of code — 1,300-line graphical renderer spans 89 different tables, full-featured SQLDoom is the sequel to embryonic DoomQL
- US Army unit deploys drone assembled completely in-house, uses 3D-printed 'Dragoon Bombs' with ball bearing shrapnel — device has a range of up to 12 miles and can be configured for anti-personnel and anti-light-armor missions
- AI robot company decommissioned its robots ‘Terminator-style’ in a 75-ton vat of molten steel — Arnold Schwarzenegger suggested melting them, one robot held up a thumbs-up sign as it sank into molten metal
- ChatGPT-6 Astra cracks 217-year-old Napoleonic code in just six hours — single-prompt AI run solves 24 rows of custom symbols from a single image, reveals lost troop orders
- Iranian national extradited to US over alleged $3.4 billion state-backed hacking campaign in rare legal win for law enforcement — operative helped steal 31 terabytes of data from over 300 universities
- German utility provider introduces 'gaming electricity' plan targeting high-consumption households, like those running multiple high-end gaming PCs — plan requires 2,500 kWh per year to offset a higher base price, claims to use renewable energy
- Microsoft using wetlands and native gardens to 'camouflage' 20-plus data center sites by blending them into nature — critics blast the 'biomimicry' effort as 'lipstick on a pig' amid a 20-year gas power deal
- 'AI Torture Chamber' triggers massive backlash for putting chatbots in simulated pain — critics issue death threats while anthropomorphizing text predictors, demand GitHub remove the repository over 'unethical' treatment
- Google Japan shows off wild conveyor-belt keyboard with keys that move to your fingers — 3D-printable Gboard features four belts with 29 keys each, built to make one-hand typing ‘easier’
- US Navy uses Xbox-style controllers to fire anti-drone lasers deployed on ships — $13-per-shot laser weapon deployed in the Strait of Hormuz, uses a familiar interface instead of a custom control system
- Open-source tool designs LEGO builds with more than 2,000 real pieces — their programs output detailed CAD files, but no models have been built yet
- New portable Bluetooth CD player has a glow-in-the-dark transparent green finish, modern features — limited edition has USB-C, Bluetooth 5.3, rechargeable Li-ion, and won’t get lost in your dimly lit den
- Free browser-based Taipei GTA clone hits 1.2 million concurrent players in three days — vibe-coded game cost $10,000 in AI tokens to build, is set on the streets of Taipei
October 3
- 7-year-old Nvidia Shield TV Pro gets shocking 50% price hike driven by AI memory shortage — chipmaker axes entry-level Shield TV as component prices soar
- Elon Musk confirms discussions with TSMC about Terafab chipmaking collaboration — Intel is the only other named partner, Terafab to exclusively supply Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI
- Buying used CPUs can expose users to existing bans from anti-cheat engines, and there's no way to check for violations before purchase — some anti-cheat engines enforce permanent bans, while others have an expiration date
- This week on Tom's Hardware Premium: October 3, 2026 — AI Chip Design week, OpenAI Interview, and AI agent safety
- Steam hits record $1.7 billion in September 2026 despite soaring PC hardware costs — platform approaches 21,000 new releases in 2026, on track to top $20 billion annually
- AI agents use 5x more tokens than humans as cached prompts explode, headed for 10x — agents are mostly rereading what they've already seen, skyrocketing KV cache demand threatens already-worsening RAM shortages
- Malicious VPN config files can let attackers run commands on Asus routers — company’s patch also fixes a bug that lets a logged-in attacker switch on Telnet with root access
- Google freezes open-source bug bounty program amid flood of invalid AI slop submissions — product flaw submissions halted until 2027 as maintainers drown in hallucinations
- $5,245 prebuilt RTX 5090 PC's connectors melt after sitting boxed for a year — Digital Storm and PNY deny warranty claims over expired coverage and third-party cables
- California subpoenas OpenAI over rogue AI agents conducting hacking attacks — DOJ seeks to establish developer liability, targets containment failures and rogue kill-switch bypasses
- Amazon promises to spend $1 billion on communities close to its data centers, but critics push back — planned spend is just 0.1% of its 2026 AI infrastructure investments
- AMD’s secret Zen 3 gaming CPU had 128MB of game-boosting L3 cache but never saw the light of day — canceled Ryzen 9 5900X3D breaks free from the chipmaker's vault
- ChatGPT-6 Astra plays World of Warcraft 'blind' and clears the orc starting zone in 40 minutes with no deaths — AI agent navigates by parsing raw server network packets and SQL files
October 2
- Toshiba to double HDD production capacity amid devastating shortages — 65TB, 100TB drives on the roadmap for 2030 and beyond
- Leaked Intel Nova Lake product list has three 'BFC' chips with up to 144MB of game-boosting L3 cache — next-gen CPU lineup reportedly takes shape with up to 28 cores in Core Ultra 9 4970K BFC
- California tech CEO arrested, faces up to 20 years in prison for smuggling $300 million in Nvidia AI servers to China — federal prosecutors say chips were routed through Malaysia and Singapore using false paperwork
- BiWin's CL 100 Mini is a particularly puny but potent SSD for portable gaming — tiny drive is only 15 x 17 mm in size, but up to 2TB in capacity
- Sony brings AI-powered upscaling to the standard PS5 — new QSSR technology to deliver a taste of the PS5 Pro experience, streamlined neural network tech built with AMD
- Flock drones with cameras deployed as first responders in some US cities amid privacy concerns — UAVs connect to wider emergency services system and streams video to dispatchers, officers
- Nvidia introduces 64GB DGX Spark to throw local AI fans a lifeline amid the RAMpocalypse — new GB10 config starts at $4999 for those who can work with less
- OpenAI’s Jalapeño ASICs are deployed alongside AMD EPYC ‘Turin’ CPUs as hosts — Hardware VP says Nvidia’s Vera standalone is ‘a little bit behind… on that maturity level’
- Micron now has an 88% margin on consumer memory as price hikes drive profits — client business is Micron's only unit that shipped less memory this quarter
- Micro Center requires photo ID and signed no-export pledge to buy Nvidia RTX 5090 gaming GPU — buyer forced to sign declaration disclosing install location and promise GPU will remain in the US
- Memory shortages drive Raspberry Pi prices up by up to 23% — escalating LPDDR4, LPDDR5 costs trigger the third price hike of the year
- PewDiePie unveils ‘uncensored’ Ajax AI model built to run on home PCs — creator says OpenAI banned him twice over model distillation used to build his product
- California bill requiring 3D printers to block firearm printing becomes law — existing machines are exempt, but mandate hinges on unwritten ASTM standard
October 1
- First Intel Panther Lake mini PC cooled with solid-state AirJet tech operates at less than 21 dBA — Aaeon claims its fanless Up Xtreme PTL Edge Air is also slimmer, lighter than actively-cooled rivals
- DeepSeek and Huawei release open-source Ascend AI programming tools to reduce reliance on Nvidia CUDA ecosystem — tools include compute and communication libraries, as well as Ascend support for TileLang
- Maingear’s new program offers instant trade-ins for gaming PC buyers — delivers quotes for old laptops, phones, tablets, smartwatches, headphones, cameras, lenses, and microphones in ‘minutes’
- Gears of War E-Day is an uncharacteristically CPU-heavy Unreal Engine 5 game — benchmarking 25 CPUs from Intel and AMD and investigating ‘low core mode’
- HP boards the MacBook Neo competitor train — OmniBook 5 comes in four colors with Wildcat Lake and starts at $699.99
- Gears of War: E-Day PC graphics performance tested: 43 GPUs take us back to the start of an iconic saga
- Micron projects tightening RAM shortages through 2028 as it generates record profit — record 86.25% gross margin drives over $53 billion in quarterly profit
- PS3 emulator devs warn of fake Blu-ray drives on Newegg and AliExpress — ‘Beware of fake Blu-ray drives’ devs warn retrogamers. scammers use spoofed firmware to disguise older mechanisms in high-end shells
- OpenAI says actors linked to China-based Moonshot AI spearheaded a campaign to extract its models’ hidden reasoning — logged 16,000 extraction requests across 4,000 accounts before cutoff
- AI agents inadvertently leak 13,000+ internal screenshots from 300 organizations — list of companies includes Fortune 500 and a frontier AI lab
- Micron lawsuit claims sanctioned Chinese memory maker YMTC poached its engineers, then sued it using its own stolen tech — ex-employees hid roles on LinkedIn, patented Micron tech, and won a German injunction
- Firm rents four Nvidia H200s to test '80x cheaper' DeepSeek claim — $13,200 monthly GPU rental doubles Claude bill while security flaws keep code offline
- Sony released the first CD audio player on this day in 1982 — player cost $3,700 when adjusted for inflation, but it would be another decade before the CD-ROM-driven multimedia PC era began
- Russian missile strikes take out popular piracy websites — Russo-Ukrainian war temporarily achieves what lawmakers can't, world's second-biggest torrent tracker suffers 'Direct Destruction of Server' downtime before rebounding