The AI-apocalypse is upon us, and regular consumers are paying that price in a big way. Apple went on a price-hiking spree in late June, leaving only iPhones and AirPods untouched. The bulk of Apple’s computing devices saw price increases ranging from a few hundred bucks to $1,300. Apple is now ushering in a new wave of price increases with the refreshed Mac mini and Mac Studio.

The new M6 Mac mini is now priced at $899, a $100 increase over the already inflated $799 price for the M5 version on June 25th. To put those increases in perspective, the M4 Mac mini had a base price of $599 when it originally launched in October 2024.

The new $799 base price is an even more bitter pill to swallow, given that the headless computer still comes with only 256GB of base SSD storage. One would think that the $300 price increase over the course of two months would at least lead to a doubling of the base storage, but the ongoing memory/storage shortage makes that wish unthinkable; at least in Apple’s eyes.

If you want to see more eye-watering pricing, take a look at the hardware upgrade costs for the base Mac mini. The system comes standard with 16GB of unified memory, but an extra 8GB (taking the total to 24GB) costs a whopping $200. If you want 32GB (the maximum allotment for the M6 chip), that’ll cost you an extra $400.

Things don’t look much better on the storage side, with an upgrade from 256GB to 512GB costing $200. The 1TB and 2TB storage options cost $500 and $1,000, respectively. Apple’s value-leader Mac mini is now in uncharted territory. A maxed-out Mac mini (M6, 32GB, 2TB) costs $2,229.

Even the M5 Pro version of the Mac mini couldn’t escape the AI tax, as the base configuration now costs $1,699, up from $1,599 for the M4 Pro version (June 25 pricing) and a far cry from the $1,399 price of the previous generation earlier in the year. That price gets you a 15-core GPU and a 16-core GPU, while stepping up to the uprated 18-core CPU/20-core GPU version adds $200. Memory upgrades are deflating to the psyche, as upgrading from 24GB to 48GB adds $600, while the 64GB option is $1,000.

Storage options are absolutely mind-boggling: a 1TB SSD requires an additional $300 outlay, while the max 8TB SSD configuration is listed at $3,800. The range-topping configuration (M5 Pro, 18-core CPU/20-core GPU, 64GB, 8TB) costs $6,699.

If there’s any consolation, the new Mac Studio holds the line on pricing ($2,499) in its base configuration (18-core CPU/32-core GPU, 36GB, 512GB). The price stasis is somewhat surprising given the hardware upgrades, including a new M5 Max SoC and PCIe Gen 6 SSD. However, upgrades are pricey, with the 18-core GPU/40-core GPU variant of the M5 Max adding $300 to your bill. The upgraded SoC is the only way to unlock additional memory options (48GB, 64GB, 128GB).

Stepping up the Mac Studio with M5 Ultra more than doubles the base, entry price of the M5 Max config at $5,499. This gets you a 30-core CPU and 64-core GPU, while the upgraded 36-core CPU/80-core GPU is a $1,300 option. 96GB of RAM comes standard, while 256GB is a $4,000 upcharge. SSD options are equally expensive: 2TB costs $500, and 16TB costs $7,500.

No matter which way you slice it, those firmly entrenched in the Apple hardware ecosystem are paying a heavy price for memory/storage shortages. Apple customers are doubly affected, as the company’s traditionally outrageously priced memory and storage upgrades have become even more expensive, putting Apple’s previously value-driven models like the Mac mini out of reach of bargain shoppers.

Apple has today unveiled its next-generation M6 Apple silicon chip, as well as a powerful M5 Ultra. The new chips will debut in new versions of its Mac Mini and Mac Studio, respectively, available to pre-order from today.

The M6 is Apple's first chip on a 2-nanometer process, utilizing a 12-core CPU with two super cores, four performance cores, and six efficiency cores. The chip also features a 12-core GPU and a 12-core GPU featuring neural accelerators, alongside a "Dual 16-core Neural Engine." The top version of the chip has 170GB/s of memory bandwidth.

That dual 16-core neural engine means that there are indeed two neural engines. There's a connection between the engines, allowing them to run one model quickly across both, or two separate models independently.

The M5 Ultra is Apple's first chip using its UltraFusion technology to form a quad-die architecture (The M5 Max chips it is connecting both used two dies). The chip goes up to 36 cores on the CPU and up to 80 cores on the GPU, with 1.2TB/S of unified memory bandwidth, which Apple says is 50% higher than the M3 Ultra. Apple also claims the 36-core CPU with 12 super cores and 25 performance cores will offer "up to 1.25x higher single-threaded performance and up to 1.3x higher multithreaded performance than M3 Ultra."

The M5 Ultra has a 32-core neural engine, but this is different from the dual 16-core neural engine on the M6. Because the M5 Ultra uses a pair of M5 Max chips over UltraFusion, the 32 cores across the dies to run two models in parallel for increased performance.

Both M6 and M5 Ultra feature GPUs with neural accelerators and their fastest cores, marking a leap forward for Apple's graphics processors when it comes to AI.

Apple users who have been maxxing out previous versions of the Mac Mini will be capped at 32GB of memory on the Mac Mini with M6, like a choice the company made due to the component shortage that has been affecting the entire industry. If you want 64GB like the M4 Pro, you'll need the M5 Pro model. But the M5 Ultra in the Mac Studio won't have that problem, with Apple offering up to 512GB of unified memory on that chip.

M6 also features updates to hardware-accelerated ray tracing, dynamic caching, and the shader core, which the company claims will allow for faster rendering and higher frame rates in games.

Mac Mini and Mac Studio

The new Mac Mini and Mac Studio aren't seeing any design changes, though there are substantial internal changes. Both systems are available for pre-order today, but won't arrive to customers and in retail stores until September 22.

Besides the M6 version of the Mac Mini, there will also be versions with M5 Pro. Both models will be bumped to Wi-FI 7 and Bluetooth 6, as well as 2.5Gb Ethernet (up from 1Gb), with a 10Gb option available as an upgrade. The Mac Mini also supports genlock via USB-C, synchronizing displays and cameras to prevent video drift during broadcasts.

For those working with AI, Thunderbolt 5 on the M5 Pro Mac Mini will allow customers to run clusters for on-device models.

The Mac Mini with M6 will start at $899, while the M5 Pro option will begin at $1,699 (each drops $100 for education pricing). Given that the Mac Mini with M4 started at $599, it's seeing substantial price hikes here.

The Mac Studio will come with M5 Max or the new M5 Ultra chip, and Apple is positioning it for on-device AI. It will now offer up to six Thunderbolt 5 ports with support for as many as eight displays. Like the Mac Mini, it's also getting Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 with Apple's N1 chip, which debuted in the iPhone 17 lineup. Like the Mac Mini, the Mac Studio also supports genlock for perfectly synced video.

The Mac Studio with M5 Max will start at $2,499 ($2,299 with an education discount), and the M4 Ultra model will start at an eye-watering $5,499 ($5,099 with an education discount).

Both systems will be compatible with macOS 27 Golden Gate, including Siri AI and refinements to the Liquid Glass design introduced in macOS 26 Tahoe.

A Russian Molniya drone carrying an Nvidia Jetson Orin module crashed and killed three civilians at a gas station in Zaporizhzhia last month after choosing its final target without a human pilot, according to a New York Times investigation that cites Ukrainian air defense commanders, drone experts, and the forensic team that examined the wreckage.

Kateryna Bondar, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the paper it's the first documented case of civilian deaths caused by a Russian drone using fully autonomous targeting. The dead were Tetiana Bubynets, a 19-year-old accounting student, and two men aged 41 and 48.

Human operators launched the drone toward the gas station, per the report, but the final aim point was selected onboard by software trained to recognize objects such as propane tanks. The aircraft failed to clear an apartment building on its approach, struck a wall, and detonated near people sheltering below, rather than striking its chosen target.

The strike drone flew in a group of roughly half a dozen aircraft, none of which emitted radio traffic, Ukrainian air defense officials said. Modules recovered from this attack and from intact test drones carried no encryption, so investigators could examine both the terrain imagery loaded for visual navigation and the code specifying which object classes the drone had been trained to attack. "Machines are making decisions to strike," Col. Serhiy Minaiev, Zaporizhzhia's air defense commander, told the NYT. Russia is understood to have begun AI-guided test flights of the mass-produced, fixed-wing Molniya in May, after months of self-targeting trials with the V2U.

Nvidia confirmed to the New York Times that modules photographed in the recovered drones were Jetson Orin minicomputers, hardware that sells for a few hundred dollars. "Our Jetson Orin modules are consumer-grade products sold to students, developers, and startups for a wide range of beneficial applications," an Nvidia spokesperson told Tom's Hardware. "They are not available in Russia and are not designed for military purposes. Pre-owned Jetsons are available through many reseller channels. Although we cannot track products after they are sold, if we determine that any customer is violating U.S. export controls, we will take appropriate action."

Ukrainian investigators have now linked the Jetson Orin to four Russian weapon families. A teardown by Ukraine's GUR intelligence agency last June found one seated on a Chinese Leetop A603 carrier board inside the V2U loitering munition, in combat use since February 2025. Weeks later, a Ukrainian general said the module powered object recognition in the upgraded Shahed MS001, and earlier this month Ukraine reported the same silicon in the S-71M Monochrome cruise missile. Data-center AI accelerators fall under U.S. export controls; edge modules like the Jetson Orin, with variants starting at $249, don't.

Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine's recently ousted defense minister, told the NYT that Kyiv tested its own fully autonomous system against fuel storage and military equipment in occupied Crimea in recent months, and Ukrainian quadcopters killed Russian soldiers in autonomous mode as far back as 2024. In Zaporizhzhia, defenses now include roughly 240 miles of anti-drone netting and plastic sheeting propped at odd angles around propane tanks to throw off image recognition.

Asus has finally opened pre-orders for the ROG Xbox Ally X20, an upgraded version of its flagship handheld with an OLED screen and transforming D-Pad. On its own, the system will sell for $1,299.99, while a bundle with the ROG Xreal R1 Edition 20 AR glasses, a dbrand Killswitch case, and a custom Pelican case will cost $2,499.99. The device will be available on October 15 at the Asus Store at Best Buy.

See the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X20 at Asus

See the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X20 at Best Buy

Initially, Asus had only announced the bundle, but later turned around and said a standalone version of its new take on the best handheld gaming PC. Given that this version of the Ally has an OLED screen (one of the biggest drawbacks of the original), it didn't make much sense to force a pair of AR glasses when so many people would want to look at the built-in display.

The original ROG Xbox Ally X, which, released in the fall of 2025, still costs $999.99. This new version, with a translucent shell, the OLED screen, transforming d-pad (from 4-way to 8-way), TMR joysticks, and rubberized grips, will come with a $300 premium before you add the bundle. What isn't changing is the internals: the X20 will still come with an AMD Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme processor.

The dbrand Killswitch in the bundle blocks much of the clear plastic, but has black and gold accents, as well as a built-in kickstand. The Killswitch also includes a skin that shows what's inside the Ally, but given that the black plastic is seethrough, it seems somewhat redundant.

The Pelican case is exactly what you would expect: a black box with red latches. There is a black-and-gold ROG 20th Anniversary logo, but all things considered, this is the most restrained item in the entire anniversary lineup. While I appreciate a case for the device, this is pretty heavy-duty.

The ROG Xreal R1 glasses appear to be functionally identical to the version we reviewed earlier this year, but with black and gold accents.

The ROG Xbox All X20 was originally announced at Computex, along with a suite of twentieth anniversary ROG computer components that cost as much as $15,000 in one PC build. Beyond components and the handheld, there is also a twentieth anniversary monitor, keyboard, mouse, router, and NUC mini PC.

The development of Linux, a free ‘hobby’ operating system, was announced by Linus Torvalds 35 years ago today. On August 25, 1991, the unknown computer science student noted that the budding OS had been “brewing since April, and is starting to get ready.” The first public release of this ‘Minix-like’ OS came the following month, and in a last-minute change by the co-worker who uploaded it, was distributed with the name Linux instead of Freax. In 2026, Linux powers everything from smartphones to supercomputers and oodles of products, like the Steam Deck, in between.

The above commemorative post celebrates Torvalds’ stewardship over the Linux project. However, it is also quick to make clear that “hundreds of maintainers and thousands of contributors” have been instrumental to making this free open source OS a competitive, capable alternative to corporate/paid software, which can “move computing forward for humanity.”

Since 1991, Linux has come a long way on its journey from its humble ‘hobby’ OS beginnings. What started as a kernel with roughly 10,000 lines of code has exploded into 40 million or more lines today. Torvalds was humble about the first release yet proud of features like its multi-threaded filesystem, and the first release being clear of any borrowed Minix code. But the countless contributors over the last 35 years have helped forge an enviable OS, which boasts capabilities and features that must make it a worrying foe for commercial rivals.

There are areas, outside our PC and gaming core, where Linux is actually the biggest fish by far. Industry stats suggest that nearly 80% of web servers, and virtually all of the world’s Top500 supercomputers run a flavor of Linux. It dominates mobile too, with nearly 4 billion Android devices running Linux-derived kernels. Then there are all those embedded systems, encompassing things such as routers to automotive MCUs – so many run Linux.

I feel that Linux has made significant progress towards the fabled ‘year of Linux’ over the last couple of years. Microsoft’s Windows has been its own worst enemy in some respects, pushing people away due to a multitude of concerns. Meanwhile, consumers can see that content creation, productivity, and gaming on Linux PCs are continuously improving.

There was a recent collective sigh of relief in the Linux world, too. Earlier today, we reported on news that the decades-long Linux ownership dispute was effectively killed after Xinuos’ appeal was rejected by the U.S. Court of Appeals. That ruling means much lingering uncertainty over Linux devices facing future licensing claims, maker settlements, audits, and/or forced software rewrites has been banished.

This Tom's Hardware Premium article is free to read with a Tom's Hardware account; no payment necessary. We're offering free access from August 23 to 26 so you can read all of our reporting from Hot Chips.

Nvidia has spent the last several months providing key disclosures about its next-gen Vera CPU for agentic data centers, which it continued at Hot Chips 2026. Although we've already learned a lot about Vera, how it compares to AMD's next-gen Venice CPUs, and the inner workings of the Olympus core, Nvidia provided a bit more color at Hot Chips on spatial multithreading, the memory subsystem, and what types of workloads it's targeting with Vera.

As a quick refresher, Vera is the first CPU with a custom Nvidia core, following up on Grace, which used a stock Arm design. It's shipping as a single, 88-core SKU, and it has some key design differences compared to Nvidia's x86 competition, most notably a multi-threading implementation that Nvidia calls spatial multi-threading, an LPDDR5X memory subsystem, and a monolithic compute die rather than using compute chiplets.

Nvidia says it's designed Vera specifically for agentic AI workloads, a category that's still being defined in terms of performance benchmarking. Many CPU-intensive tasks serve as proxies for agentic workloads (i.e., code compilation), though measuring performance across a full agentic chain is complex and inconsistent. Nvidia, in its own slides (see the end of this article), calls agentic AI the "most complex computing workload in history," after all.

Nvidia provided an example of a headless browser to show the benefits of Vera, using optimized code to mimic how an agent would use a browser. Compared to the 96-core EPYC 9655P, Nvidia says Vera runs 24% faster as browser instances scale.

This slide is a good demonstration of the complexities in measuring traditional workloads and applying that performance to agentic workflows. Agents will often fetch websites for information, but there are several layers where agents can trim back compared to humans; in this case, agents can run through a browsing workflow 4.5x faster by cutting things like GUI rendering, fonts, media decoding, and more.

Another touchstone for agentic performance is code compilation, as agents seek out software to compile on the system. This might be the most direct benchmark of agentic AI performance with current workflows right now. Though, as previously mentioned, agentic chains are long, complex, and involve several different workloads.

Once again, compared to the 96-core EPYC 9655P, Nvidia claims Vera can compile the Linux kernel 22% faster with a native AArch64 target, and 14% faster when cross-compiling for x86.

Nvidia's big cores for agentic AI — another look at Olympus and how it fits into Vera

Nvidia reiterated the importance of the large cores inside Vera, including the large BPU, neural branch predictor, and 10-wide decode. Nvidia has previously disclosed the Olympus core architecture, which you can read about in our Vera deep dive. Broadly speaking, however, it's a wide core optimized for high single-core throughput.

One of the more interesting design points of Vera is spatial multi-threading, which Nvidia described in more detail during its Hot Chips 2026. In short, Nvidia separates core resources on two pipelines, though data and cache can move between threads as needed. To demonstrate the benefit, Nvidia shared the results from SPEC CPU 2017 intrate that you can see below.

This shows the "noisy neighbor" effect. Nvidia measured single-core performance and then measured the same workload with another thread active. Nvidia's data shows that Vera is less concerned with the neighboring thread, whereas a "traditional CPU" sees a larger slowdown. Nvidia didn't clarify which CPU it's comparing Vera to here, however.

Nvidia's slide does a good job illustrating, but it's worth noting the difference compared to traditional SMT nonetheless. With traditional SMT, resources are time-sliced between threads, leading to gaps between BP and decode, as illustrated in the slide. With spatial multithreading in Vera, threads are still fighting for resources within the core. However, spatial multithreading allows Nvidia to deal with the demand of neighboring threads in a deterministic way, leading to a more consistent downturn in per-core performance when the second thread is working.

Nvidia's second-gen Scalable Coherency Fabric (SCF) moves data across the die. Nvidia didn't provide any new disclosures around SCF at Hot Chips, but you can see how the fabric is laid out in the slide below. Centralized Coherency Switch Nodes (CSNs) connect the cores to pools of L3 cache totaling 164 MB and the broader memory subsystem.

At a system level, one of the more interesting choices Nvidia made was to use LPDDR5X as opposed to traditional RDIMMs, a choice that it was only able to make due to the serviceable SOCAMM2 design. Nvidia includes eight SOCAMM2 slots per Vera CPU on a board, offering up to 1.5 TB of capacity with 1.2 TB/s of bandwidth.

LPDDR5X can deliver transfer rates higher than DDR5 RDIMMs, at least compared to single-rank DIMMs. However, it seems the driving force behind LPDDR5X wasn't performance but rather power consumption. One of the pillars of Vera, according to Nvidia's Hot Chips presentation, was to deliver a CPU for power-limited data centers. Micron says its LPDDR5X consumes about a third of the power compared to a traditional RDIMM.

Nvidia demonstrated that point a little differently, using bandwidth per watt as a point of comparison between the LPDDR5X system in Vera and traditional RDIMMs. This illustration does the job, though it could be a bit misleading, measuring power draw against peak bandwidth.

Nvidia tells us that a fully loaded memory system with Vera consumes between 30W and 40W, with 1.5 TB at 9600 MT/s. Power demands for RDIMMs vary wildly depending on capacity, channels, and transfer rate, though power consumption can easily climb over 100W depending on the configuration.

Although Nvidia has deployed Grace in the data center — to the tune of "hundreds of thousands" of standalone servers, apparently — Vera represents Nvidia's first big push to gobble up market share in the expanding agentic CPU market. It's highly targeted, as evidenced by the fact that Nvidia is only delivering a single 88-core SKU, and it's already being put to use in large-scale deployments, with Nvidia announcing yesterday a deployment of Vera at SpaceXAI.

Nvidia has shared the slide above before, which it once again showed at Hot Chips 2026. It's normalizing per-core performance in SPEC CPU 2026 against the AMD EPYC 9755. The core differences explain the big disparity in numbers; in reality, Vera led in overall score by 3%. Regardless, this is the slide Nvidia is using to pitch Vera, claiming it offers a big improvement in the workloads that are most relevant for agentic AI.

The most formidable opponent for Vera isn't Turin, however. It's Venice, which AMD launched in June, and Diamond Rapids, which Intel detailed just moments after Nvidia left the stage. Vera has a lot of interesting talking points already, but it'll be interesting to watch how Nvidia scales (or doesn't scale) its data center CPU business over the next few generations. Perhaps we'll see the firm double down on these agentic workflows, or maybe concessions and product segmentation to appeal to hyperscalers. Time will tell.

Full Nvidia Vera Hot Chips 2026 presentation

An AI computing enthusiast has demonstrated Doom running on a custom CPU designed by GPT-5.6 Sol. Angel (@Angaisb_) shared a technical and visual feast with a video of classic Doom running within a pulsing schematic of the CPU, in the sandbox provided by the Turing Complete game environment. Clearly, this shows that GPT-5.6 Sol is capable of constructing a virtual computer system from the basics, and one that is accurate enough to boot and play a port of the original Doom. The model dubbed its CPU design ‘Codex-R32.’

Angel knows Doom is a hugely popular demo to show computing capabilities, despite it being quite a vintage nowadays (1993). So they must have thought it a good idea to show how far agentic coding has come with this tried and trusted ‘people asked for Doom’ metric. They were impressed by the results, concluding that it is “truly insane that we can do stuff like this.”

Despite the accomplishment, another rule of the internet is that there’s always someone who thinks you haven’t pushed far enough. So there were the inevitable remarks about having a shot at Crysis next. Likely grasping for a witty comeback, Angel asked their AI to whip up a response to the unsolicited stretch goal. It didn’t disappoint, suggesting they answer “Absolutely – I just need to build a GPU, add a few gigabytes of RAM, and make a schematic visible from orbit first.”

Indeed, Doom is a relative minnow compared to Crysis, though it still stretches the model and its performance in the sandbox is not what anyone would call playable. “The CPU is built from primitive logic components inside Turing Complete,” the Codex told Angel. “Doom uses the C-based PureDOOM port, compiled into native RV32IM machine code that runs directly on the custom Codex‑R32 CPU.”

Watching the video, you can see the live schematic of the custom CPU with a pulsing visualization of processor gates, registers, memory, ALUs, and other blocks within the Turing Complete computer-science education and puzzle game’s anything-goes sandbox mode. Live stats show the cycle counter, sim speed, memory/register values, and more.

Overall, with this demo, we have a neat visual demo of LLMs not just creating software, but also reinventing hardware at a capable enough level to pass the 'can it run Doom' test.

Looking back in time is always interesting, especially when visiting any topic that's technology-adjacent — and doubly so when looking at the evolution of pricing. The price of memory continues to be a hot-button topic, and an eagle-eyed Redditor came across a 1995 press release from Advantage Memory Corporation announcing prices for its freshly released DIMMs, revealing that fitting a high-end machine with 1 GB of RAM would set you back as much as a cheap house.

The figures on display are rather shocking when converted to today's dollars, with 8 MB of RAM going for $399, or $874 in today's money, and a 64 MB stick ringing in at $3,900, or $8,540 in 2026. The Apple Power Macintosh mentioned in the PR had 12 slots, so it could fit in as much as 1.5 GB of RAM, and although the pricing for 128 MB DIMMs wasn't mentioned, those would be around $8,000 a pop, so "only" 1 GB of RAM would come in at $64,000 — enough for a house back then in the more affordable areas of the U.S. By the way, that amount would be $140,000 today.

In 1995, memory technology was transitioning from SIMMs to the spankin' new DIMMs, and Command and Conquer, MechWarrior 2, and the original Need for Speed were coming out. 16 MB of RAM was generally accepted as a decent amount of memory for a build, roughly matching the 16 GB of today. Some quick math says those 16 MB of the new technology were about $800, or in today's money, the princely sum of $1,751.

As of today, 16 GB of DDR5 will set you back $200 to $250, but the price of memory has been extremely volatile, to say the least. Plus, not only is supply rumored to drop, server RAM contract prices are expected to rise, and the few crumbs left for the consumer market are still rising in price.

SK hynix chairman Chey Tae-won even suggested that DRAM wafer shortages could last until 2030 at least. The fact that all the major RAM makers are shifting their production lines to HBM for AI accelerators is only making the problem worse. Yes, $200 is still a long way from $1,750, but with things keeping in this direction, there's a non-zero chance this very article will be linked to in the near future.

At any rate, despite the poor outlook, these figures reveal just how much technology really became democratized with time. Any form of PC was really expensive back in 1995. Around that era, Bill Gates said that there would be "a PC at every home, and at every desk." That statement sounded a little insane back then, but in retrospect wasn't crazy enough, as today we have what would be sci-fi hardware... in everyone's pocket or purse.

Nvidia's 88-core Vera chip will be getting put to work for Elon Musk twice over, first and foremost as the standalone CPU orchestrating Grok's AI agents in SpaceXAI's data centers and, from the fourth quarter of 2027, inside the company's first Starmind satellite. Nvidia announced the deployment yesterday, making SpaceXAI the second hyperscaler after Meta to commit to Vera outside full Vera Rubin racks, with Musk supplying the launch window in a post on X. Nvidia claims the chip completes agentic, reinforcement learning, and data processing tasks up to 1.8 times faster than x86 processors, but that figure hasn't been independently verified.

Agents spend much of their runtime off the GPU. A model that writes code, for example, calls tools, queries databases, and parses results by leaning on the host CPU between every inference pass; idle GPUs waiting on that work are wasted capital. "Vera gives us the CPU performance and memory bandwidth to run enormous amounts of orchestration, code, and data processing while keeping GPUs doing what they do best," Mike Nicolls, president of SpaceXAI, said in the release.

Meta was the first company to announce a large-scale standalone Vera deployment, confirming in February that it would run Grace-only servers in production with Vera to follow as soon as 2027. Nvidia has since disclosed shipping hundreds of thousands of standalone Grace servers and more than 2.5 million Grace CPUs in total, and the SpaceXAI deal extends that dominance directly into territory held by AMD's EPYC and Intel's Xeon lines.

Vera pairs 88 custom Olympus cores on a monolithic die with spatial multithreading and LPDDR5X memory delivering up to 1.2 TB/s of bandwidth. Nvidia's performance claims for the chip remain contested, and AMD has countered that its 256-core Zen 6 Venice processors beat Vera by 3.3 times in rack-level performance. Neither company disclosed how many Vera CPUs SpaceXAI will deploy, the value of the deal, or when the data center rollout begins; the only date attached to the announcement is the satellite launch window.

Musk said earlier this month that Starmind launches would begin in 2027, and his X post following the press release narrowed that to the fourth quarter, with what he described as significant scale-up following in 2028. The terrestrial NVL72 combines 72 Rubin GPUs and 36 Vera CPUs in a fully liquid-cooled rack, and an orbital version has to be reworked for radiation exposure, heat rejection through radiators rather than facility water loops, launch vibration, and the absence of any hands-on servicing.

SpaceXAI's first-generation AI1 satellite design carries a 120 kW compute payload, peaking at 150 kW, on a craft wider than a Boeing 747. The company has also acknowledged that orbital compute at the scale it's targeting requires significantly more chips than it currently has access to, a constraint the Vera Rubin commitment doesn't itself address.

Legendary Windows developer Dave W. Plummer has been busy finessing his revamped Task Manager. His latest release, dubbed TMOG (Task Manager OG), was vibe coded by feeding Claude “a 107-page spec,” says the mind behind the original 80KB Task Manager, which debuted publicly in Windows NT 4.0 (1996). TMOG doesn’t just work natively on modern Windows 11 systems though; it struts its neon stuff on macOS and Linux, too.

Above you can read Plummer give some background regarding the latest TMOG release, interspersed with details about his son’s emergency appendectomy. Cutting a long story short, Plummer found he had lots of spare time waiting around the hospital and thought he'd put it to good use by doing some coding.

With a new MacBook Air M5 under his arm, Plummer decided not to follow his original plan of vibe coding a new version of Microsoft Word, sticking to a project he knows intimately – Task Manager. After constructing “a 107-page spec” and feeding it to Claude Code, he got a rough app working by the time his son left the hospital, having completed the first procedure. A spell of internal bleeding meant readmission and more portable M5 dev time for Dave.

The result of all this extra hospital waiting room time is that Plummer had abundant TMOG tinker time. For example, TMOG can “animate everything at 60 Hz, instead of once a second.” Moreover, there are oodles of visual customization options, plus some interesting retro-flavored presets.

The first versions of TMOG were generated on the portable M5 in about four and a half hours. They worked the first time, asserts the veteran dev, and then work on fine-tuning started from there. Reading through the social media interactions following the new TMOG announcement, it looks like there are still a few vibe-coding flaws to paper over, and Plummer seems busy responding to many individual comments. There are also plenty of positive messages about the responsiveness and capabilities of the TMOG beta versions available.

At the time of writing, the latest version of TMOG beta available is version 0.1.1 on all supported platforms.

A decades-long dispute over the ownership of Linux looks like it is over. Earlier this month, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit rejected Xinuos’ continued claims that IBM and Red Hat improperly contributed jointly‑developed Project Monterey UNIX code to Linux, reports The Register. Despite this deathly blow to its chances of extracting potential damages from IBM and Red Hat, and oodles of Linux royalties and licensing fees, Xinuos intends to seek a full‑bench rehearing. This appeal is a very long shot for Xinuos, with only 0.03% of such hearings granted, according to IBM’s legal representatives in the dispute.

This is a complicated case that spans decades. So, to make sense of what has happened over the years, we’ve constructed a timeline of key events, spanning from way back in 1998 to the present day.

• 1998 Project Monterey. IBM partnered with a firm called Santa Cruz Operation (SCO), Intel, and Sequent to build a unified UNIX running on multiple processor architectures. SCO’s contribution was largely related to Intel x86 code.
• 1998-2001. Linux enjoyed rapid growth, so the importance of Project Monterey waned. IBM saw the shifting sands and moved its focus to Linux.
• Early 2000s. SCO first complained that IBM contributed jointly‑developed UNIX code to Linux without having proper rights to do so. Litigation began.
• 2003. SCO’s first major lawsuit was filed against IBM. It asked for billions of dollars due to the aforementioned complaint of IBM’s unauthorized use of UNIX code in Linux.
• 2011. Xinuos bought SCO’s UNIX business and IP.
• 2021. The SCO heir settled with IBM for $14.25 million. That’s a far smaller sum than it asked for in 2003, which kind of reflects SCO’s failure to produce convincing legal evidence.
• 2021. Xinuos sued IBM and Red Hat, claiming that IBM knowingly breached its non‑exclusive license by contributing Monterey code to Linux.
• 2022-2025. Xinuos argued that IBM’s actions amounted to licensing violations, but the U.S. District Court (SDNY) rejected this claim.
• August 10, 2026. Xinuos’ appeals are rejected. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that the case was too old to relitigate, and Xinuos framed it as licensing but was really arguing ownership, which is time‑barred. Thus the District Court dismissal stood.
• Now, August 2026. Xinuos has announced that it will petition for a full‑bench rehearing of its case. However, this is a long shot with a 0.03% chance of a rehearing being granted. According to IBM’s defense law firm.

While Xinuos looks like it has run out of road on its Linux code ownership claims, that’s probably good for the computing community. IBM, Red Hat, and the open-source world can probably now rest a little easier, with the shadow cast in 2003 now nearly entirely removed. Lingering uncertainty over Linux’s legitimacy is evaporating with the Second Circuit’s affirmation that the case is time-barred, and rather hollow, legally.

Other companies contributing code to open source projects can also rest a little easier as this distracting, resource-draining litigation grinds to a halt. Success for Xinuous may have also meant billions of Linux devices facing licensing uncertainty, maker settlements, audits, and/or forced software rewrites.

Chinese multinational tech giant Alibaba has been accused of tracking web users after a developer discovered its global online marketplace running hidden audio processes that could be used for sophisticated audio fingerprinting. While investigating an issue with his wireless headphones, Matt Callaghan found that opening an AliExpress webpage in Firefox or Chrome interfered with the multipoint Bluetooth audio feature.

As Callaghan explains in his blog post, “Normally the PC takes priority playing audio, with my phone being able to play audio when nothing is playing on the PC. Usually I listen to music on my phone but with notifications or YouTube playing through the PC.” However, shortly after loading the AliExpress homepage, audio from his phone would stop playing, despite no media playing on his PC. Closing the AliExpress tab immediately fixed the issue, while muting the tab, browser, or Windows did not seem to resolve it.

Their investigation began by inspecting various conventional media elements; however, he did not find any unusual activity. He also zeroed in on the fact that the problem would not begin immediately, but rather after the webpage had been sitting idle for a few seconds. He then moved on to inspect the Web Audio API to wrap the AudioContext constructor so that it would record whenever a page created an audio-processing context. They additionally wrapped AudioNode.prototype.connect() to see whether anything was connected to the context's audio destination.

Eventually, Callaghan found that the page was loading two suspicious scripts named collina.js and fireyejs.js, which appeared to be part of Alibaba's browser security and anti-abuse tooling. With some help from AI during his research, he found that the scripts built a Web Audio graph using a sawtooth oscillator to generate a waveform. An analyzer then measured the results after they passed through the browser's audio implementation, while another script read the resulting frequency data. The scripts also set the volume gain to zero, meaning there was no audible sound or noise, even though the browser continued actively processing the Web Audio graph.

Unlike autoplaying videos, there is no media element playing, which is why the browser's tab mute control does not help. However, the webpage continues performing live audio processing, keeping the Bluetooth audio path active and preventing multipoint Bluetooth headphones from switching between devices. Further investigation also uncovered code collecting information related to screen dimensions, device memory, browser plugins, WebGL rendering, supported audio and video formats, browser performance, mouse events, and more. The scripts also appear to serialize and encrypt the collected data before sending it to Alibaba's telemetry services using fetch() or sendBeacon() functions.

Following the discovery, Firefox said on X that its browser includes built-in protections against fingerprinting. The company pointed to a blog post explaining that Firefox 118, released in September 2023, introduced additional protections against Web Audio-based fingerprinting. Brave also claims to block audio fingerprinting by default. According to the browser maker, it does this by injecting randomized data into the browser's audio output, making the fingerprint appear different to websites and resetting the data between sessions.

Earlier this year, we brought you news of the UltraGear 25G590B gaming monitor, which LG proudly claimed as the world’s first 1080p gaming monitor to offer a 1,000 Hz refresh rate. At the time, LG said that pricing and availability for the 25G590B would arrive in the second half of 2026, and, true to its word, we now have details. According to the company, the monitor, which is currently available for preorder, is priced at $999.99. Looking at it a different way, you’re paying $1 per Hz if you want to be the first on the block with this segment leader.

• You can preorder the UltraGear 25G590B directly from LG right now. Alternatively, you can purchase it at a discount from Amazon, where it’s currently on sale for $932.

However, that’s not all; LG is throwing in a couple of sweeteners with the 25G590B if you preorder it directly from its online store before August 31. The first perk is that you’ll earn 5 percent back in MyLG rewards on a purchase, which, on a $1,000 monitor, should get you $50 to use on a future purchase. As for the second perk, you can get two years of LG Premium Care for only a buck.

We've seen monitors employ Dynamic Frequency Resolution (DFR) to hit the 1,000 Hz mark before, but only at lower resolutions. For example, the Acer Predator XB273U F6 can hit the mark at 720p resolution, as can the AntGamer ANT275PQ MAX. The ANT275PQ MAX also uses a TN panel to reach 1,000 Hz, which might be a dealbreaker for some gamers. However, the 25G590B can hit 1,000 Hz at 1080p, giving it a resolution edge over its competitors.

The 25G590B features a 24.5-inch IPS panel supporting both AMD FreeSync Premium and Nvidia G-Sync. LG has also enabled its Motion Blur Reduction Pro technology, which helps smooth out visuals at 1,000 Hz for your fast-paced gameplay. However, we’ll be eager to get our hands on the monitor to test out the tech in person.

You'll also find two HDMI 2.1 ports and one DisplayPort 2.1. The monitor is adjustable for tilt, height, and swivel, and it features LG UltraGear RGB lighting.

When it comes to building a gaming PC, DDR5 RAM clocked at speeds of 6,000 MT/s is often touted as the sweet spot for specs. While slower and faster speeds are available, it's very much the benchmark for both price and performance, which is why it's noteworthy that this particular configuration now costs $400, a more than 400% increase from the low prices we've seen in the past.

• $401 for Corsair Vengeance 32GB DDR5 600 ($215 off)

In addition to our ongoing RAM price tracking, we perform daily spot checks on pricing for discounts or deals for 32GB (2x16GB) of DDR5 RAM, given its aforementioned significance as the "benchmark" when it comes to capacity. In recent weeks, the price of 32GB DDR5 6000 RAM has been creeping ever closer to that unfortunate $400 milestone, and in the last few hours we've just crossed the threshold. That's not to say that prices might fluctuate back down in a day or two, but generally the traffic is only moving in one direction.

You can buy 32GB of DDR5 RAM at slower speeds for less — this Corsair Vengeance DDR5 4800 is "just" $359 — but good RAM is now harder (and more expensive) to come by than ever before.

According to data from PCPartPicker, this particular 32GB DDR5 6000 kit from Corsair has been as little as $80 in years gone by at Newegg, marking a full 400% price increase on the lowest we've ever seen on this model.

RAM prices elsewhere have climbed by as much as 500%, with 128GB of DDR5 now costing $3,399 in stores. The causes of the PC component crisis are numerous and well-documented. AI buildouts are consuming much of the world's NAND and flash manufacturing capacity, which is having a knock-on effect for consumer production. Famously, Micron even wound up its consumer brand Crucial in favor of serving more enterprise customers.

All signs point to the memory shortage, and thereby pricing, getting worse in the coming months. As such, bundles and pre-built PCs remain one of the only ways to insulate yourself from cost increases if you're in the market for new hardware. As mentioned, slower memory speeds are available at lower prices, but compromising for 4,800 MT/s RAM to save $40 when building a PC is an extremely tough state of affairs.

Just days after Supermicro revealed it had terminated several employees following an internal investigation into U.S. smuggling, nine people have been indicted by Taiwan's Keelung District Prosecutors' Office in the ongoing investigation into the illegal smuggling of Nvidia B300 GPUs to China. According to a new report from Digitimes, details of the indictment reveal an intricate five-step scheme designed to subvert various export restrictions.

According to the report, the indictment sets out how "a compliance regime designed to track every unit was defeated from the inside," thanks to a scheme setup to run through five different points in the supply chain.

Per the report, Supermicro's Taiwan subsidiary only sells its B300 systems to whitelisted buyers, who must sign an end-user agreement promising they won't re-export or sell the GPUs to sanctioned parties, such as customers in China. Order enough servers — eight units or more — and an on-site inspection led by representatives from both companies is triggered.

To that end, Taiwanese server trading firm Flying Tiger Tech reportedly obtained whitelist status and then placed a 130-unit order, declaring that it was the end user for the servers, which would be installed in Taiwan. That order was placed on behalf of Flying Tiger by a listed Supermicro distributor, Albatron Technology. Per the report, this "kept Supermicro from ever examining where Flying Tiger's money came from," because Albatron is listed on the Taiwan stock exchange and is a listed Supermicro distributor, presumably not raising too many flags.

The report says that, in order to pass the inspection, Flying Tiger leased colocation space from Chief Telecom, another TPEx-listed firm, but presented a quotation instead of an actual lease. Inspectors of the site in September 2025 reportedly found the site operational, but crucially incapable of running the 130 B300 servers the firm had asked for. Despite not having the racks, power, or bandwidth for that kind of hardware, no one spoke up.

The report then turns to a group it dubs "The insiders," likely the nefarious parties working inside the various points of the supply chain to help push through the transaction. One such individual listed is a sales manager at Nvidia Taiwan who "pushed the quota through," emailing headquarters to state the inspection was complete. A senior sales manager at Supermicro's Taiwan subsidiary had reportedly coached Flying Tiger through the review process, possibly revealing how its Chief Telecom lease passed muster on inspection. A second Supermicro manager reportedly caught wind of where the servers were really ending up, but was cut in on the commissions rather than speaking up.

All of this meant that Supermicro ultimately approved the sale of the 130 B300 units in three tranches of 2, 64, and 64. Of the first 74 units, sixteen were sent directly to China in January 2026. A further fifty were sent to Indonesia and then transshipped to China. Eight reportedly went to a Japanese entity controlled by the defendants, before going to Hong Kong and then China. This set of shipments was said to be worth $21.21 million in profit.

The scheme was given up shortly after 56 units were declared to Japan and flagged by customers, who demanded a "strategic high-tech commodities export permit." The defendants in the case filed for one, including fake mockups of Supermicro's website created by splicing together real parts of the site. Once word of the scheme came to light, the servers were not allowed to leave the country.

According to prosecutors, investigations have also uncovered a second scheme cooked up by the GM of Albatron, a manager from Supermicro, and the head of a small electronics firm, which billed Albatron $39 million Taiwanese dollars for installation work that was never carried out, splitting the money with the other perps. The head of the latter firm reportedly turned himself in, confessing alongside Albatron's GM and naming other participants in the scheme in exchange for leniency. Despite this, they reportedly still face up to five years on counts of export and six years for looting.

As per above, Supermicro has announced the findings of its own investigation in a US smuggling scheme, claiming that senior management had no knowledge of the matter and no evidence that controlled products were sold to banned entities.

As the report notes, this latest Taiwan sales channel was uncovered by Taiwanese prosecutors, rather than Supermicro's audit.

AMD has been the dominant force in DIY PC building CPUs for several years now, thanks to the advent of Zen 3 and great chips like the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, and more recently its potent Ryzen 7 X3D SKUs like the 9800X3D. Now, just days after AMD touted that it continues to occupy all 10 slots in the Amazon CPU best-sellers list, a couple of Intel CPUs have broken into the list for the first time in months, as spotted by WCCFTech.

The two chips in question aren't surprising if you know ball. Coming in at number six is the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus for $290 USD; Intel's most recently released desktop CPU, and at nine we have the workaday Core i7-14700K for $312, a steady seller since its launch in 2023. It offers less performance in gaming than many of the other chips in the top 10 (including the cheaper 270K Plus), but it has the advantage of being able to slot into both aging LGA 1700 systems as well as new builds with DDR4 memory. That's also likely why the Ryzen 5 5500 continues to stay near the top of the chart at #2, while the Ryzen 5 5600X and Ryzen 7 5800X3D (in its 10th Anniversary guise) also rate high. As for the Core i7-14700K, we actually recommended it over the Ryzen 7 5800X3D in our review of the 10th Anniversary re-release of that chip for people who are building new DDR4 machines.

The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus appearing this high is heartening for Intel's sake, though. If you haven't kept up with Intel's CPU releases, this chip is a course correction from the first-generation "Arrow Lake" processors, offering outstanding productivity performance and very solid gaming performance, just a few percentage points off of the beloved Ryzen 7 7800X3D that sits one position above it in the rankings. Put frankly, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus beats everything else in the top 10 for both single- and multi-core performance save for the $569 Ryzen 9 9950X3D, which is in an entirely different price class from the $290 Intel chip (though discounted quite significantly at $569, 19% off the $699 list price)

It's clear that gaming continues to be a top driver for the DIY market. Five of the chips in the top 10 have been on our list of the Best CPUs for Gaming either now or at some point, including the number one seller, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D. AMD's 3D V-Cache continues to be unbeatable in gaming, even if the Arrow Lake 'Plus' parts do their best to close the gap with extremely high single-core performance. It's not single-threaded speed that's the bottleneck anymore, though, and not for some time; the limitation in gaming frames is multivariate as it has ever been, but on the CPU side, it's largely down to memory performance these days, and that's exactly why AMD's 3D V-Cache chips dominate.

Of course, if you're reading Tom's Hardware, you probably don't need me to tell you that. But it's interesting to look at the pricing of the parts that are moving the most units. The Ryzen 5 5500 is a tame processor, but if you need a gaming PC for the absolute bottom dollar, it's hard to beat six Zen 3 cores with a CPU cooler for $84. The Ryzen 7 7800X3D seems an absurd choice next to the much faster Ryzen 7 9800X3D for less than $100 more, but the gaming performance is really pretty close, and you're likely to desire a drop-in Zen 6 processor upgrade late this year or early next year, so why spend the extra $85 now?

That CPU upgrade angle warrants consideration. Any Socket AM5 processor has a path forward, and that's not the case for any extant Intel platform nor for Socket AM4, despite the fact that Intel is apparently releasing new LGA 1700 chips eventually. Ultimately, memory pricing is probably driving a lot of these choices, but in the upgrade context, it's not quite as surprising to see five and a half of the top ten CPUs on platforms that require DDR5 memory—the 'half' being the Core i7-14700K, naturally.

You absolutely can build a DDR4 machine using the Raptor Lake Refresh CPUs, but the performance penalty can be significant; in our testing, we found that it was actually worse than just running a single DDR5 DIMM. It's the PC builder's Sophie's Choice: buy a last-generation CPU to save significant cash on the RAM, or suck it up and spend out massively on a system that offers the best performance now.

Pricing is naturally also a factor; the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus launched at the comically low price of $299 in comparison to the $589 Core Ultra 9 285K, which it performs very close to, so $290 isn't much of a discount there. Meanwhile, the Core i7-14700K's $311.99 price tag is 16% off of Amazon's list price of $370.99, but it's a bit larger markdown from Intel's $419 recommended customer price. Still, if pricing is your primary motivator, it's hard to ignore the $330 Ryzen 7 7800X3D (27% off list), at least as long as gaming is your main concern. There's the 5800X3D 10th Anniversary, too, but again, the Core i7-14700K actually offers better minimum framerates and vastly superior productivity performance, especially if you're willing to do some memory tuning.

Clearly, gamers have accepted that memory pricing isn't coming back down any time soon, and that the time to buy is now before it gets even worse. The shortage isn't expected to abate between now and late 2028; if you're keen to build a new machine in the in-between, make sure you keep an eye on our Deals posts to save yourself from bleeding too much at the checkout.

A fiber-optic cable strung across the Drake Passage could pull Antarctica's research bases off satellite links and hard-drive shipments and onto the global network after Chile's finalized feasibility study concluded last week that the crossing is technically viable. Salience Consulting and Pioneer Consulting ran the study for telecom regulator Subtel, and development bank CAF financed it, with partial support from the China-initiated MCDF Finance Facility. It recommends an instrumented cable carrying a dedicated fiber pair to each Antarctic landing, naming two Chinese firms among the six suppliers Subtel canvassed. Antarctic research data still leaves the continent physically, on hard drives ferried out by ship and plane "in suitcases full of hard drives," said Juan Pablo, a team leader in the pre-feasibility study.

The study weighs a minimum configuration serving three facility groups around King George Island and the northern Antarctic Peninsula against an optimal configuration with nine Antarctic landing points, an option that Reports 2 and 3 recommend. The nine-landing version would connect research bases run by Chile, Argentina, Brazil, the United States, and the United Kingdom, all fed from landings at Punta Arenas and Puerto Williams in southern Chile and routed across the Drake Passage. Reporting from The Maritime Executive puts the minimum build near $370 million and the optimal build at roughly $620 million.

The study lists four features that separate the project from a commercial cable: Drake Passage weather, ice scour at the Antarctic landings, installation methods uncommon in Antarctica, and a plan to embed SMART sensors that measure ocean-bottom temperature, pressure, and seismic acceleration for climate and tsunami monitoring.

Each Antarctic landing would get a dedicated fiber pair rated at 15 to 30 Tbit/s through space-division multiplexing, with each base free to pick its own transmission equipment. To clear ice scour to about 340 meters of depth, the design calls for horizontal directional drilling at the Antarctic landfalls and double-armored cable, with installation spread across three austral summers inside the December-to-January weather window.

Subtel's request for information went to Alcatel Submarine Networks of France, Japan's NEC, U.S.-based SubCom, the UK's Xtera, and two Chinese firms, HMN Technologies and FibreHome. HMN Technologies is the former Huawei Marine Networks, sold to Hengtong after U.S. sanctions and placed on the Commerce Department's Entity List in 2020, and Washington has spent years working to keep it off Pacific cable routes. The study acknowledges this, listing the geopolitics of project financing and procurement restrictions among its critical risks and recommending "neutrality by design," dark fiber, and user-controlled transmission gear so no operator can read another's traffic.

As for financing, that also carries a Chinese link through the MCDF Finance Facility, a Beijing-based mechanism tied to the Belt and Road Initiative. That backdrop runs into a Western push to strip Chinese firms and money out of subsea cable infrastructure on security grounds, the same pressure reshaping projects such as a Black Sea cable routed to bypass Russia.

The study stops short of recommending construction, calling instead for a phased path that resolves the financing and political questions before the expensive supply contracts are signed. Chile has sent the reports to its Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which is expected to bring them to the country's Antarctic Policy Council, and any build would need agreement from the other Antarctic states whose bases sit on the optimal route.

Today marks Valve’s 30^th birthday. The company was founded on August 24, 1996, by Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington, both Microsoft veterans. It didn’t take long for the PC gaming world to feel Valve’s influence after it rewrote the FPS genre with Half Life (1998) and pioneered an internet-connected games retail model with Steam (2003).

Valve didn’t come from nowhere, and it doesn’t have a bedroom coder story like many of the game publishers of the 8- and 16-bit eras. Both Newell and Harrington were time-served Microsoft employees, with experience spanning 13 years and 9 years at the massive software corporation, respectively. Their in-depth knowledge of OS engineering, large-scale software projects, game porting and programming, and technical ambition were a great foundation for what they would achieve with Valve.

Only two years after its formation, Valve released Half Life. This title changed FPS gaming forever with its scripted sequences, smart enemy ‘AI,’ storytelling, seamless level design, and application of physics. It broke the Doom-a-like mold that many devs had settled into, and Half Life’s influence is still felt in modern-day FPS games.

Steam is probably Valve’s greatest achievement, though, and powerful rivals are still trying and failing to replicate its success. This online games retail platform got better and better with features like automatic patching, cloud saves, communities, achievements, indie publishing, and - importantly - mod distribution.

Valve was quick to 'industrialize' its game engine and modding to appeal to gamers. The firm’s Source Engine was used by a host of successful games, and its Steam Workshop modding wasn’t just casual fun, with billion-dollar franchises beginning as Valve-supported mods. Valve’s embrace of the above helped it fight off rival online distribution platforms made by powerful and wealthy rivals, and that it prevented deep fragmentation was probably good for the PC platform as a whole.

We remember the first wave of Steam Machines, so Valve isn’t immune to strategic missteps. However, it seems to have found much greater success in the hardware realm with the introduction of the Steam Deck handheld. It clearly wants to rekindle the Steam Machine desktop dream, but the PC industry is having something of a moment right now, with the AI-pocalypse making so many key components of PCs (and consoles, and smart devices) unaffordable. However, the software support for the new hardware thrust, things like SteamOS and Proton, seems to be improving at an enviable pace, clearly worrying Microsoft's Windows and Xbox divisions. If and when we get past this difficult hardware pricing cycle, perhaps other console makers should be worried too.

A research team at Kyoto University has built a silicon carbide (SiC) transistor that operates at 600°C (873 K) using ion implantation, the doping step used across commercial chip fabs, and cut the gap between its designed and measured threshold voltage to under 0.1V at 400°C, down from more than 2V in the conventional layout. The work, announced earlier this month by Mitsuaki Kaneko, Shunya Shibata, and Tsunenobu Kimoto and published in APL Electronic Devices, pairs a bottom-gate transistor with a double-well isolation structure to keep an ion-implanted SiC junction field-effect transistor stable at temperatures where silicon stops working above roughly 250°C.

The bottom-gate layout puts the gate electrode beneath the channel, which captures the dopants that scatter deeper than intended during implantation, a channeling effect that had thrown conventional top-gate JFET thresholds off by more than 2V. With the channeling tail compensated, the design-to-measured threshold voltage gap dropped to under 0.1V at 400°C.

The double-well structure isolates each device inside a pn junction instead of leaning on the semi-insulating SiC substrate underneath, which loses its insulating behavior as it heats and bleeds leakage current through the wafer. Kaneko's group reported the remaining leakage sits close to the theoretical floor set by SiC's own material properties, so there's little room left to improve it at the device level.

In contrast, NASA Glenn Research Center has run SiC JFET integrated circuits carrying more than 175 transistors for over a year at 500°C in air, and 60 days on a simulated Venus surface at 460°C and 9.3 MPa with no shielding, per the agency's published testing. Those chips are built from epitaxial JFET-resistor devices on a bespoke process. The Kyoto researchers reached a higher device temperature through ion implantation, a method already standard across mainstream fabs, which fits existing mass production.

SiC is already scaling as a power-device wafer material, but high-temperature logic is a separate and far smaller niche. It isn't the only wide-bandgap material chased for these conditions either, with researchers recently showing devices that hold up from 500°C down toward absolute zero in other compounds.

The transistor is normally-on, so it conducts with no gate voltage applied and draws standby power. Efficient logic needs complementary pairs built from normally-off devices, which this isn't. Kimoto's group has already demonstrated complementary SiC JFET logic gates at 350°C, and its next step is to design normally-off devices in the new structure to build low-power complementary circuits. Long-duration reliability at temperature and heat-tolerant packaging are just two challenges the researchers will need to overcome before any of it reaches a gas turbine, or Venus.

Nintendo has just issued DMCA takedowns against seven GitHub repositories hosting Switch emulation code, leading to 401 affected repos being removed from the platform. Most of these belonged to a single parent repo of the Suyu emulator, which itself is a fork of the previously shut down Yuzu emulator. Nintendo leveraged GitHub policies to their fullest extent to execute its notice, arguing that emulators inherently rely on circumventing anti-piracy protections built into Switch games.

TorrentFreak reports that this was a coordinated campaign by Nintendo as it filed seven different strikes on the same day. GitHub has a rule that says if a parent repo contains more than 100 forks, then the platform will not look at each one individually but rather remove the entire network. Suyu had 311 of these repos under its parent, so all of them were wiped off the map. Suyu was born in 2024, picking up after Yuzu following a lawsuit against its creators, Tropic Haze, that ended in a settlement.

Besides Suyu, the Android-based Skyline emulator was also affected in this campaign, but it has already been defunct for the past three years. It's not based on Yuzu, so it stands out in this lineup. Skyline devs actually stopped development in 2023, fearing legal repercussions, so the source code has remained dormant, but it did have 29 independent forks under the parent repo. Since it's an open-source project, anyone can iterate on it and publish their own versions.

Similarly, Yuzu Android, another fork of Yuzu was also struck with a DMCA notice that took down 8 forks under it. NicholasArvani's Yuzu fork had a network of 14 repos that were removed. A repo focusing on an early access build of Yuzu with 21 forks was taken down as well. Finally, MonoNX and its 17 forks, along with the parent repo of the main Yuzu emulator, were hit by Nintendo, too. These repos now link to the seven DMCA notices Nintendo sent to them, as visible in the sidebar, while their forks may return a 404 error.

The reasoning for the takedown is tied to piracy, with the company saying these emulators "illegally circumvent Nintendo's TPM in order to run illegal copies of Nintendo Switch games." Switch games require cryptographic keys upon every boot to verify the authenticity of the title, and emulators rely on a ripped-off prod.keys file to bypass this failsafe at runtime. Nintendo argues that, therefore, these keys are used to play pirated games instead of legally acquired ones.

The company lists two previous court cases as justification. The first one is its settlement with Tropic Haze — the devs behind Yuzu — and the second one is a default judgment against streamer EveryGameGuru who streamed pirated copies of Switch games ahead of their release using emulators. According to Nintendo, both convictions prove that merely providing the tools that lead to piracy also constitutes illegal trafficking since they rely on circumventing the company's TPM.

Keep in mind that neither case actually set a legal precedent because they weren't contested rulings where a judge interpreted the law; there was no verdict. Tropic Haze decided to settle, and EveryGameGuru failed to appear in front of a court entirely, granting Nintendo a victory by forfeiture. Still, the outcome of either case sets a strong legal blueprint on which the Japanese game company stands today as it tries to warp the legal precedent surrounding emulation as a whole.

The U.S. Army tested an autonomous breaching vehicle with an onboard counter-UAS (C-UAS) turret during a live-fire exercise at Fort Bragg on August 18. As part of Project Sandhills 2.0, self-driving Ford F-250 trucks were put through their paces, some armed with computer-controlled drone-killing shotgun turrets.

Sandhills 2.0 builds on the original Sandhills project which spawned the Lancer UGV, built on the Polaris Ranger 1500 utility vehicle, which ended up being gifted to Ukraine. However, this new breaching solution adds C-UAS abilities to bolster their abilities to clear the way for human soldiers to advance. Breaching operations can be seriously compromised by a determined enemy using increasingly common FPV drone technology and this fact inspired the changes delivered in Sandhills 2.0.

The vehicle chosen for Sandhills 2.0 was a self‑driving Ford F‑250 truck, equipped with Forterra’s AutoDrive system. Ford’s readily available spares should make the F-250-based system easier to maintain and repair, reckons Forterra’s VP of defense. That is another important factor the designers weighed, for this latest iteration of a viable U.S. Army autonomous breaching vehicle.

Meanwhile, the Edda counter-unmanned aircraft system turret (built by Austin-based 9 Mothers) takes care of fast-moving drone threats of 7-inch diameter or larger, at ranges between 10 to 100m (33 to 328 feet). The source report notes that the turret weighs around 23kg (50 pounds).

Interestingly, the turret first detects incoming drones acoustically before an onboard visual tracking system locks on. This methodology prevents the F-250-based system from being easily detectable by advanced enemy drone sensors, suggests the source report. Finally the shotgun-armed Edda engages the enemy drone. According to 9 Mothers published data the Edda turret is an “ultra-fast, ultra-light, ultra-accurate motion platform — 5° in under 15 ms at 1.5 arcminute precision.” We would welcome some test data, though – like what percent of drones get destroyed in one shot, the maximum speed of drones that Edda can engage, or how many drones it can handle per minute.

Nvidia has told some of its largest customers that the prices of servers containing its AI chips will rise by more than 15% in many cases, Bloomberg reported on Saturday. The increases will take effect on Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems shipping early next year, according to people familiar with the matter, who commented on communications that have not yet been made public. The size of each increase will depend on the chip generation and the memory configuration involved. Companies that build servers under contract for large data center operators, including Microsoft, Google, and Oracle, have recently notified their customers of the forthcoming increases, the people told Bloomberg.

This is another example of the so-called "RAMageddon" that's gripping the DRAM market, with contract prices having risen at record rates this year. Analysts projected that conventional DRAM contract prices would climb 58% to 63% quarter-over-quarter in Q2 2026, following a Q1 surge of 90% to 95%, as suppliers reallocated capacity toward HBM and server products. SK hynix said in October last year that it had already sold out its entire 2026 memory production capacity, and Samsung and SK hynix raised 2026 HBM3E supply prices by close to 20% before the year began.

AI systems carry enormous memory loadouts, with Nvidia's Rubin GPU shipping with up to 288GB of HBM4 per package, and the NVL72 rack-scale system combines 72 of those GPUs, putting more than 20TB of HBM in a single rack before accounting for the LPDDR attached to its Vera CPUs. With HBM production consuming roughly four times the wafer area of equivalent conventional DRAM, memory has become one of the largest line items in an AI server's bill of materials, and it's continuing to rise at a stratospheric pace.

Ironically, the supply crunch that's now inflating Nvidia's systems is the same one its demand helped to create. The three major memory makers spent this and last year shifting advanced nodes and new capacity toward HBM and high-capacity server DRAM, starving commodity markets in the process. Consumer DDR5 pricing has more than doubled since late 2025 as a result, with a mainstream 32GB DDR5-6000 kit selling for around $392 in August against $110 to $140 a year earlier, according to our RAM price tracker.

Nvidia has already passed rising costs through to consumers, raising prices on GeForce graphics cards earlier this month. The Bloomberg report indicates the same unrelenting pressure has now reached the top of the Nvidia stack, where hyperscalers as well as PC builders will be absorbing the increase. A 15% rise on rack-scale systems that sell for several million dollars each adds hundreds of thousands of dollars per rack across deployments that run to thousands of racks.

Nvidia runs a gross margin of roughly 75% non-GAAP, among the highest in the semiconductor industry, and the reported hikes indicate the company intends to pass memory cost inflation on to customers rather than absorb it, which it can more than afford to do. Meanwhile, supply of its accelerators from TSMC still can't meet demand, which limits buyers' immediate leverage.

Whether the increases push hyperscalers further toward AMD's accelerators or their own custom silicon will depend on how quickly those alternatives can absorb displaced demand, and all of them draw HBM from the same three constrained suppliers.

Nvidia officially launched the latest DGX Station desktop at Computex 2026 earlier this year, but the announcement was not accompanied by an explicit price tag. The expectation of an MSRP withers away when it comes to enterprise-grade hardware anyway, but still, early chatter had pointed toward a $100,000 ballpark figure. That number has just been confirmed, as a DGX Station from Exxact was found listed for $94,930 on its website, featuring the all-powerful GB300 Superchip, ready to customize and buy.

The desktop tower in question is the Valence VWS-158270643 that was originally unveiled a few months ago and was part of the lineup shared by other OEMs such as Dell and HP. Since this hardware is not meant for regular consumers — those who can afford it can pay really any price for it — Nvidia's partners don't make its cost outright public information. Instead, you can ask for quotes or inquire about a proper deployment to get the number. That's why the Exxact listing is newsworthy.

The Valence VWS-158270643 starts at $94,930, and that gets you one GB300 enclosed in a standard full-sized tower. The main draw of the GB300 is the Blackwell Ultra GPU that comes with 252GB of HBM3e memory. It talks to a 72-core Arm-based Grace CPU through a 900 GB/s NVLink-C2C interconnect that shares a further 496GB of LPDDR5x RAM with the GPU.

Combined, you get a massive 748GB pool of unified memory that allows you to fine-tune and deploy AI models locally instead of worrying about token costs or any cloud vulnerabilities. For large enterprises that need to quickly iterate on the go and want maximum security, a DGX Station is considered a worthwhile investment even at $100,000, especially if the smaller DGX Spark isn't enough for your workloads.

The Valence VWS-158270643 in specific can be configured with different GPUs for video output (since the GB300 doesn't have one) and you get a few SSD options to choose from based on your training data needs. There are three "optimized configs" that go up to $96,316. The top-tier manual configuration costs $108,350 with an RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell (that has its own 96GB of VRAM) and 2x extra 2TB PCIe 5.0 SSDs.

The Valence VWS-158270643 comes with a 1,600W 80+ Titanium power supply (which is enough to cover a dedicated display-out GPU as well), so it can be plugged into any standard outlet, just like a regular PC. Though it comes with Linux-based DGX OS out of the box instead of Windows. Both the Grace CPU and the Blackwell Ultra GPU are liquid-cooled with a massive direct-to-chip (D2C) coldplate, and there are three fans up top for optimal airflow.

Front panel I/O is nonexistent, but there are 2x QSFP112 ports at the back driven by the integrated ConnectX-SuperNIC for 800 Gbps/s interconnect between two DGX Station towers. There's also 1x 10 Gbps RJ45 port, a dedicated 1Gbps RJ45 management port, 1x mini-DisplayPort for local BMC management (not display out), 1x USB Micro-B for direct serial access to said BMC, 4x standard USB Type-A, and a 3.5mm headphone jack.

Exxact did not disclose the exact materials of the tower, but we can infer from the pictures that it's made out of steel, and the design is rather sleek. For $100,000, you also get a 3-year warranty so you can rest assured your parts are insured against a potential popping of a bubble. You can order up to ten of these at the same time, but there's no standard checkout page; you still have to provide your details in order to be contacted back for a purchase.

A GTA gaming enthusiast highlighted on social media that a 113GB GTA VI ISO file is being shared online and asked their followers to “take one for the team” to confirm if it’s a valid build of the game. X user @GTAGolden_ did not mention where they saw the file, but it’s alleged that it was circulating on various Torrent sites. In a reply on X @Aidas29506493 said that they “did some reverse engineering” and confirmed that “it is fully fake and full of viruses.” Further analysis by the internet sleuths indicates that the huge ISO is mostly junk data alongside a 50KB virus.

“The decompiled bytecode literally contains commands to whitelist the entire C:\ drive in Windows Defender (powershell Add-MpPreference -ExclusionPath %SystemDrive%\) and kill security software (taskkill -f),” Name said in one reply to their X post. They also added in another response, “It’s not 100 GB of actual code—it’s just a tiny 50 KB virus padded with 99.99% empty junk (literally endless zeroes).”

Grand Theft Auto VI is one of the most anticipated games in history, with Rockstar set to release an extended look on Netflix this coming August 27. However, someone has been releasing leaks of GTA VI gameplay and the entire map of Leonidas, where the game is set. The leaker, who goes by the name of Cyberleek, said that they are doing it because of Rockstar’s decision to release pre-selling digital copies of the game, which Cyberleek claimed to be anti-gamer. They then threatened to keep on revealing clips and snippets of actual gameplay until the publisher issues a public apology and promises “to be better.” Take-Two Interactive has already taken steps to identify the leaker, asking for the device IDs of every member of three Discord servers in an effort to plug or prosecute the leaks. Still, it appears that it will take time before the company could even identify the person or people behind Cyberleek, which could be disastrous as the leaks, so far, have continued daily.

The hype behind GTA VI, plus all this news of leaks and even a complete build, means that many gamers are curious about the game and are likely trying to find a copy online. Because of this, it seems that bad actors are trying to take advantage of the situation and are releasing fake GTA VI ISOs to try and spread malware. While it’s never a good idea to download pirated software online, torrenting an unreleased game is 100 times worse. That’s because it is more likely than not just a virus disguised as a build of the game. The best thing that any GTA VI fan can do presently is to patiently wait for the game’s release in November and to only purchase it as it becomes downloadable. It might even be wiser to watch reviews first before buying the AAA game, so that you know what to expect before spending your hard-earned money.

HoverAir has pulled the Flight Kit for its Versa camera drone from U.S. buyers on its Indiegogo campaign three days after it opened on August 19, telling backers that "due to a few remaining logistics updates with the Flight Kit, we're currently only shipping our PocketOnly and PocketCombo combos to the US." In a statement to DroneXL, however, the FCC says the authorization "was granted erroneously," the device is "a prohibited UAS critical component produced in a foreign country," and the company was "apparently willfully violating" the law.

The Versa, a 230g pocket gimbal camera that snaps into a separate propeller chassis to fly, raised more than $230,000 in its debut, thanks to a U.S. certification that HoverAir said let it dodge the ban that's kept DJI's newest models out of the country. The device's FCC ID has since disappeared from the commission's equipment database, according to The Verge, which said HoverAir declined to comment.

The FCC granted ID 2AIDW-ZZ-H-1-006 to Shenzhen Zero Zero Infinity Technology, the HoverAir parent's grantee entity, earlier this month for the Versa as a camera rather than a drone. The Flight Kit carries the motors and props but no radio, drawing power and telemetry from the camera through pogo pins, meaning it never needed its own FCC ID.

HoverAir announced the certification on August 18 and priced the camera at $449 early bird, with Flight Kit bundles starting around $630 and shipping slated for October. By August 21, U.S. visitors to the Indiegogo page couldn't see the Flight Kit tiers while Canadian visitors still could, and backers received an email attributing the change to "a few remaining logistics updates with the Flight Kit."

The December 2025 Covered List order that barred new authorizations for foreign-made drones also covers "UAS critical components," which the FCC's public notice DA 25-1086 defines to include flight controllers, navigation systems, batteries, motors, and "sensors and cameras," with the list marked as not exhaustive. A camera built to bolt onto a propeller frame satisfies that definition regardless of which product category it's certified under, and the FCC said it's now "sending guidance to all Telecommunications Certification Bodies to strengthen their due diligence of applications." The commission outsources equipment authorization to those private labs, which is likely how the Versa grant slipped through the cracks.

The only exemptions issued so far were approved back in January and cover Blue UAS-listed aircraft and components that qualify as domestic end products. Neither applies to a Chinese consumer camera; DJI is challenging the underlying order in court.

HoverAir's previous crowdfunder, the waterproof Aqua, raised more than $2 million from over 1,800 Indiegogo backers in August last year but missed the December deadline after the October government shutdown slowed FCC processing. It launched in more than 50 countries in May without the U.S., with American backers offered refunds.

The Versa is still listed with the Flight Kit in other markets, and U.S. backers can still take the camera-only tiers, though the FCC's statement that even the camera is a prohibited component casts doubt on that option. HoverAir is due to show the Versa at IFA in Berlin on September 3, with retail availability planned for fall.

Sony’s decision to end physical game production by 2028 is facing backlash from the community, with one group announcing a concrete protest. DoesItPlay, a community dedicated to video game preservation, has called for a one-week boycott of PlayStation, asking players to turn off their consoles or log out of the PlayStation Network from August 23 to 30. According to its Bluesky post, the community, along with other creators, is calling for a one-week #PSBlackout starting tomorrow, asking for “No logins, no play sessions, no purchases on any of Sony’s platforms.”

Unfortunately, many say this move likely won't make much of an impact. That’s because the last week of August is “ordinary,” with no major events or PlayStation-related launches. In fact, it’s also the same week as Gamescom, so many hardcore gamers would likely be away and at the convention anyway. Some comments on DoesItPlay’s post suggest more drastic measures, like a mass cancellation of PSN subscriptions for three months or even mass refunds of pre-selling digital games, arguing that a boycott or blackout with an expiry date is meaningless, as Sony will simply wait it out.

Other users are showing their displeasure with the move towards digital-only releases in more drastic ways. One example of this is Cyberleek, who leaked gameplay clips and the entire map of Leonidas a week before GTA VI’s extended look trailer is set to come out on Netflix. Take-Two is already taking steps to find out who was behind the leaks, but only after it became apparent that the hacker apparently has a full working build of the much-anticipated game. While the leaker did not mention anything about Sony’s plan to go fully digital, Cyberleek opposed the decision to offer pre-selling digital copies of GTA VI and threatened to keep releasing leaks until the publisher issues a public apology and “a concrete commitment to be better.”

Sony wants to abandon fans? Let's give them a small taste of their own medicine!Together with other creators we call for a 1 week #PSBlackout in August. No logins, no play sessions, no purchases on any of Sony's platforms.

— @doesitplay.org (@doesitplay.org.bsky.social) 2026-08-23T02:04:05.199Z

The gaming industry has been slowly moving away from physical media and toward fully digital releases, especially with the prevalence of the Steam and Epic storefronts. However, what many do not realize is that “buying” games from most of these services does not equate to ownership—something Steam had to clarify on its checkout page in 2024.

The only major distributor that currently offers complete ownership is GOG, which says, “A purchase of a digital content on GOG grants you its Offline Installers, which cannot be taken away from you.” Subscriptions like PC Game Pass have also started offering short-term convenience for gamers, especially those who only want to play something for a while and don’t mind losing access to the game after they’ve already completed or grown tired of it.

Companies like Sony are likely reacting to market preferences for digital games, which is probably why it doubled down on its decision to axe physical game discs. One way consumers can force these tech companies to keep physical distribution alive is by putting their money where their mouth is and start purchasing game discs from retailers instead of downloading them from online storefronts.

Two Chinese humanoid robots just beat the record of the world’s fastest human in the 100-meter dash. According to Reuters, Tiangong Ultra achieved a record time of 9.39 seconds in the race, while Honor’s Lightning came in at a close second, with a time of 9.47 seconds. These are 0.19 and 0.11 seconds faster than Usain Bolt’s 9.58-second record, which he set in 2009 at the World Athletics Championships in Berlin, Germany. This gives the Tiangong Ultra an average speed of 23.83 mph or 38.34 kph, which is just marginally faster than Bolt’s 23.35 mph or 37.58 kph. The robots set the records at the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, which has been held annually starting last year.

It may seem odd that we’re celebrating a robot speed record when the world’s fastest quarter mile is just 3.22 seconds, but we must remember that these are autonomously running bipedal robots. This “form factor” is certainly more challenging to build compared to machines running on four wheels or legs. Despite that, the teams behind these machines greatly improved their projects in such a limited time. To put things into context, the Tiangong Ultra also won the 100-meter race last year, but at a relative snail’s pace of 21.50 seconds. By comparison, Donald Lippincott set the first 100-meter world record in 1912 with a time of 10.6 seconds at the Stockholm Olympics. That means that it only took the machines one year to cut their time by more than 12 seconds, but it took humans nearly 100 years to shave the world record by a little over a second.

While these machines are certainly fast, with the Lightning reportedly achieving a 9.32-second unofficial time during practice runs, they still lack the finesse of human runners like Bolt. A few meters after these robots crossed the finish line, they slammed directly onto a foam pad, with the winning Ultra redirecting itself towards the right off the camera frame while the Lightning seemingly lost control and eventually fell helplessly towards the left. A third robot, which was a couple of seconds behind the faster two units, attempted to slow down by sliding forward before it crumpled itself on the massive cushion. They probably need to teach themselves how to end a race gracefully, much like how Nvidia’s AI robots taught themselves how to install GPUs on mobos.

Aside from this 100-meter dash, there are 51 other competitions during this five-day event, including boxing, football, dancing, and industrial-task contests. Reuters reports that 2,056 robots across 666 teams have registered for the games, with representatives from 16 countries from every corner of the world. These robots might not yet be ready for at-scale deployments in industrial, commercial, or residential uses, but events like this show that they’re beginning to become more than capable of doing many different things. But as for the two fastest robots, it’s unlikely that they’ll become available in the U.S. because of the FCC’s ban on foreign-made robots.

Meteoric, a startup by two engineers from the University of Cambridge and backed by Y Combinator, plans to build drones that will autonomously fly inside low- and mid-altitude clouds near solar farms to dissipate them and help keep power production in optimum conditions. According to Mete Karslioglu, Meteoric’s CEO, these drones will mechanically alter the water droplets inside clouds that cover solar farms, reducing their reflectivity and increasing the amount of sunlight that hits the panels below.

“Low and mid-level overcast clouds cut incoming sunlight by 73–82% while they’re overhead. We recover that without building new infrastructure,” Karslioglu wrote in their Y Combinator post. “Fleets of 10s-100s of autonomous drones that fly into low and mid-altitude clouds (1–5 km) over a solar farm and alter the water droplets that form them without using any chemicals. This reduces their reflectivity and brings back measurable amounts of sunlight to the panels below. Our cloud-loss model shows that this process can increase annual generation from existing assets by 10-30% across major U.S. grid regions, worth ~$5,000-28,000/MW, without building any new infrastructure.” They also added, “Our ultimate goal is to reduce the intensity of severe storms and hurricanes.”

It’s unclear what method the startup will use to help dissipate clouds, but it claims to have a working prototype that dissipated an artificial cloud by 13% in cloud-chamber tests. Techniques to dissipate fog and low clouds already exist, like dispersing solid or liquid carbon dioxide inside them to make the floating water droplets grow bigger and encourage them to fall from the sky, or through mechanical mixing, such as flying a helicopter through saturated air in order to mix them with drier air and make it easier for the water vapor to evaporate. However, Meteoric said that these methods are expensive, with aircraft operations costing $2,000 per hour or more. On the other hand, its electric drones would only cost $30 to $60 an hour, making its operations significantly cheaper.

This is a unique approach to one of the biggest problems of solar power, where changing weather patterns and the day/night cycle greatly reduce their output. Other institutions, both startups and tech giants, are also looking for ways to solve this. For example, Reflect Orbital proposes launching an orbital mirror to reflect sunlight in various areas to extend daylight, while Meta plans to put solar collecting satellites in geosynchronous orbit and then beam the sunlight to collectors on the ground below.

Now, the startup’s premise looks promising for localized applications, like solar plant deployments. However, its dream of scaling up to impact storms and hurricanes raises some questions. The World Meteorological Organization says that the amounts of energy involved in weather systems are so massive that it’s impossible to alter or eliminate severe weather phenomena. “Weather modification technologies that claim to achieve such large-scale or dramatic effects do not have a sound scientific basis and should be treated with suspicion,” the group said. There’s also the concern that modifying weather conditions, even locally, might have unintended consequences on the local ecosystem. Nevertheless, Meteoric’s plan to increase solar output by cutting cloud cover might be interesting for solar operators looking to maximize the production of their plants.

Shopping for PC parts continues to be a nightmare, with skyrocketing RAM, SSD, and GPU prices paired with unpredictable availability. However, a lucky shopper managed to score a flagship GPU for far less than its original launch price. According to Reddit user u/sparkyscotty55, their local Walmart store was selling a PNY-branded Nvidia RTX 5080 for just $702.56, down from its listed selling price of $1,249. Not only does this deal result in a discount of $546.44, but its final price is also much lower than Nvidia’s suggested $999 retail price for the RTX 5080.

A quick price check reveals that this particular PNY RTX 5080 OC graphics card is currently listed at over $1,500 on Amazon, Newegg, and Best Buy. This makes the Walmart clearance price even more impressive, with the shopper essentially paying less than half of what the GPU currently costs at major retailers. The shopper also confirmed that they inspected the box to verify that the GPU inside was indeed the correct model and appeared to be in good condition.

The PNY GeForce RTX 5080 OC is a factory-overclocked version of Nvidia's reference RTX 5080 that targets 4K gaming and content-creation workloads. The RTX 5080 packs 10,752 CUDA cores, 16GB of GDDR7 memory on a 256-bit bus, and up to 960 GB/s of memory bandwidth. Its fifth-generation Tensor cores and fourth-generation RT cores enable features such as AI acceleration, hardware-accelerated ray tracing, and Nvidia's DLSS 4 technology, including Multi Frame Generation. The GPU is listed to push the boost clock to 2.73 GHz, up from Nvidia's reference 2.62 GHz, while retaining the 360W power rating. It also uses a substantial cooling system with three 100mm silent fans and a dense heatsink, along with a triple-slot design.

Walmart's clearance aisles have produced rare but similar GPU bargains in the past. For instance, back in February another shopper managed to grab the same RTX 5080 model at just $562.49. During that period, it was one of the few RTX 5080 models sold at Nvidia’s suggested MSRP of $999, thus resulting in an impressive discount of $430 for the lucky customer. Another Walmart clearance find involved an RTX 5060 Ti, with a customer picking up an MSI RTX 5060 Ti Ventus 2X 8GB at just $80. Since the card had launched with an MSRP of $379, the shopper managed to end up saving nearly $300. The deal was particularly interesting as the buyer was reportedly upgrading from a much older GTX 1060, resulting in a massive generational leap at a negligible price.

While such deals occasionally result in an incredible bargain, there is always an element of risk, especially when it involves expensive PC hardware. Such items could be customer returns with opened boxes, or items that have been marked down because of damaged packaging or missing accessories. There are also some cases where heavily discounted PC components are returned units that are either damaged, swapped, or do not include the hardware originally sold with it, which makes checking the contents before completing the purchase particularly important.

Officials in Marshall, Michigan, did what data center opponents across the country have been demanding: on August 3, its city council passed a one-year moratorium on new builds. Ten days later, police told council members they were the subject of a credible death threat tied to the project. The same week, the 300-person town of Salix, Iowa, postponed its own moratorium vote after Facebook posts put its government "in the crosshairs," and in Box Elder County, Utah, a commissioner who approved a project told KSL he has police stationed outside his house. Then, on August 21, NBC News reported that city leaders nationwide are now receiving death threats over data centers, regardless of which way officials vote.

Marshall Mayor Scott Wolfersberger told local news station WWMT that the city's police department contacted him on August 12 about the threat and that the investigation is ongoing. Councilor James Hackworth wrote in a social media post that members had received "a legitimate death threat" and that disagreement, protest, and voting the council out are all part of democracy. It's unclear whether the sender supports or opposes data centers, and no suspect has been identified to date.

Meanwhile, Salix Mayor Kevin Nelson has said that the Woodbury County Sheriff's Office is investigating posts that called for "various death and terroristic type things" against the entire city government. Nelson said threats first came in May, after the town annexed 900 acres of farmland in April for a site Google is evaluating.

Woodbury County is separately challenging the annexation in court. The council met a week late on August 20 and voted 3-2 against the moratorium, with Nelson calling officers into the room as members of the public and councilman Gene Monk objected. "We ask for a cool-down period for a year to research, then we can make an educated decision. We can let the people vote for it after that — do something different," Monk said. "It's too big of a decision for us five people [council members]."

Over in Box Elder County, Utah, Commissioner Lee Perry has said that he and fellow Commissioners Boyd Bingham and Tyler Vincent had received threats after voting through two resolutions for the Stratos project area, with an audience of roughly 500 chanting "shame" at the meeting.

Previous incidents show these are more than idle threats. In April, Indianapolis councilman Ron Gibson had 13 rounds fired into his home after backing a rezoning, and Saline Township, Michigan, treasurer Jennifer Zink resigned in May citing threats over the 1.4GW Oracle and OpenAI campus that triggered moratoriums in at least 19 Michigan municipalities. Emporia, Kansas, moved its August 5 and August 19 commission meetings online and dropped public comment after its leaders were threatened.

Recent data published in the Soufan Center's July IntelBrief, which is based on a year of scraping X and Reddit, found hundreds of posts with threat language between July 2025 and July 2026, and a volume surge beginning in April that hasn't receded. Most violent threats in its dataset are targeted towards infrastructure rather than people, with posts naming council members and planning commissions a small minority. Many use memes, emojis, and misspellings to dodge moderation.

The center also found that each new incident now draws far more secondary amplification than it did earlier in the year. Emporia's mayor said the threats to his commission didn't appear to come from locals, and Salix, Emporia, and Marshall have all now canceled, moved, or restricted public meetings because of them, at a point when more than 500 local restrictions on data centers are in place nationwide.

TrashBench is back with another project that might seem deranged at first, but it actually ended up working out pretty well. Taking a grinder to the stock cooler of an Nvidia GTX 1070, he attached a fully-fledged CPU cooler with RGB fans to see if that'd cool the die better than what came from the factory. Not only did it work for the 1070, but also the 1060 and the illustrious 1080 Ti. The modification resulted in higher FPS, higher clock speeds, lower temperatures, and even lower power consumption.

The sacrificial lamb for this project was the Asus Strix variant of a GTX 1070 that TrashBench actually mistook for a 1060 at first (since they both share the exact same cooler). The modder separated the cooler assembly from the shroud and proceeded to cut out a part of the finstack with an angle grinder. The goal was to expose the back of the metal plate touching the GPU core on the other side, so that a CPU cooler could be mounted there.

He attached the cooler to a 1060 with a 120mm fan zip-tied on, and despite missing a few fins, the temperature somehow dropped from 46°C to 45°C under load. TrashBench then drilled holes into the exposed metal plate and screwed a single-tower CPU cooler directly into it. The result was a graphics card 9°C cooler than before and with slightly better clocks.

Moving on to the dual-tower cooler required a few more grinding modifications to the baseplate of the card. Once attached, the temperature dropped further by only one degree even though two fans were now dissipating the heat from those extra fins. Still, he overclocked the 1060 in this condition, and it netted 9% higher FPS in Shadow of the Tomb Raider compared to the stock cooler, while being 6°C cooler.

It was now time for the 1070 — the dual-tower CPU cooler ran a whole 20°C cooler than the stock configuration. It consumed 15W less and clocked higher during the test, which prompted TrashBench to push for a 2,200 MHz OC. Unfortunately, it wasn't stable at that; boosting to 2,177 MHz was the limit. That still resulted in almost 200 MHz higher clocks compared to stock and 7% more FPS in-game. The GTX 1070 was a raging success, especially impressive when you consider that the 1060 didn't elicit a large temperature differential.

Keep in mind that the GTX 1060 and GTX 1070 have identical coolers from the factory. The 1060 has a 120W TDP while the 1070 has a 150W TDP, so the same modded cooler can work wonders on either card. The GTX 1080 Ti up next is a huge leap at 250W, and it has a much beefier heatsink to keep up with that. Instead of just testing the card with that, TrashBench transplanted a stock 1060 cooler to make the comparison between all cards as fair as possible. The 1060 cooler on the 1080 Ti was already 8°C hotter under load.

Against this configuration, the dual-tower cooler ended up achieving the same clocks for 30W less, or about a 12% reduction in power consumption. The first run saw the stock 1060 cooler peg the card's hotspot at 72°C while the dual-tower cooler sat at just 42°C — that's 30°C cooler! In the second run, the difference was down to 23°C, which is still mighty impressive. Even after an overclock to 2,152 MHz, the modded cooler ran 19°C cooler than stock despite actually consuming more power this time.

Overall, the results speak for themselves, and this isn't even the first time TrashBench has done something like this. He's previously strapped a CPU cooler on a GTX 960, though with a lot more grace, and bolted a server AIO on an RTX 3080. As for this experiment, as long as you're rocking an open test bench and have too much time on your hands, then this wouldn't be the strangest TrashBench project to replicate.

Disk Union announced a special edition cassette tape on August 21. The new UD-60U tapes are the result of a Disk Union and Maxell brand collaboration in Japan. According to the press release, one of the major reasons for the release of the new UD-60U tapes is to appeal to nostalgic customers.

“Before the era when hobbies could be easily shared digitally, exchanging cassette tapes was an important way to share our favorite music and culture,” recalls the Disk Union press release. It goes on to ponder how this product release will “evoke a sense of nostalgia” for those who grew up with the original UD series. Perhaps naughtily, it even seems to encourage folks to indulge in making home recordings from vinyl. “Dub your treasured music purchased at a record shop, and enjoy it together with the unique texture and character that only cassette tapes can provide,” suggests the Disk Union marketing department.

Creating mix tapes is hinted at as a possible use of a pack of UD-60Us. Normal-position tapes (Type I ferric) like these are not the best for high-fidelity audio recordings. I always liked to use Chrome (Type II) or even Metal (Type IV) tapes for my own hi-fi mixes and recordings. Nevertheless, ferric tapes are ideal for 8-bit home computer tape storage. They would be perfect partners to a C64 Datassette, or for any tape interface you may have used with a VIC-20, Plus/4, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, MSX, BBC Micro, and so on. The square-ish digital pulses used to encode data to audio (and read it back) are actually in the sweet spot for ferric tape on low-end mechanisms.

Maxell UD tapes were originally launched in 1970 as a high-output, low-noise mass-market cassette line. Later in the decade, they moved to PX gamma‑hematite iron oxide, a purer and more advanced ferric formulation for higher output, lower noise, and pleasing frequency response. Sources suggest UD tapes were often chosen by major music labels for commercial pre-recorded cassette releases. Maxell UD tapes earned a place in cassette music lore alongside TDK SD and Sony HF rivals.

A wave of UD revivals began in 2016, with tapes marketed by Maxell in retro packaging. Last year, Maxell collaborated with Disk Union on the release of the first batch of UD-60U tapes to “a great response.” Now they’re back on sale, and they are priced at 990 yen ($6.25) each, or 2,900 yen ($18.28) for a triple pack. Denkyosha Co. is listed as the distributor.

It has been a quarter century since the world’s first webcam was turned off for good. The Trojan Room Coffee Pot was retired on Wednesday, August 22, 2001, after 10 years of service at Cambridge University. This extraordinary webcam’s final low-res image was of its own switch-off, with the fingers of Daniel Gordon, Martyn Johnson, and Quentin Stafford-Fraser pressing the power-off switch on the Acorn Archimedes to which the cam was attached.

Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky created the webcam for the entirely practical purpose of preventing team members from being disappointed when they visited the coffee pot. “There were about fifteen of us involved in related research and, being poor, impoverished academics, we only had one coffee filter machine between us, which lived in the corridor just outside the Trojan Room,” Stafford-Fraser recalls. “However, being highly dedicated and hard-working academics, we got through a lot of coffee, and when a fresh pot was brewed, it often didn't last long.” With several team members in other parts of the building, some needing to traverse several flights of stairs to reach the coffee pot, XCoffee was devised as a solution.

The Archimedes mentioned in the intro wasn’t the first host for the Trojan Room Coffee Pot camera; that was an unnamed Motorola 680X0 machine. The Acorn RISC computer took over webcam duties less than eight years prior to the switch-off in 2001.

This webcam has a history going even further back, though. Remarkably, the Trojan Room Coffee Pot webcam was live even before the World Wide Web was a thing. It began service in 1991, when a 128 x 128 pixel grayscale camera was connected to the science lab’s LAN via a frame capture card. An image of the coffee pot was captured three times a minute and via a custom-coded server-side X Window System protocol app so that any team member on the network could monitor/check it. This pioneering webcam actually connected to the internet for the first time in November 1993, just a few months after web browsers gained the ability to display images.

Today, webcams can be used to broadcast very high-quality streams with high resolutions and supporting very fast data and frame rates. Great capture hardware, fast computers, and fiber internet are widespread now, so if you wanted to live-stream a coffee pot, it would be a cinch to do so in true color, in up to 4K, and 60 frames per second using one of the best webcam picks of 2026.

Like clockwork, it's a new month and a new OS-breaking bug has been discovered in Windows 11's latest monthly update, KB5121003. Users reported random system instability, with games freezing or outright crashing, and even BSODs in worst-case scenarios. Microsoft investigated the issue and reached a vindicating conclusion — RGB software installed on affected PCs was interfering with core system components, causing Windows 11 to become unstable.

Online multiplayer titles such as Arc Raiders, Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls, and The Finals were most affected by this issue. Reports mentioned these games exhibiting a pretty classic crash pattern. They'd suddenly hang and become unresponsive, show an "EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION" blue screen, and force your computer to restart automatically.

An official update posted on Microsoft's Windows 11 25H2 health status page says, "this issue is related to peripherals or internal device components which have RGB lighting features." The software governing these devices would install drivers or code components with file names similar to "inpoutx64" to control the RGB. When you'd launch a certain game, inpoutx64 would trigger the issue and cause a crash.

Microsoft didn't explain the underlying cause, but it's likely tied to anti-cheat not appreciating a kernel-mode driver in user space. RGB software, like other apps, should be limited to user space, but the driver it uses to interface with peripheral controllers runs in kernel space. For anti-cheat software, this is essentially an exploit waiting to happen, so it tries to block the driver to make sure it doesn't inject malicious code.

If the driver is blocked upon startup and the RGB software unknowingly tries to push a lighting change or monitor a temp sensor, for instance, it hits a wall, and Windows throws up the EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION error. If the driver is terminated mid-use while executing assembly instructions at the Ring 0 level, it causes a critical kernel fault. Kernel space typically can't recover from unhandled errors like these, so Windows triggers a blue screen as a precaution to protect your hardware.

Microsoft says it's "presently working to understand the relationship between these RGB components and the games which trigger this issue." The company will provide more info later, but for now, you can use the Registry Editor to manually disable the driver as a temporary solution. Embark Studios, developers of Arc Raiders and The Finals, also shared this method to fix crashes for now.

This could break some RGB software functionality, but you can use universal programs like SignalRGB or OpenRGB to control your devices as long as they're supported. Their specialized drivers have strictly defined whitelists that don't scare anti-cheat software. Still, if you're facing this issue, Microsoft suggests reporting it via Feedback Hub—that's how issues like this get prioritized in the first place.

Linux kernel 7.3 is set to bring an oddly nostalgic update for 3dfx's Voodoo 3, one of the most recognizable graphics cards of the late 1990s. Don't get too excited; the venerable PCI-and-AGP accelerator isn't suddenly getting a modern Linux graphics stack, but the kernel's existing tdfxfb framebuffer driver is being updated so that it can initialize a Voodoo 3 itself rather than relying on the system firmware to have already run the card's video BIOS. It's a small change with a surprisingly specific purpose, and one that illustrates why ancient hardware occasionally gets attention in contemporary Linux.

The problem is that the tdfxfb driver historically assumed that the Voodoo card had already been initialized by the PC's firmware. That's because, at the time it was written, that was a reasonable assumption on a conventional x86 PC. The system firmware would execute the card's video BIOS during boot, configure the hardware, and then hand Linux something that is already capable of displaying an image. That assumption breaks down on newer and unusual platforms where the firmware cannot or does not execute the VGABIOS. The creator's patch description specifically calls out non-x86 computers, systems where another graphics card is primary, and newer BIOSes that can't run the old video BIOS.

The developer behind the patches, Daniel Palmer, was using a Voodoo 3 in an Amiga 4000 equipped with a PCI bridge when the problem cropped up. Linux could detect the card, but the Voodoo was still completely uninitialized, leaving him staring at "no signal detected." The new code uses configuration information from the card's own video BIOS to perform the initialization from Linux instead, allowing the driver to bring the VGA core up and establish a working display without depending on the system firmware. For now, the new manual initialization code is specifically aimed at the Voodoo 3; he had initially noted support for the VSA-100-based Voodoo 4 and 5 cards, but their BIOS layouts are different, so that support was removed from the current patch series. The code has been tested on both a modern x86-64 system and an Amiga 4000 with a Mediator PCI bridge.

On a conventional modern-ish x86-64 PC with a Voodoo 3 installed, the practical result is fairly modest. Load tdfxfb and you can get a working Linux framebuffer device, typically exposed as /dev/fb0, with the Voodoo driving a display that can host the Linux virtual console. In other words, this is enough to turn the Voodoo from "a PCI device that Linux can identify" into an actual display adapter capable of putting pixels on the screen even when firmware didn't initialize it first. Applications that know how to use the Linux framebuffer interface can also draw to it, just as they could with other old framebuffer devices.

The thing is, that's also where the limits of this work become apparent. Linux fbdev is a legacy graphics interface and has long been superseded by Linux's DRM/KMS graphics infrastructure, so this ain't a resurrection of the Voodoo 3 as a contemporary Linux GPU. Loading tdfxfb does not give you a Mesa stack, modern OpenGL, Wayland acceleration, or the sort of 3D functionality you would expect. It is essentially a very old-fashioned "squirt pixels at the display" arrangement, but that's useful enough for a Linux console, embedded-style framebuffer applications, and, apparently, people putting exotic PCI graphics cards into even more exotic old computers, but it's not exactly a compelling reason to install a Voodoo 3 in a modern desktop.

The more interesting part is that Palmer is working on a separate 3D path for the Voodoo 3, and that effort is already much further along than the framebuffer work alone might suggest. The experimental interface exposes the Voodoo's register space to userspace through a new /dev/tdfx3d misc device, whose mmap() interface allows software to program the card's 3D hardware directly. On top of that sits smoltdfx, a tiny userspace library for driving the Voodoo 3, and smolminigl, a small OpenGL 1.x implementation built on top of it. Palmer says he has tested the project on real Voodoo 3 hardware and that it can render directly through the card's registers without X, Mesa, or Glide.

Palmer is developing that work alongside a QEMU emulation of the Voodoo 3. The developer says Claude helped build the emulator in the first place to debug the issue of getting the card working on his Amiga. Now, test programs can be run against both the emulated card and the real hardware, with differences fed back into the emulator until the behavior matches. The smoltdfx project now uses the same rendering tests against QEMU and physical Voodoo 3 hardware, comparing frame digests to catch differences. According to Palmer, the resulting MiniGL implementation can already run Quake on the real card, although performance isn't great, and some issues with the Voodoo 3's multitexturing capabilities remain to be worked out.

Obviously, that's a lot more interesting than simply putting a Linux console on a Voodoo 3. The sum total is a highly experimental 3dfx graphics stack built from the bottom up: Linux provides the framebuffer and low-level device access, userspace programs the Voodoo directly, and a lightweight OpenGL implementation sits above that to provide enough functionality for classic 3D software to command the card.

Indeed, things could get particularly fun for retro-computing and virtualization. A PCI Voodoo 3 is the sort of device that, at least conceptually, could be assigned to a virtual machine using PCI passthrough, letting a guest operating system talk directly to the real accelerator with its period-accurate 3dfx driver. In the fantasy version of that setup, you could have a modern Linux host hand an actual Voodoo 3 to a Windows 98 or DOS-era guest and then let the guest use the very same hardware that the old software expected. The engineering details are much nastier than the concept suggests (particularly around resetting and exposing such old hardware cleanly), but the new ability to initialize an otherwise-dormant Voodoo from Linux is at least a useful piece of that puzzle.

For now, though, the headline is more significant than the immediate feature set. Linux 7.3 isn't suddenly turning a 25-year-old Voodoo 3 into a usable GPU; it's making an existing framebuffer driver capable of bringing the card to life on systems where firmware cannot do the job, which is a very small but very real hole in hardware support. More remarkably, the same effort has already spilled into experimental 3D acceleration on real hardware, with a userspace Voodoo 3 library and an OpenGL implementation capable of running Quake. Voodoo 3 may be over 25 years old by now, but somebody is still teaching Linux new tricks with it in 2026.

If you can’t have enough RGB and LCD screens inside your PC case, Thermalright just announced another must-have accessory for your build. The Fan Frame Vision-1 is a magnetic clip-on screen that snaps onto most standard 120mm fans on the market. This fan accessory boasts a 3.69-inch IPS display, is available in black or white, and can be mounted horizontally or vertically. Unfortunately, this device isn’t available on Amazon yet, although more “adventurous” enthusiasts could get it off AliExpress for $37.14 apiece, making it more expensive than some of the best PC case fans you can buy today.

Although this accessory mounts in front of your case fans, Thermalright claims it offers enough clearance that it doesn't interfere with airflow. It connects to your PC via a USB 2.0 hub inside your case, although you could also attach it to a blank USB-A port with the included adapter if you’re already out of interfaces on your motherboard. It’s also integrated with Thermalright’s LCD software, TRCC, making it easy to customize what information and theme you see on the screen. Given that TRCC has also already been ported to Linux, you can enjoy this overload of screens on your gaming PC, even if you’ve stepped away from Windows and into SteamOS or other Linux builds designed for gaming.

This accessory pairs well with some of the best AIO coolers that come with their own screens, letting you create a unified theme across all your cooling solutions. Because it has a standardized design, you can mount it on most standard fans that use metal screws at each corner. The magnetic mounts on the Fan Frame Vision-1 would easily grab onto the heads of these screws, keeping the screen secure inside your case. Unfortunately, if you use larger fans, like the Thermalright TL-US24/36, you won’t be able to use this as an add-on, especially if they use offset screws. This means that the magnetic studs on the base of this accessory would have nothing to grab onto.

The Fan Frame Vision-1 and other similar LCD screen accessories won't bring any performance benefits to your PC build. But if you have an overpowered computer, these little extras wouldn’t hurt one bit. Besides, all that eye-candy would help remind you how much you’ve spent on your gaming computer, especially given the egregious prices on RAM and storage these days.

Solo developer Grow Now! Games has put a playable browser build of its walkable ASCII cyberpunk city online, running on a 283KB Rust WebAssembly engine feeding a WebGL renderer. The build went live this week alongside a second YouTube video, ASCII City Update: Interiors, Elevation & Skyscrapers, following the original video, which has passed a million views and 9,000 comments.

The page fetches ascii-city-engine_bg-DqjAhqbp.wasm, a 283KB module that reserves 1,152KB of linear memory at startup and reports an engine version of 0.1.0 when instantiated outside the browser. Its exports include initialise_native_game, step_native_game, and generate_native_local_map. Debug paths left in the binary name the Rust source modules behind those calls: city.rs, world.rs, population.rs, interiors.rs, and rendering.rs. World generation runs in Rust, which hands JavaScript base64-packed byte arrays covering building heights, tile kinds, surfaces, hues, saturations, window styles, lit flags, and floor plan IDs.

The renderer requests a WebGL context and compiles a vertex and fragment shader pair, the fragment stage consisting of a single texture2D lookup. Characters are drawn once each into an atlas canvas with fillText, cached per character-and-color combination, uploaded to the GPU with one texImage2D call, and then drawn as textured quads with six vertices apiece.

Atlas cells measure 11 pixels tall by the monospace advance width plus two. Every visible cell goes into one buffer upload, and one drawArrays call per frame. Two fallbacks sit beneath this, a Canvas 2D drawImage path when WebGL is unavailable, and a per-cell fillText path reachable through a ?direct URL parameter.

Desktop sessions render 180 columns by 80 rows, or 14,400 character cells, in 10px Consolas at nine pixels per row. Touch devices drop to 48 rows and between 96 and 168 columns, and the Rust engine uses a separate 160 by 112 profile. The vertex buffer preallocates 2.76MB and doubles when a frame overruns it.

Grow Now! Games described the original demo to PC Gamer as having "no Unity, there's no Unreal, there's no 3D models, textures, or shaders." A first-person Backrooms game for the 1994 Sega 32X runs on a raycasting engine written from scratch in C and SH-2 assembly. A multiplayer Doom tribute implements raycasting and sprite projection as a stack of SQL views, reaching roughly 30 FPS at 128 x 64. Thunder Lizard, an ASCII roguelike, has had its character grid redrawn by image models into full-motion visuals at around 10 FPS.

A class-action lawsuit has been filed against Logitech after it allegedly failed to return the tariffs that the U.S. government refunded to the company after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that President Donald Trump’s tariffs were illegal. According to Ars Technica, the company increased the prices on more than half of its product line by as much as 25% in April 2025, the same month that the U.S. president announced the “Liberation Day” tariffs.

The lawsuit [PDF] alleges that the company received a full refund of $61 million as of June 30, 2026, but it has yet to return or refund any of its customers who bought Logitech products at the inflated prices. In fact, the price increases that it implemented last year in response to the illegal tariffs are still in place. “Many companies that received the benefit of a tariff refund, like the shippers that are now voluntarily returning money that they paid on customers’ behalf, are returning those ill-gotten gains to customers,” the attorneys argued in their class-action complaint.

“What separates Logitech from these shippers is that Logitech has made it clear it has no intention of returning that refund to its customers.” This contrasts with some companies, like Arctic, that have begun implementing refunds by cutting product prices.

Another argument in the complaint states that Logitech has more than enough capability to refund its customers. “Logitech’s own figures establish that the Company extracted approximately $73 million to $97 million from consumers in fiscal years 2026 alone through tariff-justified price increases, a conservative estimate of the amount passed through to the Class is therefore at least $75 million to $100 million,” the lawsuit alleges. It also pointed to the company’s statement in its May 2026 earnings call, saying that “manufacturing diversification actions combined with the price increase in the U.S. more than offset the negative impact of tariffs.”

Nintendo is in the same boat as Logitech, which is also facing a similar lawsuit after it refused to pass on its tariff refunds to customers. Although the Japanese console manufacturer managed to keep Switch 2 prices at its launch price of $449, the price of the previous-generation Switch increased by $40 to $50, and other accessories like Joy-Con 2 controllers also got a price bump. The list price of the older console has since reverted to pre-tariff prices, but the company refused to refund customers who bought at the higher prices.

“Nintendo or one of its retailers set a price for each product, and consumers decided whether that price was worth paying,” Nintendo’s lawyers said. “Those who bought Nintendo’s products received exactly what they bargained and paid for: a console, game and/or accessory at a price to which both parties agreed.”

Various U.S. agencies just released a warning claiming that Iranian hackers are targeting Siemens S7-series programmable logic controllers (PLCs). According to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) advisory, hackers are using publicly available information on these widely used devices to develop exploits that would enable remote access and control. They’re also using AI tools, allowing them to identify additional attack vectors and possibly adapt to any defensive measures operators may have taken to protect their systems.

“The actors leverage Internet scanning services to find Internet-exposed PLCs running outdated software or that are otherwise poorly protected,” the agency said in its warning. “The U.S. critical infrastructure sectors most targeted by this threat activity include Critical Manufacturing, Energy, Water and Wastewater, Chemical, Food and Agriculture, and Commercial Facilities. This is not a theoretical risk — it is an active threat. Depending on the specific circumstances, exploitation of poorly protected PLCs could lead to disruption of critical industrial processes, safety incidents, downtime or equipment damage, compromise of sensitive data, compliance violations, and cascading impacts across interconnected systems.”

The warning comes from multiple government agencies, not just CISA. The advisory was also co-authored by the National Security Agency (NSA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of Energy (DOE), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), underscoring how serious this issue could become. Because of this, operators using Siemens S7 PLCs (and other PLCs operating critical infrastructure) are advised to keep their equipment updated with the latest applicable security patches, isolate it from the internet as much as possible, protect it with strong access controls, and deploy cybersecurity measures to monitor industrial control systems (ICS) for any anomalies and possible malicious activity.

What makes the threat especially dangerous is that the use of AI tools could enable potential attackers to make malicious files look and behave like legitimate monitoring tools. They achieve this by using open-source industrial automation libraries, making it easier for unsuspecting users to fall victim to their attacks. Although the agencies did not specify where these attacks could originate, they came less than a month after the water infrastructure of several states was hit by cyberattacks thought to have originated from Iran.

The proliferation of internet-connected devices in critical infrastructure has made them prime targets for both hackers seeking to make big money and nation-states seeking to gain an advantage over their opponents. This was made apparent in recent years when key government websites and online services in Ukraine went down just as the Russian military started pouring across its borders back in 2022. More recently, a worm from an unknown source wiped Iranian machines during the first quarter of 2026, which happened around the same time as the United States’ bombing campaign against the country.

There were even claims from Iran that networking devices from American and European companies failed during an attack even though they were disconnected from the rest of the world. Aside from these scenarios in active warfare, cyberattacks could also be used in gray warfare, where opponents can inflict maximum damage while retaining plausible deniability, reducing the chances of retaliation.

This week, Tom's Hardware Premium published a swath of new features, new roadmaps, and deep industry insights. And if you haven't subscribed to Tom's Hardware Premium yet, you'll have the opportunity to access our Hot Chips 2026 content for free for a limited time with a free Tom's Hardware account, no payment required.

With that out of the way, here's what you've been missing out on.

First off, PC components expert Joe Shields lays down the law when it comes to shopping for a new motherboard. Unless you've been living under a rock, you know component pricing has skyrocketed over the past 12 months. If your current motherboard has recently kicked the bucket, or if you're looking to change platforms, you don't want to overpay on a component that, in all likelihood, you'll never use to its full extent. With memory pricing the way it is, overspending on other components that are less crucial for juicing performance is a one-way ticket to spending too much on stuff you just don't need.

Within the article, Joe details exactly what you might want to pay for — and the things you don't need to focus on, like fancy 20+ phase MOSFET VRMs, or that slick RGB shroud, which pretty much just sits there looking pretty while other components do the real work. So if you're in the market for a new motherboard, or if you want to learn more about them in general, Joe's article is a fantastic, detailed read on exactly what you should be looking for, more important the reasons you shouldn't be splashing over $500 in the current market.

• How to choose a new motherboard without overpaying — scoping out the features you need, and what you might never use as component costs soar

With all of the hubbub around AI and massive gigawatt-scale data centers, focus has shifted from the not-so-humble supercomputer. In June, China's Lineshine officially became the world's fastest ... but does that really matter anymore, in an era where AI systems built for training and inference exist? That's the question columnist Chris Stokel-Walker poses for us in his latest Special Report, where he interviewed Julian Kinkel, professor of high-performance computing at the University of Göttingen and deputy head of high-performance computing at GWDG, and Jack Dongarra, one of the TOP 500 founders and emeritus professor at the University of Tennessee.

The outlook for traditional supercomputers, which are benchmarked using the High Performance Linpack benchmark (HPL), remains mixed, as compute workloads continue to diversify amid shifting trends and demands, splintering the supercomputer race.

• The supercomputer race no longer means what it used to, as rankings lose relevance in the AI era

This week's hardware roadmap examines the status of Samsung's global foundries, from the long-delayed Taylor, Texas, facility, all the way to the flagship Pyeongtaek facility and associated R&D complexes. We examine the status of each of the locations, in addition to what processes and products each focuses on. But all that glitters is not gold: We also review the foundry's yield woes and the pressure to deliver on its lucrative deal with Tesla to manufacture the company's AI6 chips.

The company remains a distant second to TSMC — at least in terms of foundry revenue — but the AI era is accelerating Samsung's products and roadmaps as the South Korean chaebol continues its efforts in the semiconductor fabrication market.

• Samsung's fab roadmaps examined — Taylor, Pyeongtaek, and the yield woes behind a $16.5 billion Tesla deal

In the news

The regular slate of analysis pieces on Tom's Hardware Premium this week has been dominated by headlines covering China, trade, and Chinese-made chips. While the blockade on Nvidia H200 chips has officially lifted, we explore how it might be too little, too late for Nvidia, whose market share in the region has plummeted as a result of relentless export controls.

In the company's place instead are homegrown suppliers, according to new reports. Both Western and Chinese companies are in a heated battle to develop the most powerful, most intelligent AI models. To that end, China's domestic heroes are poised to corner the market, according to new market intelligence.

To that end, SMIC, China's premier chipmaker, has posted a record $3 billion quarter and expects to hike wafer prices to contend with insatiable regional demand. Keep in mind, these successes come not from GPUs but other parts like logic ICs, BCD power management devices, and optical transceiver components.

• H200 AI GPUs finally reach China under case-by-case import licenses, but it's already too late for Nvidia
• China's homegrown AI accelerators to supply 90% of the country's domestic market, analysts suggest
• SMIC posts record $3B quarter and hikes wafer prices — US sanctions hand Chinese foundry a captive AI market

Speaking of optical components, which are one of the hottest commodities in the chipmaking industry, the market is set to explode, estimated to reach an eye-watering $144.4 billion by 2030. Driving those figures, according to China Insights Consultancy, is a hunger for co-packaged optics, photonics chips, transceiver modules, and new techniques, as copper traces and cables begin to reach their natural bandwidth limits.

• AI data center optical interconnect market to hit $144 billion by 2030, an over ten-fold increase from 2024 figures, according to new projections

This week, LG reportedly entered the chip packaging business, shipping a Laser Direct Imaging (LDI) tool, a maskless machine especially designed for patterning interconnects. This marks LG's first foray into the advanced packaging arena. The LDI machine trades resolution for pure throughput, which is incredibly welcome. While the LDI machine has reportedly been shipped to an OSAT, it remains new to the arena, and it'll likely take the South Korean company years to firmly establish itself as a reliable toolmaker.

• LG enters chip packaging arena with Laser Direct Imaging machine, as TSMC's CoWoS remains constrained

With that, we'll see you next week for a bumper Hot Chips edition of this digest. I've seen the schedules and anticipate some incredibly insightful pieces coming out of the show. For now, if you'd like to read any of the articles above and to gain access to Bench, you'll need to purchase a subscription. Your support goes a long way in helping us to publish deeper, more insightful stories that might otherwise fall outside of our regular areas of coverage.

The second quarter of 2026 was quite favorable for CPU suppliers, as unit growth was 10% sequentially, with data center and laptop processor shipments more than offsetting declining sales of desktop CPUs and lower-end products for embedded and IoT applications, according to a new report by Mercury Research. AMD continued to gain market share, so its unit shipments and share reached a new record during the quarter; Intel managed to increase shipments of its client and data center CPUs; whereas Apple sold a boatload of processors in its popular MacBook Neo laptops. Overall, the report describes the desktop X86 CPU market as "ugly."

The sky is blue for CPU (for now)

"In spite of a decidedly gloomy outlook on client processors from the suppliers for the second quarter, actual results for both x86 and Arm CPUs were up strongly in the second quarter of 2026, with sequential quarterly growth of the total market exceeding 10%, far in excess of normal seasonal trends which call for a slight decline in the quarter," said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research. "Behind this growth was a large increase in Intel's CPU supplies, especially in mobile client, after a couple of heavily supply-constrained quarters, and continued strong ramps for AMD's products. […] Arm shipments also appeared to be strongly higher in the quarter as well."

While the CPU market was up quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) mostly because AMD, Apple, and Intel increased their shipment volumes, on a year-over-year (YoY) basis, the CPU market contracted in terms of units. However, the decline was primarily driven by significantly lower IoT, SoC, and embedded shipments — largely due to AMD's shrinking game console business — as well as a substantial drop in desktop CPU volumes. At the same time, shipments of data center and notebook processors grew strongly.

Excluding IoT, SoC, and embedded products, both AMD and Intel substantially increased CPU shipments sequentially, but AMD grew faster and gained unit share in every major segment, so the company now controls 30.7% of the overall x86 processor market, its highest share ever, according to Mercury Research. With IoT, console SoCs, and embedded CPUs included, AMD now controls 34.1% of the x86 processor market. Intel continues to lead, but AMD's growth is impressive.

"AMD's total unit shipments and total market share reached new record highs in the second quarter of 2026, with a sequential share gain of 0.7% and an on-year gain of 6.5%," McCarron said.

Client CPUs: AMD gains share as Intel increases shipments

Performance of the client x86 CPU market was a mixed bag in the first quarter as sales of desktop CPUs declined badly, whereas shipments of laptop processors grew significantly. Intel remained the clear volume leader with 69.7% of client CPU shipments, but lost share both sequentially and year-over-year. AMD continued to gain ground in Q2 2026 as its unit share reached a record 30.3%, up from 29.6% in Q1 and 23.9% in Q2 2025.

AMD gained share in both client categories. Its desktop unit share rose from 33.2% to 34.9% QoQ, even though AMD itself shipped fewer desktop CPUs; Intel's shipments declined even faster. In notebooks, AMD increased its share from 28.3% to 28.9%, even as Intel expanded production capacity and shipped millions more CPUs.

In general, the results for the quarter suggest that Intel's improved client CPU supply helped to meet demand from PC makers and led to a client PC market rebound, the company could not stop AMD's share gains.

Desktop CPUs: The ugliest segment of the market

Hit by limited availability of graphics cards and high prices of components like motherboards, memory modules, and SSDs, the desktop CPU market was particularly weak in Q2 and contracted by over 20% YoY as well as quarter-over-quarter due to seasonality. Both AMD and Intel suffered significant annual shipment declines, but AMD held up better, according to Mercury Research.

Despite dropping desktop CPU unit shipments and overall market weakness, AMD increased market share in Q2 2026. AMD's desktop CPU unit share upticked to 34.9%, up from 33.2% in Q1 and 32.2% in Q2 2025, while Intel's share fell to 65.1%, from 66.8% sequentially and 67.8% a year earlier.

During the quarter, AMD gained 1.8% QoQ and 2.7% YoY in unit share because declines in its shipments were considerably smaller than Intel's. So, while normally we say that AMD is gaining desktop share because of strong sales of its latest Ryzen CPUs, in this case AMD's success was driven by slower declines than rapid gains.

Mobile CPUs: Sales of laptops are growing

The mobile CPU market segment performed completely differently from the desktop CPU market segment. Mobile x86 CPU shipments grew significantly quarter-over-quarter and were also modestly higher YoY. Mercury Research says Intel added millions of units of mobile CPU capacity during Q2, which helped close the supply-demand gap that had constrained the company in previous quarters. Yet, AMD's shipments increased at nearly the same pace as Intel's, which enabled it to capture 0.6% of the market.

AMD's mobile CPU unit share rose to 28.9%, up from 28.3% in Q1 and from 20.6% in Q2 2025. Intel remained dominant with 71.1% of shipments, down from 71.7% sequentially and 79.4% a year earlier. As a result, AMD gained a modest 0.6% sequentially, but a much more impressive 8.4% YoY increase.

Server CPUs: +20% year-over-year

Demand for server CPUs increased for both traditional data center processors — AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon — and CPUs used in networking and storage applications, so x86 server processor shipments posted nearly 20% YoY growth and moderately strong sequential growth. AMD continued to gain market share and now commands over 1/3 of the server CPU market, according to Mercury Research. There is a catch, though: due to Intel accounting peculiarities, AMD's unit share is artificially low and so is Intel's own dollar share.

In Q2, AMD’s server CPU unit share increased to 34.5%, up from 33.2% in Q1 and 27.3% in Q2 2025. Intel remained the volume leader with 65.5% of shipments, but its share fell from 66.8% sequentially and 72.7% a year earlier. While some may say that AMD's gains are slow (not too slow at +7.3% YoY), there is an explanation behind that slow growth.

Mercury Research notes that its broad server share calculation somewhat disadvantages AMD because Intel's edge and networking processors are now reported within its Data Center and AI (DCAI) business, so in reality, AMD's unit share should be higher. If the comparison is narrowed to EPYC versus Xeon processors for servers, AMD's unit share reaches 46.4%, up a substantial 2.9% QoQ and 9.2% YoY, which puts AMD very close to Intel in the core data center CPU market. Meanwhile, if CPUs for edge and networking applications are ignored in Mercury's analysis, Intel's dollar share would increase considerably.

Mercury Research indicates that server CPU supply constraints could limit gains in Q3, but in Q4 sales of data center-grade processors will increase noticeably both compared to Q2 and Q3.

Summary

After a weak Q1, the CPU market rebounded strongly in Q2 2026 as unit shipments grew more than 10% sequentially. The market growth was driven by rising notebook and server CPU sales, which more than offset a sharp decline in desktops, according to Mercury Research.

AMD's performance was stellar as it gained ground in every major segment even as Intel substantially improved processor availability. Despite improved availability of Intel client and data center processors, AMD still outgrew Intel and reached record overall and client CPU unit shares.

Desktop remained the major weak spot due to high component costs and generally lower demand as enthusiasts pulled in their purchases to 2025, greatly lowering sales of high-end hardware in 2026. Shipments of desktop x86 CPUs fell more than 20% YoY, whereas mobile and server volumes increased.

In core data center processors, AMD's EPYC share approached Intel’s Xeon share, which highlights how dramatically the competitive balance in the server market has shifted.

PC cases today largely focus on subdued, minimal designs in order to appeal to as many people as possible. Compare that to the towers you could find back in the old days, and you'd think no one in these corporate boardrooms has any personality. Such was the reminder that Reddit user u/Witty-Composer-6445 got when they found an old PC build with a bold aesthetic and a PSU to match its uniqueness.

"I found it in a storage unit auction that I won which I initially thought only had like 35 laptops and some junk," the lucky scavenger told Tom's Hardware. "Unfortunately/fortunately for me, it actually had somewhere around 100 laptops, 20 desktop PCs, hundreds of RAM sticks, hard drives, various pc components, and THOUSANDS of random CDs, along with the “Alienware” pc which is actually not Alienware but Aspire instead."

We're looking at an Apevia X-Superalien case from the Y2K era that screams alien due to its harsh curves and angles. The case is made entirely out of aluminum, features 5 external 5.25" drive bays, and has a packed front I/O. You get 2x USB 2.0 ports, 2x 3.5mm audio jacks, and a Firewire port, all sitting below a small LCD, housed in what seems like an upside-down mushroom.

The side panel of the case is transparent, allowing you to peer through all of your era-appropriate components inside, including the aforementioned transparent power supply. The PSU is an Apevia ATX-AS500W and has a see-through top made out of acrylic, while the bottom is still metal. All the little bits inside that make up the PSU are color-coated, and there are blue LEDs inside, too. The loud, neon green accents are UV-reactive, so they glow in the dark, including the cables.

As a power supply, however, its status is questionable. We found mixed reviews, and because this PSU was sold under many different brands, it's difficult to keep track of exactly which one is decent and which isn't. It's called "Iceberg Power" in some places (this name yields the most search results), while the actual unit is a rebranded YoungYear YP-AB, built by Sun Pro.

A comment in the same thread says the 650W unit is good for about 250W of maximum output. That kind of efficiency puts it out of contention for a potential retro revival. You shouldn't use such an old PSU for that anyway, but you can still use it as a decorative piece, while the case itself looks to be perfectly fine. Many people even posted their own sleeper builds in the comments with similar chassis.

It's important to mention that the Reddit user found this case fully built with a Pentium 4 inside an abandoned storage unit, and they stumbled upon the PSU while cleaning Superalien. Even though their discovery was natural, today we see an increasing interest in retro products with people chasing nostalgia deliberately. Sleeper builds, made in slightly more mundane cases, even have a market now, while transparent or see-through tech is slowly making a comeback.

In a bizarre quality control issue, a gamer discovered protective film on the VRM thermal pads of their Gigabyte RTX 3070 Gaming OC graphics card. As per a Reddit post by u/buczi94, the GPU was purchased brand new and had never been disassembled or sent for any sort of repairs. After using the GPU for almost five years, the owner of the GPU started noticing high temperatures on the VRMs. They also faced frequent black screens during higher loads, waking the PC from sleep, and cold boots.

The Redditor claims that they upgraded their motherboard BIOS and GPU firmware and drivers, alongside disabling several settings including custom PBO curve, XMP, and Resizable Bar. Unfortunately, none of these measures helped alleviate the problems. They further performed some benchmark tests using Furmark and OCCT, where the GPU temperatures would reach as high as 80°C with the GPU hotspot at 105°C. While these numbers were not alarming, they also found that the cooling fans would randomly ramp up to their highest speed, despite setting a custom fan curve in MSI Afterburner and limiting the fans to 90%.

Fed up with the situation, the owner of the graphics card eventually took the decision to disassemble the GPU for cleaning and repasting, upon which they found protective films on the VRM thermal pads. They claim that peeling off the protective film and repasting the core resulted in a sizable reduction of 15°C on the GPU and 30°C on the GPU hotspot. Additionally, after three hours of stability tests on Furmark and OCCT, no errors were recorded.

The GPU owner also provided an update on the black-screen issues following the fix. While the problem initially occurred once every month or two, it became an everyday concern just a few days before the thermal pad films were discovered, specifically after waking the PC from sleep, during cold boots, or under heavy loads. After the fix, the owner claims that they experienced just one black screen during a cold boot, although they acknowledged that it was too early to determine whether the problem had been fully resolved.

Removing the protective film from the VRM thermal pads fixed the overheating problem. However, the damage caused by years of excessive heat cannot be undone. The owner alleged that since the VRMs were running much hotter for a long period, they have potentially affected several components on the graphics card, including the MOSFETs, as well as the capacitors around the VRM. The owner believes the excessive heat may have also caused the PCB to repeatedly expand and contract over the years, which can put stress on the board and potentially contribute to tiny cracks in solder joints. While they suspect this could be the reason behind the black screen issue, it is just a theory and can only be confirmed through proper testing.

As the flaw occurred at the production and assembly level, the GPU owner contacted Gigabyte’s support team to report the issue and asked for a replacement. However, instead of addressing the alleged manufacturing defect, Gigabyte’s support staff advised the owner to test their GPU in another system. They also informed the GPU owner that since the card was out of warranty, they should contact the retailer or pay a local repair shop to fix the issue.

It is unclear whether the protective film caused any damage to the VRMs, which ultimately resulted in the GPU's black-screen problems as claimed by the owner. However, the case raises questions about how a factory assembly error could go unnoticed for years and whether manufacturers should address such defects even after the standard warranty has expired.

Take-Two Interactive filed two DMCA subpoenas in the Southern District of New York on August 20, demanding that Microsoft and Discord identify the person or persons behind the "CyberLeek" persona responsible for this week's Grand Theft Auto 6 gameplay leaks. Take-Two wants more than just names and is asking for MachineGuid and MSA device identifiers, registration and last-login IP addresses, phone numbers, linked Google and Xbox connections, and OneDrive contents for every account that communicated in three named Discord servers since June 1. Both subpoenas, filed by Dale Cendali and Joshua Simmons of Kirkland & Ellis, set a September 4 deadline.

MachineGuid is a Windows value generated during installation and, according to Microsoft's own support documentation, stable across hardware changes unless the OS drive is replaced. Attachment A asks Microsoft to return that identifier for every account that was a member of, or communicated with any of the three listed Discord servers between June 1, 2026 and the present, in addition to the three handles named in the filings.

The Discord subpoena names three servers: Ødyssey.gg (guild ID 1517326120867991592), "! Odyssey" (1127436882800816149), and DarkViperAU (268280696601051136). The Microsoft subpoena describes the first of those as a cheat community and labels it the "operator's home." It also demands device telemetry where certain "tool/file artifacts" were present on a system, though no list of those artifacts appears anywhere in the exhibit.

Take-Two's petition directs the Microsoft subpoena to the company as GitHub's service provider, not as the operator of Xbox or OneDrive. The predicate takedown notice, filed as an exhibit, was sent on August 19 by Take-Two IP paralegal Alex Aviles to GitHub's copyright address over a single repository, zyrexdz/cyberleek-leak-research. It states that the repository "must be completely disabled, there are no remedies to rectify this clear case of infringement." At the time of writing, the GitHub repo is public with nearly 500 stars, more than 30 forks, and a commit pushed at 16:18 UTC.

Discord account and server IDs encode their creation time, and decoding the IDs in the filings dates the CyberLeek account to January 10, 2019, and the DarkViperAU server to January 10, 2017. Australian creator Matthew "DarkViperAU" Judge, whose server the filings describe as an editors' server, denied any knowledge in a post on X, writing "I don't know anything." The Ødyssey.gg server decodes to June 19, 2026, which is 18 days after the start of the June 1 records window. The Discord petition also lists 1517326120867991592 as a user ID belonging to the handle Surfer24k, while both subpoena attachments list the same number as the Ødyssey.gg server ID.

A sixth gameplay video leak appeared on August 21, six days before Grand Theft Auto 6: An Extended Look premieres on Netflix. Rockstar's parent company was itself hacked by ShinyHunters in April, while CyberLeek claims to have a full, working build and has published a manifesto attacking digital-only preorders.

Spending on physical game disks has fallen to the lowest recorded level since tracking began in 1995, according to a new report documenting a drastic slump in the console market. U.S. console hardware sales fell 39% by unit volume in July against a year earlier, while the average price paid for a new system rose 16% to $542, according to Circana data posted by analyst Mat Piscatella on August 20.

Dollar sales came in at $282 million, down 29% and the lowest July total since 2020, with Piscatella tying the drop to console price increases caused by the RAM and component crisis, a link Circana hadn't made in its monthly reporting before. PlayStation 5 units fell 6%, Xbox Series units fell 18%, and Switch 2 units fell 51%, with Nintendo's own $50 price increase still to come on September 1.

PS5 dollar sales rose 29% in July even as unit sales fell 6%, a gap driven by Sony's $100 increase across the PS5 range in April, which took the standard console to $599 and the PS5 Pro to $899. Sony still led the month in dollar sales, while the Switch 2 led in unit volume.

Switch 2 dollar sales fell 52% alongside the 51% unit decline, and the original Switch dropped 62% in units and 61% in dollars. Nintendo's Switch 2 is the only one of the three current platforms that hasn't raised its U.S. price yet, but that’ll change when the console goes to $499 on September 1. The company's RAM costs for the console rose 41% late last year, and Nintendo reportedly cut planned Switch 2 output by 2 million units in March. Piscatella noted the comparison is skewed by the record-setting June 2025 launch, and that the Switch 2 is still 11% ahead of the original Switch's time-aligned pace.

Xbox Series dollar sales fell 18%, matching its unit decline, after Microsoft raised prices on every Xbox model for the third time in two years and dropped the 2TB Series X. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has said the company will pay five times more for memory and storage in 2027 than it did two years earlier. Taken together, the July numbers work out to roughly 520,000 consoles sold across all platforms, against around 850,000 a year earlier, based on Circana's dollar totals and average selling prices.

As for physical game discs, spending fell to $85 million in July, the lowest July figure Circana has recorded since tracking began in 1995, according to the firm's full report as cited by Kotaku. Nintendo platforms account for 63% of U.S. physical game spending so far in 2026 and PlayStation for 32%, leaving Xbox a little over 4% once PC collector's editions are stripped out. Sony has already committed to ending disc production for new PlayStation games in January 2028.

Microsoft stopped sharing digital sales data with Circana as of the July report, Piscatella confirmed, and EA also left the firm's digital panel around the time it went private. That means Circana now estimates rather than measures digital sales for Xbox, Activision, and Bethesda titles, including Call of Duty: Black Ops II, which topped July's chart on its new PS4 and PS5 port. Total U.S. video game spending across content, hardware, and accessories fell 10% to $4.5 billion in July.

A New York-based computer repair and custom gaming PC retail store is the latest victim of an alleged Amazon delivery scam. Sharing their experience in a Reddit post, one of the co-owners of PC Plug wrote that they ordered an AMD Ryzen 5 9600X a few days ago but received only the box, with the CPU missing. After immediately requesting a refund, they went on to purchase another CPU with next-day delivery. However, they once again received only the retail box, with no CPU inside.

The post also mentions that they record every product unboxing and maintain proper documentation specifically for such cases. Instead of ordering directly from Amazon or the manufacturer, one of the inventory managers accidentally purchased the CPU from “The Tech Group,” a third-party seller with decent ratings whose orders were fulfilled by Amazon. However, they claim those ratings could be fake.

The co-owner told Tom's Hardware that they order 90% of their hardware inventory through Amazon, which amounts to roughly $10,000 a month. “This is the first time we’ve received a product with no hardware in it, and it happened twice in the matter of three days.” They also shared that this may have happened around 10 times over the last five years, with packages arriving damaged or missing a few components.

They also claim to have security camera footage showing both Amazon packages being opened and found to contain only the CPU boxes. While they are not familiar with The Tech Group, they did notice a Reddit user claiming to have previously purchased from the seller without any issues. The store usually orders directly from Amazon or manufacturers on the platform, but the two Ryzen 5 9600X from the seller “slipped through the cracks.” Despite having a good track record with Amazon, the co-owner is now concerned that the attention surrounding the incident could potentially put their Amazon account at risk, as much of the business relies on Amazon Business Prime to purchase hardware inventory.

Such scams are quite common on Amazon, where buyers sometimes receive completely different, or in this case, no product at all. In a recent case, a Reddit user ordered a lightly used Ryzen 9 9900X3D from Amazon Warehouse but discovered that the box contained a much older Ryzen 9 3900X, a 2019 AM4 processor worth substantially less than the 2025 flagship originally ordered.

It is highly recommended to always purchase from reputable sellers and verify the seller’s ratings and reviews before placing an order, especially if you are planning to buy expensive computer hardware. Make sure you also record the unboxing, as video evidence can be useful if the package arrives damaged, tampered with, or missing an item.

An alternative storage solution for the Xbox Series X|S finally arrived on the market five years after its launch. The SanDisk Optimus GX C50 starts at 1TB on Amazon and costs $249.99, while the 2TB version will set you back $486.99. SanDisk initially announced the Optimus SSD lineup in early January 2026, but it only revealed this storage solution for the Xbox Series X|S in August of this year. These drives are also listed at a discount directly on the SanDisk website, with the 512GB available for just $109.99, and the 1TB and 2TB versions priced at $199.99 and $339.99, respectively. However, they’re all listed as unavailable at the time of writing, meaning you’ll have to be patient and click on ‘Notify Me’ to get informed once stock becomes available.

• Get the SanDisk Optimus GX C50 Storage Expansion Card for Xbox Series X|S on Amazon.

Seagate was the only brand to offer a storage expansion card for the Xbox Series X|S at launch, with the Seagate Storage Expansion Card for Xbox Series X|S, initially available at a 1TB capacity with an SRP of $199.99. Unfortunately, the AI-driven memory and storage chip shortage has caused NAND prices to balloon, meaning the cheapest brand-new options from third-party sellers on Amazon now start at $318. The brand followed this up with 2TB and 4TB options, with an SRP of $299.99 and $549.99, respectively, but Amazon pricing has brought the former up to $473.99 while the latter remains unavailable.

The Xbox Series X|S launched in 2020, meaning it has been more than six years since these consoles arrived on the market. Despite that, Seagate and SanDisk are your only options if you want to play games directly off the add-on storage slot. Western Digital also used to make these add-on cards for the Xbox, but its decision to focus on HDDs and the spinoff of SanDisk as a separate entity meant that gamers can no longer buy WD storage expansion cards.

These specialized storage expansion cards are only needed if you want to increase the capacity of your console to install more games directly on it. You can still keep your games offloaded on an external hard drive and just plug it into the console when you want to play it again. Crucially, you'll have to move the games from your hard drive back to your Xbox's SSD to ensure the games run properly, which is why these expansion cards are a popular alternative.

This is a different take from Sony’s PS5, which comes with an NVMe slot right on the console. This means that you don’t have to buy proprietary PlayStation SSDs to upgrade the capacity of the console — any PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD would work, making capacity upgrades cheaper. The Nintendo Switch 2 took a similar approach, where it allowed users to upgrade the capacity of their handhelds with a microSD Express slot. It must be noted that microSD Express cards are quite niche, though, and more expensive than ordinary microSD cards, but they could potentially be used on other devices that have a similar slot, making them far more useful compared to the Xbox Series X|S expansion cards, which only work with the particular consoles.

Florida's lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman has now been sitting before U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon in Fort Pierce for seven weeks without a ruling on whether it belongs there. The state filed its 83-page, ten-count complaint in Highlands County circuit court on June 1, pleading only Florida law, naming Altman personally, and demanding a jury. OpenAI removed the case to federal court on July 2, arguing that one count built on the federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act pulls the whole action into federal jurisdiction. Amongst other things, the state is seeking a court ruling finding that ChatGPT is a public nuisance.

Florida moved to remand on July 10, calling the removal "preposterous," and briefing closed July 31. In a similar matter, New Mexico kept its own state-law case against Meta out of federal court and this month won a $567 million public-nuisance abatement order on top of a $375 million jury penalty.

Count IV alleges OpenAI violates the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act by collecting data from under-13s without the parental notice and consent the FTC's COPPA rule requires. Paragraph 30 of the complaint expressly disclaims any federal cause of action. Meanwhile, OpenAI's opposition to remand argues the count arises under federal law anyway, that applying COPPA to "artificial intelligence research services is a novel question of federal law," and that 15 U.S.C. §6504 makes federal court the exclusive forum for state attorneys general enforcing COPPA.

OpenAI's brief cites three cases in which states sued platforms under state law, defendants removed, and federal judges sent them back: New Mexico v. Meta, California v. TikTok, and New Jersey v. Discord. OpenAI cites them only to show the judges declined to award fees because removal wasn't "objectively unreasonable." Florida's remand motion asks for fees regardless, arguing OpenAI removed for one reason: "delay."

The complaint's remaining counts cover negligence, gross negligence, strict liability for design defect and failure to warn, fraudulent misrepresentation, and public nuisance. It alleges ChatGPT's memory feature was on by default, the free tier has no age gate, the September 2025 parental controls require a voluntary account link, and GPT-4o's safety evaluation was compressed to one week to beat a Google launch.

The State seeks a permanent injunction on under-13 data collection and a finding that distributing ChatGPT in Florida is a public nuisance, demanding civil penalties of up to $10,000 per willful violation, which is double New Mexico's $5,000 cap. New Mexico's jury found 75,000 violations.

A footnote in every federal filing states that Altman "is not making a general appearance" and reserves a personal-jurisdiction defense. That defense sets up a motion to dismiss the CEO individually, no matter which court hears the case. Much of the record that Florida's case relies on is against Altman, including Greg Brockman's diary and Tasha McCauley's testimony about a "toxic culture of lying," which came out at the Musk v. Altman trial in May. A coalition of 42 state attorneys general subpoenaed OpenAI in June; none has filed a complaint yet.

Members of the world's largest 'truly open library in human history' have issued a worldwide call to volunteers, begging them to scan and upload books online to prevent AI companies from obtaining and destroying huge quantities of books. The Anna's Archive appeal follows multiple reports that large AI companies are buying up books to train AI models, often resulting in the destruction of the works.

According to the blog post, the problems started when Anthropic was hit with a $1.5 billion penalty as it settled a copyright infringement lawsuit from 2024. This settlement is the largest amount ever in a copyright case, with the AI tech firm paying $200 per title based on its collection of 7 million pirated books stored in a central library. However, that same ruling affirmed that the use of existing works to train AI models is fair use. This opened the floodgates for AI firms, which started buying up books online to scan and destroy them.

Independent bookstores all across Europe are seeing a trend like this, where they receive random, relatively large orders that are shipped to local addresses. While orders like these still come through in the digital age, especially from institutional buyers looking to fill out new libraries, they say that most “legitimate” orders often come with coordination and negotiation, not just a straight purchase order. Aside from that, the suspicious orders also include books that no one would buy today, like “Pass Your Driving Test, 2018 Edition” and “The Eddie Hobbs Guide to your SSIA.” An investigation revealed that some of the books are sent to an Amazon processing facility, where workers cut off their spines and feed them into industrial scanning machines.

Unfortunately, this method of scanning destroys the books, meaning the printed record is erased in favor of a digital one. There are non-destructive methods of scanning these materials, like using a V-shaped scanner that follows the natural curve of the book binding, but it’s likely that this method is slower and more expensive compared to just stripping out the spine and feeding it into an automatic scanning machine. The blog also says that destroying the original material means that competitors could not use these very same books to train their AI models, giving the original buyer an advantage, especially if the book that is destroyed is a rare one with no other copies in the world, and that it also avoids legal risks.

Using these books, especially those published before 2022, which are said to be “untouched by machines,” comes with legal and ethical issues, but the bigger concern of many is that the destruction of this material could lead to a monopoly of knowledge. If the original copy no longer exists, the knowledge stored in it would only be available to the AI company that scanned it, and anyone else who wants to gain access to it would have to pay for the privilege unless the company shares the original for free (although this would come with its own legal issues). Aside from that, it would probably only be available in processed form if access is limited through the AI model, as most LLMs will not produce it verbatim for fear of copyright restrictions, which is why the author said, “Knowledge is permanently monopolized on private servers.”

This fear has led to the callout for volunteers to scan books and upload them to Anna’s Archive. “If every person scans a book, and there are 10 million volunteers worldwide, we can obtain 10 million pieces of invaluable wealth,” the blog post said. It also added that uploaders of small scans are often recognized and awarded lifetime membership to the shadow library. Those who want to conduct large-scale scans and upload many titles can reach out to the archive for support, as the archive says that it “can help pay for the scanning fees and other rewards.”

“This is a race against time,” the author said in the Anna's Archive blog post. “Our ideal is to scan and upload all the world’s publications before publishers completely block knowledge, and before AI companies scan and destroy all the world’s books and papers.”

The tech industry faces unprecedented challenges as the continued disruption from AI-driven shortages has driven pricing to record highs and supplies to record lows.

However, even amidst the damage we've seen in the PC market, the industry is still moving forward, giving us plenty of new devices over the last year that continue to push the bar higher.

The continued industry advancements give us several new picks for our annual Tom's Hardware Innovation Awards: a set of products that set or expand the standard for others. This year's list includes devices ranging from CPUs from Intel and AMD to motherboards with support for a new type of memory to the newest line of budget laptops from Apple, among many others. Given the state of the industry and stagnation in a few key areas, we also have a few dishonorable mentions as well.

CPU: Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus

Both of Intel’s Arrow Lake Refresh CPUs are excellent, but the 20-core Core Ultra 5 250K Plus hits a special sweet spot for value. At $220, or as little as $155 on sale, it delivers solid midrange gaming performance while competing with chips that are a tier up in pricing and branding in applications. Against the backdrop of re-releases like the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, it’s hard to choose anything other than Arrow Lake Refresh when we think about CPU innovation over the past 12 months.

The Core Ultra 5 250K Plus taking center stage comes down to how much horsepower you’re getting for around $200. There’s nothing else close. It matches that Core i5-14600K in multithreaded performance, but that CPU is $260 right now. In AMD’s camp, the closest CPU is the $185 Ryzen 5 9600X. The Core Ultra 5 250K Plus is 5.6% faster than that chip in single-threaded performance and 70% faster in multithreaded performance based on our testing.

The weak link with Arrow Lake has always been gaming, and the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus carries some of those issues forward. However, it benefits from Intel’s iBOT feature in select titles, as well as a 900 MHz die-to-die frequency boost that broadly benefits games. Gen-on-gen, the 250K Plus is in lockstep with the Core i5-14600K, and it matches the Ryzen 5 9600X. However, for pure gaming rigs, the Ryzen 5 7600X3D is around the same price and 10% faster (though much slower in other applications).

Read More: Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus review

HEDT: AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2

AMD said it wouldn’t make a dual-cache X3D CPU, yet here we are, with the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 in hand. It’s not a chip that we’d recommend to most builders, even with an unlimited budget; the base Ryzen 9 9950X3D is nearly identical in all but the most niche workloads and hundreds of dollars less. But from the perspective of innovation, the 9950X3D2 achieves something that we never thought we’d see.

As AMD originally promised when discussing dual-cache CPUs, the 9950X3D is expensive, launching at $1,000 and now selling for $890 — a price that still feels far too high. What’s surprising about the CPU is that it delivers no-compromise performance. It can hang alongside the 9800X3D in games; it’s just as fast as the 9950X3D in applications. The extra cache steps in with workstation-level tasks, accelerating data science and AI workloads, in particular.

For the vast majority of users, you won’t notice any performance difference between the 9950X3D2 and 9950X3D. However, the dual-cache chip offers that slight, flagship edge in specialized workloads. And in a time when the majority of high-end computing innovation is heading to the data center, it’s nice to see an ambitious release like the 9950X3D2 on desktop.

Read More: AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 review

GPU: Intel Arc G3 Extreme

Intel's Arc G3 Extreme handheld platform and its Arc B390 iGPU have changed the game for handheld performance thanks to the cutting-edge Xe3 graphics architecture and the unmatched performance of the B390's 12 Xe Cores for this class of chip. It's made the biggest splash in graphics so far this year as new discrete graphics cards from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel itself remain the stuff of rumors.

In our review of the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+, the Arc B390 iGPU thoroughly outclasses AMD's widely used Ryzen Z2 Extreme and its 16 compute units built on the older RDNA 3.5 architecture. Intel's iGPU turned in performance as much as 50% higher than the Z2 Extreme, even unplugged and at a relatively demanding 1920x1200 native resolution.

The Arc B390 also gives handheld fans access to Intel's high-quality XeSS 3 upscaler with multi-frame generation, offering those gamers advanced tools to tune their gaming experience to taste. AMD hasn't officially brought its latest FSR 4 tech to the Z2 Extreme yet, so Intel's upscaler is the most advanced you can get on a handheld—at least in the games where it's available.

The Arc B390 is the gaming star of the G3 Extreme, but its Panther Lake-based CPU with two P-cores, eight E-cores, and four low-power E-cores gives handhelds built with this chip plenty of CPU power for a balanced package.

The MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ is the first Arc G3-powered gaming handheld, but the OneXPlayer 3 (arriving this month) and Acer Predator Atlas 8 (shipping in October 2026) promise to expand the availability of this platform soon. Our only complaint about the Claw 8 EX AI+ is its high $1799 price tag, but if you want the best handheld gaming experience this side of a much more expensive Strix Halo-powered unit, that's just the state of things amid the AI-driven RAMpocalypse and NANDpocalypse.

Read More: MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ review

SSD: Corsair MP700 Micro

Pricing has been the biggest problem with new SSDs, with prices skyrocketing over the last year as the AI-driven shortages intensify. Despite those challenges, the Corsair MP700 Micro 4TB SSD brings new and innovative features to the table, cramming in the utmost performance into the tiny single-sided M.2 2242 design, making it the fastest and highest-capacity option in this compact footprint.

This PCIe 5.0 SSD leverages the DRAM-less Phison E31T SSD controller, delivering speeds up to 10,000 MB/s of sequential read and 8,500 MB/s of sequential write throughput. Sprinkle in the peak 1.3 million random read and 1.4 million random write IOPS, and this SSD is poised to fully saturate any PCIe 4.0 link, which is the predominate interface used in devices that use this small footprint. The SSD also has exceptionally good power efficiency, a boon for small handheld devices that operate on battery power.

Smaller, faster, more capacity, and better power efficiency; what’s not to like? The only con for this SSD is the same as we see for all models currently — pricing. Hopefully the shortages will recede and bring the pricing of this drive to more tenable levels, but on the whole, this is the most innovative SSD released this year.

Read More: Corsair MP700 Micro 4TB SSD review

Monitor: Alienware AW3426DW

We’ve been seeing a lot of activity in the OLED gaming monitor space over the past year, and panel makers are investing heavily in new technology to make already color panels look even better. The swift advancements have also led to lower prices across the board for OLED monitors, which is an absolute blessing considering that gamers are being pummeled from multiple fronts, with rising costs for RAM, SSDs, and even GPUs.

One new monitor making waves is the Alienware AW3426DW, one of the brand’s first offerings to use a Penta Tandem OLED panel (it features five light-emitting layers instead of three) with V-Stripe RGB sub-pixels. This panel has several advantages over previous QD-OLED panels, with the Penta Tandem arrangement improving energy efficiency and panel longevity. Likewise, the V-Stripe RGB sub-pixels help to combat color fringing and somewhat blurry text, which can be an issue with older QD-OLED designs.

Once you get past the building blocks that make the AW3426DW a standout, it checks all the right boxes for the discerning gamer. It features a 34-inch panel size with an 1800R curve and a 3,440 x 1,440 resolution. Just as important is the refresh rate, which maxes out at 280 Hz while supporting Nvidia G-Sync and AMD FreeSync Premium Pro. Full-field brightness comes in at 300 nits, while it can boost to 1,300 nits (HDR) with a 3 percent window (it’s also DisplayHDR 500 True Black certified).

When it comes to ports, the AW3426DW features two HDMI 2.1 ports and one DisplayPort 1.4 port. It also has a USB-C hub with USB-A and USB-C ports for your peripherals.

As for actual performance, the AW3426DW didn’t disappoint, with sharp, colorful imagery that we expect from OLEDs (especially compared to the previous-generation AW3425DW). We also witnessed low input lag levels compared to its peers. More importantly, the AW3426DW represents an excellent value in this space, with a street price of just under $800.

Read More: Alienware AW3426DW Review

Motherboards: Gigabyte Z890 Aorus Elite Duo X (CQDIMM compatibility)

Innovation on the motherboard side has been few and far between. CQDIMMs hit the scene promising increased density, 128GB per stick, and much faster speeds. In fact, we tested a 2x128GB DDR5-8000 set on one of the few affordable consumer motherboards that actually support the high-density, high-speed CQDIMMs: the Gigabyte Z890 Aorus Elite Duo X (MSRP of $279.99), which gets our nod for an innovative motherboard.

The Z890 Elite Duo X sports a 2-DIMM topology and is an early adopter of next-gen JEDEC standards. Gigabyte enhanced the 2-DIMM topology with improved signal reflection by removing the middle slots and thus the interference. They also optimized the PCB circuit with advanced EMI shielding and “2x signal enhancement.” They also tuned the BIOS to support the high-capacity sticks better, upgraded the MRC training algorithm to enhance stability, and even offered per-rank independent tuning for termination, drive strength, and voltage.

I considered the CAMM2 design standard and any boards that support it, as it is unique and innovative. However, it’s still a twinkle in the industry's eye, and only prototype and concept boards seem to exist in the wild. We loved Gigabyte’s space-age X870E Aorus Infinity Next concept, but here again, we won’t see the technology in the public.

If you’re someone who can use such high-capacity sticks (like running local AI tools, 4K/8K video editing, and content creation), and need the blazing speeds on top of it, the Z890 Elite Duo X stands alone as one of the more reasonably priced ATX form factor motherboards that can actually run them. Other boards do support CQDIMMs (ASRock’s Z890I Nova Wifi R2.0, Z890 Aorus Tachyone Duo X Ice) but good luck finding them in the USA at a reasonable price.

In addition to the CQDIMM support, the board also offers a well-rounded assortment of features for any user. You get a whopping five M.2 sockets (one PCIe 5.0), fast networking with 2.5 GbE and Wi-Fi 7 (320MHz), three full-length PCIe slots, capable power delivery, a last-gen flagship audio codec, and a slew of their DIY-friendly features like M.2 EZ-Latch designs (click, plus, and PCIe EZ-Latch plus, Wi-Fi EZ plug). Even without the CQDIMM capability, it’s a good motherboard.

Read More: Gigabyte Z890 Aorus Elite Duo X Motherboard review

Laptops: MacBook Neo

The MacBook Neo stunned the world. Everyone was expecting a notebook cheaper than the MacBook Air, but no one seemed to expect that you'd be able to get a basic Apple laptop experience for just $599. (That price increased to $699 after component-related hikes across Apple's Mac and iPad lines).

The system uses Apple's A18 Pro system on a chip, which also powered the iPhone 16 Pro. That includes six CPU cores, five GPU cores (down one from the iPhone), and 8GB of RAM. It also has a solid aluminum build that feels great, a decent, consistent, bright screen (that looks best head-on), side-firing speakers, and a keyboard not unlike the one on a MacBook Air. Even though there's a mechanical touchpad, Apple designed a mechanism that lets you click anywhere, rather than using a hinge.

Beyond the headphone jack, there are only two ports, and they're not the same speed. The A18 Pro wasn't meant for two ports, but Apple had to make it work. This resulted in an awkward combination of one 10GB/s USB-C 3 port and a second, 480 Mb/s USB-C 2 port, leading to two visually identical ports that don't offer the same experience. Despite a few drawbacks, the MacBook Neo is largely an extremely solid experience and far more affordable than we've seen before. It has also inspired competition among its Windows-based rivals, with the Dell XPS 13, Acer Swift Air 14, and other Intel Wildcat Lake systems bringing some nicer laptops in under $1,000 in response.

Read More: Apple MacBook Neo review: a budget-priced game-changer

Laptops: Dell XPS 14

The Dell XPS 14 is perhaps most notable for breathing some fresh air back into the brand. Beyond being one of the first systems since Dell revived its flagship PC label, the XPS 14 also fixed many of the problems its predecessors had. The touch function keys are gone, replaced with an honest-to-goodness function row. The haptic touchpad still sits in a glass wristrest but with defined barriers that ensure anyone can tell where the edges are. But most interesting is the option for a 1920 x 1200 variable refresh rate display that drops as low as 1 Hz (and up to 120 Hz). That extremely low refresh rate means the system won't refresh as often when static text or images are on the screen. Our review unit with that screen lasted over 20 hours on our battery test.

Read More: Dell XPS 14 (2026) review: Two steps forward

Cooling: Noctua NL-LC1-36

Leave it to Noctua to take its sweet time entering a well-established cooling category, and drop a product that performs as well as any competition (in terms of temps), while being hands-down the quietest AIO on the market. And of course, the NL-LC1-36 does this with no RGB, and in the company's signature brown and beige. Built in partnership with Asetek, around the company's Emma Gen8 V2 pump, with a noise-absorbing pump cover, the cooler is paired with two or three NF-A12x25 G2s fans (depending on the model).

The fans even have 50 RPM offsets to avoid audible harmonics – our testing showed it beating the high-end cooling competition in noise-normalized benchmarks, while its pump can run much slower in low-load situations than anything else, further limiting acoustics. To be clear, at $220-$250, you'll pay for this level of silent, refined cooling, but Noctua has raised the bar, delivering a level of liquid cooling previously only available via custom cooling, which is much more complex and expensive.

Read More: Noctua NL-LC1-36 review

Keyboard: Corsair Galleon 100 SD

The Corsair Galleon 100 SD is the first keyboard with a built-in physical Stream Deck. While this might not have seemed particularly revolutionary at first (after all, there are plenty of keyboards with... extra programmable keys), it's far more useful than you might expect, thanks to Elgato's robust Stream Deck ecosystem, which is pretty well-integrated with third-party hardware and apps. Plus, the keyboard itself is excellent — it features an aluminum top case over a plastic chassis, a hot-swappable PCB, lower-profile double-shot PBT keycaps, and six layers of sound-dampening foam that does a great job of keeping case ping and echoing to a minimum. It also gets up to an 8,000 Hz polling rate and comes with a matching wrist rest.

The Stream Deck side is also impressive, with 12 customizable LCD keys under a 2.75-inch full-color screen and two programmable aluminum rotary knobs. You'll still have to set it up, as a Stream Deck (or any macro pad) is only as useful as you make it, but Elgato's Stream Deck software makes this relatively easy, and you can find plenty of additional plugins and customization options on the Stream Deck Marketplace (plus, it does come with some pre-programmed options to get you started). It's not the cheapest keyboard on the market — it retails for around $350 — but if you're willing to set up the Stream Deck side, it's well worth the price.

Read More: Corsair Galleon 100 SD review

Mouse: Pulsar Feinmann F01 Noctua Edition

It's not the first mouse to have a built-in fan, but it's the first mouse worth buying with a built-in fan. The Pulsar Feinmann F01 Noctua Edition is a lightweight wireless eSports-oriented gaming mouse with a perforated shell and a built-in Noctua NF-A4x10 5V fan, which is aimed upward — designed to keep your palm cool while you game. The NF-A4x10 is surprisingly effective, with four adjustable speed levels, and it's mostly silent (you can hear it at the highest level, but it shouldn't be too much of an interruption).

It's also a great mouse, featuring Pulsar's XS-2 sensor, which has a maximum resolution of 42,000 DPI and a maximum speed of 800 IPS and can handle up to 70 G's of force. It gets up to an 8,000 Hz polling rate over both wired and wireless connections, and it has a comfortable, ergonomic right-handed shape with five programmable buttons. It weighs 73g — a little heavier than most of its competition, but the fan might just be worth it.

Read More: Pulsar Feinmann F01 Noctua Edition review

Mouse: Logitech G Pro X2 Superstrike

We hadn't seen a ton of innovation on the performance side of gaming mice — until earlier this year, when Logitech dropped its Logitech G Pro X2 Superstrike earlier this year. The specs are premium, but expected: Logitech's Hero 2 sensor, which has a maximum resolution of 44,000 DPI and a maximum speed of 888 IPS and can handle up to 88 G's of acceleration; up to an 8,000 Hz polling rate; and a 61g, pseudo-symmetrical shape that's identical to that of the Logitech G Pro X Superlight 2.

What's innovative are the switches — or rather, lack thereof. Instead of using actual switches below the left and right mouse buttons, the Superstrike uses Logitech's H.I.T.S. (Haptic Inductive Trigger System), which combines induction sensors with haptic feedback. The result is mouse buttons with adjustable actuation and tactile feedback. In other words, you can lower the actuation of your mouse buttons to make them incredibly sensitive and — objectively — more responsive, without sacrificing tactility. It also means that this is the first (and, still, only) mouse that supports Rapid Trigger, which means you don't have to fully release the mouse button before you can click it again — making it even more responsive.

There's no guarantee this mouse will make you a better gamer, but it certainly won't hold you back.

Read More: Logitech G Pro X2 Superstrike review

Mobile CPU: Intel Cores Series 3 "Wildcat Lake"

Intel's entry-level chips might not always seem exciting, but this year, they're powering a handful of the most important Windows systems on the market: the ones competing with the MacBook Neo. There are six consumer configurations of Wildcat Lake, all built on Intel's 18A process. The silicon uses a two-tile package with a compute die and an external platform controller tile. The compute die carries up to two Cougar Cove P-cores, four Darkmont low-power E-cores, an NPU 5 block, and an Xe3 integrated GPU with up to two Xe-cores, while the platform controller tile delivers six PCIe 4.0 lanes, up to two Thunderbolt 4 ports, Intel Wi-Fi 7 (R2), and Bluetooth Core 6.0.

We've seen versions of Wildcat Lake in a number of consumer notebooks, but among the most important are the Dell XPS 13, the highest-profile Neo competitor, as well as sub-$800 models from Acer, Lenovo, and Chuwi. Outside of Snapdragon X chips from a few years ago, these are the systems keeping x86 and Windows competitive on the low-end.

Read More: Intel launches Wildcat Lake as Core Series 3 for value laptops and edge systems

Dishonorable mention: Slip back to DDR4 memory

When DDR5 was first introduced to consumer platforms, there was a fuss about how expensive it was compared to DDR4, a comparison that now seems quaint given the current market conditions. With how expensive DDR5 has become, there’s been a shift back to DDR4 platforms, with Tom’s Hardware first reporting in June about motherboard manufacturers spinning refresh DDR4 boards up to meet the demand; Gigabyte actually launched a new LGA 1700 DDR4 board just days ago.

The CPU brands are bracing for a tick back, as well. AMD has already re-released the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, and ironically at a price higher than the DDR5-based Ryzen 7 7700X3D, which is newer, faster, and surprisingly cheaper, at least for the CPU alone. For Intel’s part, murmurs about “Raptor Lake Next” have floated around, with Tom’s Hardware first reporting on the range earlier this year.

It became clear even in the first few weeks of the memory shortage that DDR4 platforms would remain popular. However, what we’ve seen over the past few months is something different, with DDR4 becoming an upgrade destination due to the prohibitive cost of DDR5. The memory shortage is perhaps the biggest story of the past 12 months, and unfortunately, it doesn’t appear like it’s ending soon.

Read More: Production of DDR4 memory and motherboards is restarting amid unprecedented memory shortages

Dishonorable mention: Discrete GPU stagnation

The sad truth for PC gamers in 2026 is that we’re no longer anywhere close to the first priority for GPU innovation. Nvidia and AMD are laser-focused on the AI compute arms race, and any resources or wafers that aren’t dedicated to that market represent a large opportunity cost for those companies as they try to capture every last AI dollar.

Nvidia’s long-rumored RTX 50 Super-series refresh, if it ever arrives, would likely follow a familiar approach of slightly boosting core clocks and increasing the amount of VRAM on select cards using 3GB GDDR7 chips.

Reports indicate those denser GDDR7 chips are quite costly, though, and any increase in VRAM capacity on gaming graphics cards would immediately make them better for local AI applications while offering little performance benefit to the vast majority of games available today.

Since local AI trailblazers are ravenous for every FLOP and gigabyte of VRAM they can get and are willing to pay premium prices for the privilege, any RTX 50 Super products would likely launch at even higher price points than the already hiked-up RTX 50-series products already in the market.

And since Nvidia’s RTX Pro cards already offer larger VRAM pools paired with the same Blackwell silicon, any RTX 50-series Super products also run the risk of cannibalizing sales of products at the low end of the RTX Pro stack. All these pricing and positioning headaches make us skeptical that we’ll ever see a Super-series refresh under current market conditions.

Any further gaming innovation this year from Nvidia seems likely to be concentrated on software. The company has spent much of 2026 improving its already superior DLSS upscaling and frame generation technologies. Its wildly controversial DLSS 5 update, which promises an extensive AI-powered enhancement of lighting effects and character details in supported titles, is slated to launch this fall, but it remains to be seen whether the considerable resource demands of the tech will be tamed before that point. And it’s just as unclear whether gamers will ever warm up to the extensive changes that DLSS 5 makes to the final presentation of a game.

AMD’s next-generation RDNA 5 gaming products also seem unlikely to arrive any time soon. The current buzz projects that those products will arrive late next year or in early 2028, and given that AMD’s client and data center CPU and AI GPU revenue are both set to massively outpace the contributions of its gaming business unit, it seems that the company will likely continue to focus resources on those areas until there’s competitive reason to do otherwise.

Intel also hasn’t committed to any new discrete gaming graphics products with its current roadmap, and the relatively lackluster gaming performance of its Arc Pro B70 “Big Battlemage” card (roughly equivalent to an RTX 5060 Ti) suggests that the Xe2 architecture has reached the end of the line for performance scaling from a larger (and costlier) chip.

Intel instead seems focused on driving iGPU performance forward (as proven by the impressive Arc B390) and on capturing a bit of the AI market with its Crescent Island inference accelerator using the Xe3P architecture. The ongoing AI gold rush, combined with CEO Lip-Bu Tan’s professed focus on improving Intel’s operating margins, likely means that any future discrete GPU from the company will face considerable challenges for an internal green light under current market conditions.

Business is business, and public companies have an obligation to maximize shareholder value. That means that unless and until the semiconductor industry finds a new level with the AI boom such that the insatiable demand for AI silicon and memory is met, PC gamers are going to have to face the disappointing fact that we’re in the back seat for any future gaming chips. But can we offer you an RTX 3060 12GB in this trying time?

Read More: Legacy Nvidia RTX 3060 12GB returns to retail five years after original launch