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

As advanced packaging technologies like EMIB and CoWoS become yet another battlefield in the semiconductor industry, outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) companies are trying new tools in a bid to offer services that others do not. This week, LG Electronics Production Technology Institute (PRI) signed a contract with an OSAT to supply it with a maskless laser direct imaging (LDI) lithography tool that can be used to build metal-interconnect patterns in semiconductor packaging, potentially with higher yields than currently available tools, reports ETNews.

LG-PRI's Laser Direct Imaging (LDI) system is a maskless lithography machine designed to pattern fine metal interconnects for advanced semiconductor packaging. While the company has developed various versions of the machine, its highest-resolution version can produce 1.5-µm line-and-space (L/S) patterns, which should be fine to 'print' wiring pitches of about 3 µm. The production equipment uses a 405-nm laser-diode light source and can process substrates as large as 600 × 600 mm, according to various media reports.

LG positions its LDI system primarily for advanced semiconductor packaging using organic and then glass substrates, displays, and MEMS. Yet, it can also be used to build high-density printed circuit boards (PCBs) for mobile devices or prototype purposes.

LG is entering an already established direct-imaging market led by KLA, Screen Holdings, Limata, and ORC, but participated in by a dozen manufacturers from Germany, France, Switzerland, Japan, and even China. What is notable is that LG is offering LDI systems with line/space capability down to 1.5-µm, which means it is targeting the higher end of the market. Yet, to establish a position, LG plans to price its LDI system competitively.

Another way to pattern substrates

There are many ways to pattern substrates, including photolithography, e-beam lithography, nanoimprint lithography, and laser direct imaging, just to name a few. LDI is a maskless lithography process in which a laser exposes a digitally generated circuit pattern directly onto a photoresist-coated substrate, rather than transferring the pattern through a physical photomask. Instead of a photomask, an LDI system uses a digitally controlled pattern generator and projection optics, which resembles how a laser cinema projector projects a digital image onto a screen, except that LDI projects a circuit pattern onto photoresist. After development, the exposed resist leaves a pattern that defines where metal interconnects will be formed in later processing steps.

LG's LDI machine can produce down to 1.5-µm line-and-space patterns, which is good enough for chip substrates and even redistribution layers (TSMC CoWoS-R/-L uses RDL interposers with a minimum 4-µm pitch, or 2-µm line width/spacing). In contrast, competing products offer 1-µm, 3-µm, and 5-µm versions for different applications. While LDI in general cannot boast the resolutions offered by modern DUV, EUV, or e-beam lithography machines, LDI trades ultimate resolution for vastly higher throughput and large-area processing, exactly what the doctor ordered for production of PCBs or chip packaging. With current-generation LDI, the RDL interposer is the most advanced thing that these devices can pattern, as both CoWoS-S and CoWoS-L/EMIB-like technologies require considerably higher resolution. Meanwhile, there is another advantage that LDI machines have over lithography systems that rely on photomasks.

Because the image is generated digitally, the system can create and calibrate patterns in real time, while projection optics, precision alignment, and stage control position the pattern accurately on the substrate. This capability is important because the dimensions/geometry of packaging substrates can vary and because organic substrates can expand, contract, or warp during processing. Given that we are talking about a 1.5-µm-scale wiring pattern, any shift from the nominal layout may result in a solder bridge or a faulty contact, which means yield loss. That said, the ability to adjust the pattern to the peculiarities of a substrate may be a game-changer for OSATs, their customers, and a major selling point for devices that can do it.

A new kid on the block? Not really

Unlike competing chaebols Samsung and SK Group, LG Group does not produce chips, even though its divisions supply various materials and components for the semiconductor industry. To that end, it is perfectly reasonable for the company to enter the market for tools for the production of chip packages or PCBs.

In fact, LG PRI is not entering the exposure-equipment business from scratch. PRI traces its history to the Goldstar Production Technology Research Institute, established in 1987, and has worked on manufacturing and productivity technologies covering semiconductors, displays, and rechargeable batteries. Specifically, LG had already commercialized LDI technology for display manufacturing and supplied such equipment to LG Display.

As a result, the semiconductor packaging-grade equipment represents an expansion of an existing LG technology into a new market rather than the development of an entirely new exposure platform from scratch and without any experience. Interestingly, LDI is the first element of LG's semiconductor equipment ambitions. The company reportedly plans to expand its portfolio into high-bandwidth memory (HBM) inspection equipment as well as through-glass-via (TGV) laser systems for glass substrates.

Prospects

Before LG expands to inspection or laser drilling tools, it will have to establish itself as a producer of reliable tools used for chip packaging, which will likely take years. For now, the significance of the deal with the undisclosed OSAT is less about business and more about the fact that an OSAT decided to give LG's LDI machine a try. Moving from university R&D installations to an OSAT mass-production facility provides LG a starting point for pursuing additional external orders.

Whether LG can establish itself alongside Applied Materials, ORC, or Screen will depend on how its equipment performs in production and whether its emphasis on competitive pricing proves sufficient to persuade more packaging companies to adopt the system.

In any case, a new Wafer Fab Equipment player is here, which is good news considering shortages of virtually all chipmaking tools. While LG's entrance will hardly have any noticeable impact on the market for at least a couple of years, another supplier could eventually add much-needed capacity, increase competition, and give chipmakers and OSATs another source of advanced packaging equipment.

This weekend heralds the beginning of the annual Hot Chips conference, and with it come dozens of sessions over the course of the three-day event. At Hot Chips, you can expect the latest presentations from companies across the industry, including Nvidia, AMD, Intel, and many more. These technically focused, dense sessions offer a glimpse into the future of our industry, and we're breaking it all down over on our subscription service, Tom's Hardware Premium.

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LG Display has just unveiled perhaps the biggest innovation in OLED manufacturing in a while, aptly called "FLiPP" or FMM-less Innovative Pixel Patterning. FMM stands for Fine Metal Masks, and they're required as a stencil to deposit organic LEDs onto a glass substrate. FLiPP gets rid of these and instead relies on photolithography to vaporize unneeded areas from an RGB subpixel to produce a brighter panel that takes less power to drive and is ultimately cheaper to produce.

The main benefit of FLiPP is how it increases the subpixel surface area in an OLED stack. Instead of the metal mask taking up space, the subpixels are spread out much closer to each other, which improves their "aperture ratio" by up to 55%. In reality, that translates to 1.6x brighter panels with 2.4x longer lifespans. Since the panel doesn't have to work as hard to drive the pixels, its power consumption drops by 13% as well.

A metal mask is also heavy and can thus sag in the middle, leading to panel uniformity or color blending issues. It's expensive to make, too, because it features tiny holes that scale up in precision depending on resolution and size. FLiPP eliminates those constraints entirely, as it can, in theory, produce panels ranging from 1-100 inches for a broad range of devices and applications with any resolution in mind.

For instance, whenever new panel tech emerges, a new metal mask needs to be created to specifically accommodate its subpixel layout. A majority of the OLED materials are wasted during the stencil process; only about 30% make it through the stencil on the motherglass. Moreover, the motherglass needs to be cut in half for larger displays because of the mask's unstable structure just so be joined back together after deposition.

FLiPP uses a process akin to semiconductor manufacturing where UV light reacts with a photoresist layer through a micron-sharp photomask. A bed of organic material, such as the red subpixels, is first deposited, and a photoresist layer is applied on top. The UV changes the chemical bonds of the areas that should have red subpixels, hardening and locking them into place. The glass then goes through a chemical bath to dissolve away everything else.

The process is repeated for the green and blue subpixels until the desired layout is achieved. LG says this method utilizes 64% more of the motherglass when producing laptop-sized panels, leading to less wastage, which will make displays cheaper. The company has already internally produced an OLED panel that used an entire 8.5-Gen motherglass through FLiPP, which measures at 2,200mm x 2,500mm.

LG is currently looking to apply FLiPP to its RGB OLED technology, which means self-emissive red, green, and blue subpixels will be deposited directly onto a motherglass. Otherwise, in Samsung's QD-OLED and LG's WOLED, white (or blue) LEDs pass through color filters to produce red, green, and blue, instead. Therefore, the combination of RGB OLED and FLiPP could lead to panels with exceptional color volume and gamut coverage — traditionally weaknesses of OLED.

FLiPP is not the only FMM-less OLED deposition technique on the market, but it does seem to be the first to be commercialized on a massive scale. Japan Display Inc.'s eLEAP is actually the pioneer of maskless OLED photolithography, and LG was said to enter into some sort of partnership with them last year, though FLiPP is marketed entirely as an LG invention. China's Visionox also has its own version that it plans to release next year.

Inkjet printing is increasingly gaining traction in the OLED world as an alternative method, too, and TCL CSOT is currently at the forefront of its development. As far as FLiPP is concerned, LG promises to invest 3 trillion Won, or $2.15 billion, to begin production using this tech by late 2027. Laptops and monitors will be the first recipients of FLiPP OLED screens before expanding to smartwatches and ultra-large TVs.

Five months after the arrest of Supermicro co-founder Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw and two other co-conspirators for the alleged smuggling of Nvidia hardware into China, the company announced that it has completed its independent investigation and released its findings to the public, resulting in the termination of several employees. Supermicro said that the investigation, which was handled by an external law firm and conducted by an “independent forensic accounting consultant,” finds that neither the company nor its current senior executives were part of the alleged AI chip smuggling. It also said that it’s adopting all the recommendations to enhance its export compliance programs, although it did not directly admit that it was lacking in that department.

“The investigation team reviewed the customer transactions that were the subject of the federal indictment, as well as transactions with a selection of other customers who bought restricted products, and did not find any evidence that any current member of senior management had knowledge of the alleged diversion scheme or of any actual diversion of restricted products by the Company,” Supermicro said in the statement. It also added, “The Company’s compliance personnel have acted in good faith, with the support of management, to mitigate the risk of the Company’s products subject to export controls being diverted to restricted parties or locations.”

This odyssey began in March when the U.S. charged Liaw alongside Supermicro sales manager Ruei-Tsang “Steven” Chang and third-party broker Ting-Wei “Willy” Sun with conspiracy to unlawfully divert cutting-edge U.S. artificial intelligence technology to China. The accused aren’t operating a small-time smuggling operation, either — reports estimate that the three have smuggled hardware worth $2.5 billion since 2024. That massive amount has got shareholders worried that a huge chunk of the company’s sales come from illicit sales, resulting in some investors suing the company for securities fraud. Because of this, the company’s independent advisors also looked into this issue and said that it “did not find any evidence that the Company’s previously issued financial statements could not be relied upon based on the potential diversion of restricted products.”

Even though the third-party investigation exonerated Supermicro’s senior executives, it also resulted in the termination of several employees. The affected people were from the sales, technical support, and business development departments, although they were fired for breaking the company’s policies and code of conduct — the company said these moves were made "in connection with the investigation." Notably, none of the personnel were from its compliance department, and it’s also unclear how many people were dismissed.

Supermicro also said that it’s enhancing its export compliance program, which Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said it must fix. Even though the company was never accused of wrongdoing and wasn’t part of the defendants in the case against the alleged smugglers, the fact that some of its employees were able to run a massive diversion scheme right within the organization raises major questions about the effectiveness of its compliance department. It said that it has already made changes that were recommended by its General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer even before the third-party investigation concluded, and that its independent directors “will oversee implementation of the remaining recommendations.”

The high demand for AI chips in China has meant the smuggling operations are quite lucrative, even as the U.S. is tightening its grip on export controls and Chinese authorities are commanding that its tech companies prioritize locally made Chinese chips instead of American AI GPUs. Nevertheless, the race to build ever more powerful AI models means that there is such a massive demand for the most advanced AI GPUs from Nvidia that some people are looking for ways to circumvent these bans and make “easy” money.

CPU-Z has rolled into its version 3 release, representing one of, if not the largest, updates the app has seen since its release in 2001. V3 introduces a host of updates, focusing primarily on an overhauled validation system with a new advanced mode.

CPU-Z's validation system now consists of three modes: standard, advanced, and XOC. The standard validation system can now display the current health of a PC in less than 10 seconds, and will check over 100 detection points including drivers, CPU temperature, bloatware, and more.

The team behind CPU-Z also worked with major support services to add "meaningful" labels detailing how healthy parts of the system are. These labels include "Critical," "Warning," and "Informational".

The advanced validation portion is entirely new for CPU-Z and features a far more in-depth validation process, including checking for potential hardware issues under heavy load. Using the advanced validation tool can take anywhere between several minutes and several hours to complete due to the stress testing and error detection functionality targeted at the CPU, RAM, and GPU. Additionally, the advanced validator also features a "significantly extended benchmarking" tool that measures CPU, GPU, RAM, and storage performance. Advanced sensors based on HWMonitor have also been incorporated to monitor temperatures, frequencies, fan speeds, and more.

The XOC validator, aimed at extreme overlockers as its name suggests, has been updated to better measure the CPU frequency of modern processors as well as properly handle memory overclocking to prevent accidental validation rejections. V3's XOC validator better handles the complex, always-changing clock speeds of modern CPUs by calculating the effective CPU clock and the "input" frequency. "If the effective frequency is lower than the input frequency, the dump will still be validated, but the real, effective frequency will be used as the final validated frequency."

By contrast, the XOC validator in CPU-Z V2 validated CPU frequencies with a five-second load, with a "one-shot measurement." Additionally, V2 also removed all load and most internal checks, which increased the risk of a validation not validating properly.

The new V3 update is designed to improve CPU-Z's usefulness for mainstream users, enthusiasts, and overclockers with its new health checks and diagnostics. CPU-Z V3 is available to download now from cpuid.com; however, many of the app's features will be disabled until enough validations arrive on the V3 database to process statistics efficiently. The V2 database will still accept validations until October 20th, when the database will be switched to read-only mode.

Micron on Thursday announced a plan to establish the Micron Research Lab, which will explore memory, computing, packaging, and semiconductor manufacturing technologies that could be used commercially more than a decade from now. The facility will bring together expertise from Micron itself as well as its customers, government organizations, startups, universities, and partners in a bid to develop pre-competitive IP that will be required years away. The company plans to invest $10 billion over the next 10 years in the initiative.

Traditionally, universities, R&D organizations, and internal R&D units of large companies research new materials, architectures, phenomena, methods, and technologies that are years, if not decades, away from commercial deployment. Then, companies like Micron build new products using that fundamental IP to build actual products. As products and technologies become more complex, the time it takes a pre-competitive IP to become a product stretches, while R&D operations become more costly. This is where joint development operations like Micron's Research Lab come into play, as they bring fundamental research closer to developers of actual products.

Micron's Research Lab will focus on future memory technologies, advanced memory and compute architectures, advanced packaging, and next-generation semiconductor manufacturing. As Micron itself puts it, rather than simply develop subsequent generations of DRAM or NAND, the Research Lab will investigate technologies beyond Micron's existing product and technology roadmaps.

"With a planned $10 billion investment in Micron Research Labs, we are looking around the corner to the memory and compute systems the future will demand, bringing together the best minds across academia, government, startups and industry," said Sanjay Mehrotra, Chairman, President and CEO of Micron.

Micron envisions that its Research Lab will be capable of accommodating hundreds of researchers and operate as part of a considerably larger network. The company plans to finance collaborations with universities, establish satellite laboratories around the world, and work closely with external research partners. The network will connect Boise with Micron's existing R&D operations across the U.S., Europe, Japan, India, Singapore, and Taiwan, to move fundamental discoveries toward practical semiconductor technologies.

"Innovation is about turning bold ideas into discoveries that change the world. Micron Research Labs reflects the kind of long-term investment in fundamental research and innovation that is needed to keep America at the forefront," said Jonathan Levin, President of Stanford University. "I look forward to the collaborations the Labs will enable with academic institutions to advance the science of memory and computing, and power the next era of discovery."

Global collaboration on fundamental research is nothing new in the semiconductor world. However, Micron's Research Lab will be the first organization of its kind that will bring together fundamental research dedicated specifically to memory and conducted by different organizations.

"Micron understands the power of both academic and industry research and is driving innovation in the national security sector," said Jim Davis, President of The University of Texas at Austin. "This investment is the kind of long-term commitment that will produce breakthroughs and unlock new opportunities for our students, researchers, and industry partners."

The research organization will be based in a new facility near Micron's global R&D center in Boise, Idaho, though this will not be its only base. In addition to laboratories, the site is expected to host research conferences, workshops, and innovation forums that bring together scientists and engineers from Micron and external organizations. The company expects to break ground on the Boise facility in calendar 2027.

Nvidia has rejected a report claiming that it plans to begin small-batch shipments of a language processing unit tailored for Chinese customers by the end of 2026, with several Chinese orders already placed. "The reporting in The Information on NVIDIA's LPU is incorrect. We have no LPU sales in the China market today, and no China-specific LPU product in our roadmap," an Nvidia spokesperson told Tom's Hardware on Thursday. The Information's story, which cited two Nvidia employees, said the chip is a variant of the Groq 3 LPU Nvidia announced at GTC in March, and that its silicon is unchanged because it already falls within U.S. export rules.

The LPU was designed as a decode co-processor for the Vera Rubin platform, and Vera Rubin can't be sold in China. The Information's sources said Nvidia rewrote the software that splits work between the GPU and the LPU so the accelerator can run alongside processors that are available in the country.

The publication said Nvidia didn't respond to requests for comment over several days before publishing, and that it's unclear whether Beijing would allow the orders to proceed. Chinese officials blocked purchases of the H20 last year and only recently told companies they'd permit some H200 imports, so U.S. compliance alone doesn't guarantee the chips can be delivered.

Back in March, it was reported that Nvidia was preparing LPUs for China, with Jensen Huang saying two days later that the story was "totally false.” Thursday's statement is narrower than Huang's, addressing current sales and a China-specific product. Nvidia hasn’t clarified whether the standard LPU will ship to Chinese buyers. Huang told CNBC in May that Nvidia had "largely conceded" China's AI chip market to Huawei.

The Groq 3 LPU is built on Samsung's 4nm process with 512MB of SRAM per die and no HBM, and Nvidia said at GTC that it would ship in Q3 2026 to customers including OpenAI. U.S. export thresholds for China are set on compute density and bandwidth, and an SRAM-only decode accelerator with no HBM stack is the kind of part that can still be exported under them without a cut-down SKU, which is the mechanism The Information's sources described.

Huawei's Ascend 950DT, which the outlet named as the LPU's direct competitor, is optimized for decode and training and is due in Q4 2026, with the prefill-focused 950PR already in production since April. ByteDance and Tencent each took delivery of roughly 10,000 H200s in recent weeks, according to a Financial Times report this week, the first meaningful Nvidia accelerator volume to enter mainland China since December's U.S. approval.

Sandisk has launched the NAS 600 SATA and NAS 800 NVMe series of drives to compete with the best SSDs on the market. However, as their names insinuate, these SSDs target a specific niche: NAS devices. The Sandisk NAS 800 7.68TB, the highest-capacity drive of the lot, flaunting an endurance of 14 PBW, will retail for a whopping $2,199.99.

Despite the fact that we are in the middle of a global storage shortage, Sandisk has remained one of the busiest companies in the storage industry. Having previously released the Sandisk 320 and 520 SATA SSDs, the company is back again with two new SSD lineups. The NAS 600, which sticks to the conventional 2.5-inch form factor, and the NAS 800, which uses the M.2 2280 form factor, target prosumers, professionals, and businesses that need an SSD for their NAS devices.

NAS users typically rely on hard drives because of their affordability and high storage capacity. However, SSDs are a valid alternative to traditional mechanical drives, offering higher transfer throughput. Sometimes, users deploy SSDs as performance accelerators alongside hard drives. But since NAS devices operate 24/7 and are constantly writing lots of data to the drives, you need SSDs with high endurance, and that is where the Sandisk NAS 600 and NAS 800 come in.

The Sandisk NAS 800 boasts some of the highest endurance ratings ever seen on a NAS SSD. According to Sandisk, the drive is officially rated for 14 petabytes written (PBW) over its lifespan. Under a five-year warranty, users can write up to 7.67TB of data to the drive each day. It translates to an impressive 1 Drive Write Per Day (DWPD), meaning users can fill and rewrite the drive’s entire capacity daily for five consecutive years.

Sandisk NAS 600 and NAS 800 Specifications

To put these endurance numbers into perspective, consumer SSDs typically top out around 2,500 TBW, while NAS SSDs sometimes hit 5,000 TBW. The Sandisk NAS 800's impressive endurance numbers put the drive in the same category as enterprise SSDs with crazy endurance ratings over 10,000 TBW. For comparison, the Seagate IronWolf 525, which may be a bit outdated, tops out at 2,800 TBW for its 2TB capacity. In contrast, the comparable Sandisk NAS 800 1.92TB SKU boasts a remarkable 3,500 TBW, representing a 25% higher endurance.

We reached out to Sandisk to inquire about the SSD controller and NAND used in the new NAS 600 and NAS 800 SSDs. While Sandisk has not gotten back to us, we have a fairly good idea of how the company achieved the impressive endurance figures.

Assuming the standard 8TiB of physical NAND behind the 7.68TB user capacity, effective Over-Provisioning (OP) works out to roughly 14.5%, significantly higher than roughly 7% to 10% inherent in consumer drives. Assuming the SSDs use Sandisk 3D TLC NAND with ratings around 1,800 to 2,000 Program/Erase (P/E) cycles, the math implies a Write Amplification Factor (WAF) near 1.16X. However, if the NAND is closer to 3,000 PEC, the rating carries proportionally more margin.

Outside of impressive endurance, the Sandisk NAS 600 and NAS 800 deliver performance that you would expect from SATA III and PCIe 4.0 drives. The former offers sequential read and write speeds up to 560 MB/s and 520 MB/s, respectively, whereas the latter maxes out at 14,900 MB/s and 13,2000 MB/s, respectively. We suspect Sandisk has optimized the firmware for NAS workloads.

Sandisk's new SSDs will not come cheap, as expected for any SSD launched during a storage shortage. The NAS 600 starts at $179.99 for the 500GB but quickly scales to $999.99 for the 4TB SKU. Meanwhile, the NAS 800 960GB and 7.68TB will cost $309.99 and $2,199.99, respectively. Both series come with a limited five-year warranty and will be available for purchase in September.

Slovakia sought to modernize its traffic control systems with the acquisition of a batch of 279 new NERO R-ONE speed cameras, reports the Risky Bulletin Newsletter. Unfortunately, the country’s national security service, the NBU, has discovered that the cameras have multiple security issues. Firstly, they have SMS-activated Russian backdoors. Secondly, live camera feeds can be accessed by anyone with the device IP, no password necessary. Slovakia splurged a chunk of its €30 million EU-fund modernization budget on this now deactivated system.

The nearly 300 freshly installed NERO R-ONE cameras are thought to be rebranded Russian CORDON PRO.M traffic cameras, produced by a St. Petersburg-based firm called Semicon. Their path to acquisition sounds rather serpentine, with the big batch reportedly bought via a Cyprus-based shell company with fake certifications. Reports also suggest that pressure from the opposition political party in Slovakia led to the NBU investigations. The current government of the country, led by populist Robert Fico, initially denied reports that the cameras were of Russian origin and rebuffed any security concerns. Fico has what some would describe as a pro-Russia tilt, but you can read more about that elsewhere, if you are interested.

Camera flaws and vulnerabilities

As we mentioned in the intro, the hundreds of cameras Slovakia recently acquired and deployed have multiple issues which seem serious. Probably most seriously, in terms of national security, these cameras contain a hardcoded list of Russian phone numbers, which can be used to open a backdoor. An SMS from one of these numbers can open shell and network access.

Another problem with the cameras concerns broader security flaws. For example the SecureBoot feature is ineffective, and the web management portal can be accessed, exposing live streams, by anyone with the camera IP.

Cameras that have been installed and set up have since been deactivated by the Slovak Ministry of the Interior. Meanwhile, for due diligence, an independent auditor will be called in to confirm the NBU’s findings. It is thought that Croatia, and some other countries in Eastern Europe, may have undiscovered issues with traffic control cameras of similar origin.

A 30TB TLC enterprise SSD now costs $22,600, 6.5 times higher than the $3,460 it fetched around this time last year, and an equivalent hard drive costs $1,216, putting flash at 18.6 times the price of disk per terabyte. On those numbers, a 25PB AI storage build comes to $51.60 million all-flash against $12.86 million as a hybrid SSD-plus-HDD system. The figures come from the August update to VDURA's Flash Volatility Index, published by a vendor that sells exactly that kind of hybrid system, and they record a further 5% flash price rise in July with the TLC-to-HDD multiple easing from a 23.2 times peak in Q1.

The hybrid option only works if you can buy the hard drives, though, and Seagate and Western Digital have both told investors their nearline HDD output is sold out through 2027. Anyone without a long-term supply contract is paying spot prices for the disk, not the $1,216 in VDURA's table.

TrendForce’s Q3 survey has NAND contract prices rising 10–15% quarter on quarter, after 70-75% in Q2 and a 55–60% Q1 that saw enterprise SSD contract prices climb roughly 80% in a single quarter. VDURA's 5% figure sits inside that decelerating range, but the company reads it differently: Erik Salo, senior vice president of marketing and business operations, said in the release that "elevated flash pricing is structural."

The June update to the same index had already raised VDURA's Q1 2026 TLC figure from the $10,950 published in January to $17,500, so the company has already changed its own historical numbers once since the index launched.

VDURA also has the 30TB HDD rising from $495 in Q3 2025 to $1,216 now, a 2.5 times increase. Western Digital CEO Irving Tan told analysts in February that the company was sold out for 2026, with firm purchase orders from its top seven customers and agreements with three of its top five running into 2027 and 2028.

Seagate CEO Dave Mosley said on the company's April earnings call that nearline capacity was almost fully allocated through calendar 2027 under build-to-order contracts. Rosenblatt Securities analyst Sajal Dogra put the HDD spot premium at 30% to 40% in an August note ahead of WD's results. VDURA's mixed-fleet configuration pairs 5.78PB of flash with 22.68PB of hard drives, or roughly 756 30TB units at index pricing. A neocloud without a hyperscaler-scale supply agreement is buying those drives at spot, if at all, which moves the $12.86 million figure in only one direction: up

VDURA launched the index in January alongside a Storage Economics Optimizer Tool that models cost for the mixed-fleet architecture it sells. The broad direction matches independent data and our own retail tracking, which shows consumer SSD prices up as much as 220% over the same period. The 18.6 times multiple itself, though, sets one vendor's unexplained flash price sample against a hard drive price that neither Seagate nor WD is offering to new customers

Bad bots account for 91% of the traffic reaching one retailer's DDR5 memory product pages, roughly 10 automated requests for every legitimate visit, according to a LinkedIn post this week from Jérôme Segura, VP of threat research at bot-mitigation firm DataDome. The figure updates research DataDome published in March, which measured the ratio at about 6:1 across several e-commerce sites.

Over the same period, the cheapest 128GB DDR5-6400 kit tracked by Tom's Hardware has reached $3,399, ten times its record low pricing. The Thales 2026 Bad Bot Report puts bad bots at 40% of all web traffic, less than half the share Segura reports on DDR5 listings.

DataDome's March report documented a single operation that generated more than 10 million blocked requests, with a one-hour sample showing 91 DDR5 listings each polled around 551 times, or once every 6.5 seconds. The requests carried cache-busting parameters to defeat cached stock data and targeted industrial module makers such as Micron and Apacer, as well as DIMM socket suppliers Amphenol and TE Connectivity, alongside consumer brands.

Segura wrote on LinkedIn that retailers carrying memory should assume their "traffic analytics are probably understating the problem significantly."

Keep in mind that the 91% figure comes from one unnamed retailer, and DataDome hasn't published a sample window or its methodology. DataDome also sells the product that blocks this traffic, and page requests ultimately aren't purchases, so the ratio measures monitoring pressure on listings rather than how much stock bots actually end up securing, which can’t easily be quantified.

Apacer CEO C.K. Chang said in July that DRAM supply to independent module makers could fall to 30% of 2026 levels next year, and TrendForce expects conventional DRAM contract prices to rise another 13% to 18% in Q3 after roughly 60% in Q2. Hyperscale buyers have reportedly placed deposits against most of 2027's DRAM output.

A 32GB DDR5-6000 kit that averaged $72 this time last year now averages $392 on PCPartPicker. While graphics card and console scalping in 2020 and 2021 ran against scheduled restocks that eventually outpaced resale demand, no equivalent restock date exists for consumer DDR5 before 2027 at the earliest.

Framework stopped selling standalone RAM in November last year, citing scalpers, and Micro Center sells its CPU, motherboard, and 32GB DDR5 bundles in-store only with a one-per-household limit. Newegg and Amazon have run repeated CPU-plus-memory bundles that price a 32GB kit well below its standalone cost, which ties each kit to a processor a reseller then has to move as well. On eBay, we found G.Skill's Trident Z5 Neo 32GB kit listed at $836.54 in December against a $429.99 retail price, roughly double, and about seven times the $117.99 it sold for before the shortage.

Many towns, counties, and states have been passing data center moratoriums to delay these projects so that they could study their impact and create mitigations before this infrastructure even before they get off the ground. However, Ypsilanti, Michigan, is taking a different approach to this issue. Instead of putting a moratorium on data centers, the township put a temporary ban on the underlying electrical infrastructure needed to run them. According to 404 Media, the six-month delay is intended for studying the potential effects that the proposed electrical substation needed to power the project will have on noise pollution and existing customers.

“We need to make sure it’s in the right location from a planning standpoint, and we need to make sure that we have ordinances in place that require DTE or any electrical company to go through a process,” Ypsilanti Township Supervisor Brenda Stumbo said in a statement. The township will determine “the nature and scale of electrical infrastructure necessary to serve new high-energy-demand land uses [...] including infrastructure associated, but not limited to hyper-scale data centers, mid-sized data centers, artificial intelligence computing facilities, and high-performance computational centers, industrial facilities, and other intensive electrical users” during the six-month period.

This move is related to the University of Michigan’s announcement that it will build a 220,000 square-foot hyperscale data center on a 144-acre plot of land on Textile Road. The data center, which costs $1.25 billion, is part of the University of Michigan and Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL) work on nuclear weapons. The University said in its press release that the development “will give scientists the computing power needed to solve the world’s most complex challenges” and that it’s “not a military instillation or weapons production facility.” It also added, “No hazardous nuclear materials will be stored or used on-site, no weapons production will occur at the site, and the facility will not conduct real-time defense operations.” However, that isn’t the primary concern of many of Ypsilanti’s residents. Instead, it’s the fact that many other data center projects have caused grief to the communities that they are in.

The electricity moratorium isn’t the first one that the township took to delay the data center project. In April of this year, Ypsilanti voted yes to another moratorium — a one-year temporary ban on delivering water to hyperscale data centers as it studies the impact of the massive water demands, which was estimated to be at 500,000 gallons per day.

It’s unclear what will happen after the moratoriums that Ypsilanti set expire, but even after the first temporary ban was set, the University of Michigan still went forward with its groundbreaking. The institution also threatened to sue the township, calling its action to delay its data center project “discriminatory.” Aside from that, the federal government has historically supported data center projects that it deems crucial for its projects, like when the Department of Justice asked the court to dismiss the NAACP lawsuit against xAI’s use of unpermitted gas turbines at its Colossus data centers.

ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), China's largest maker of dynamic random access memory (DRAM), planned to obtain Samsung's IP related to its memory process technologies in a bid to develop its own production nodes, according to testimony given in a South Korean criminal case involving leaked Samsung technology, reports Maeil Business. The company's managers allegedly had no intention to develop an in-house process technology from scratch, so obtaining IP from Samsung was a strategic decision.

The intention was a key part of CXMT's business plan rather than an opportunistic attempt to acquire Samsung's technology after the start of its own DRAM process development, according to the testimony of a former Samsung engineer identified as Jeon, who worked at Samsung for 28 years before jumping ship to CXMT sometimes around 2016. This April, Jeon was sentenced to seven years in prison for illegally obtaining a 600-step Process Recipe Plan (PRP) information concerning Samsung's DRAM fabrication processes in general and the 18nm-class node in particular.

"From the beginning, CXMT CEO and CTO tried to develop DRAM by stealing Samsung Electronics' Process Recipe Plan (PRP) information," Jeon told the court this week, according to Maeil Business. "CXMT had no research institutes or facilities at the time of its establishment, and had no intention of developing technology through its own research."

Copying the recipe does not automatically give you a working process. Nonetheless, a detailed process recipe can dramatically shorten development of any production node because it reveals things like the sequence of steps, deposition or etch conditions, anneals, cleans, implant parameters, temperatures, pressures, tool types, and so on. For a memory process, a ready process recipe can remove a huge amount of trial-and-error and reveal how the process integration is supposed to work. Meanwhile, even to ensure that the recipe works as intended, one needs to obtain the same or compatible tools as well as adjust their characteristics accordingly.

However, while a process recipe can potentially help to ramp any fabrication technology, a process recipe itself does not necessarily reveal the complete transistor architecture or physical design. For that, perpetrators also want things like cross-sectional structures, masks/layout information, design rules, device dimensions, capacitor geometry, process window, and so on. Such details are not easy to get for a brand-new fabrication technology, but they can be obtained by reverse engineering of shipping products. By combining process recipe with reverse engineering, experienced DRAM engineers can reconstruct much of the technology. Meanwhile, process integration engineers can save years of trial-and-error with actual fab tools.

Normally, it takes DRAM companies around 3 – 5 years to design a process node from device development to yield ramp. For a new player, development time from scratch will probably be around five years rather than three unless pre-competitive IP is licensed or certain heavy-lifting is done elsewhere. In fact, the Maeil Business report claims it took Samsung five years to develop its 18nm-class node.

Meanwhile, CXMT began mass production of DDR4 SDRAM in 2019 using a 22nm-class node. Mass production of memory using a 18nm-class process technology began in 2023. Such a timeline raises a question of whether CXMT's 22nm-class G1 was derived/adapted from the knowledge of Samsung's process technologies and/or their process recipes, the more advanced 18nm-class node, or did the allegedly obtained Samsung IP primarily help CXMT develop the later 18nm generation? In any case, there is a court ruling that CXMT stole IP from Samsung to boost its own memory production capability.

Hacker Cyberleek, who’s protesting Rockstar’s pre-selling of digital copies of GTA VI by releasing gameplay clips and the entire map of Leonidas, has once again released video clips on their website. Per videos online, the leaker apparently has a complete, unreleased game build, with the clip showing in-game footage of the character spelling out the LEEK by shooting at a wall, revealing that they have recorded themselves playing the game, rather than simply accessing internal recordings or video.

Rockstar has been quick to combat these leaks by issuing DMCA takedown notices, especially on YouTube, but it seems that some clips are still available on X. Aside from that, the leaker’s website is still active, although it seems that its server gets overwhelmed sometimes, returning a 502 Bad Gateway response. This could potentially be disastrous for the company, especially as the hacker threatened to keep on releasing leaks until the GTA VI maker issues a public apology with “a concrete commitment to be better.” Kuba even said that Cyberleek could potentially release the ending of the game, spoiling it for everyone.

It’s unclear how Cyberleek got their hands on such a complete GTA VI build, especially as it isn’t pegged to launch until November. More than that, the game will also be released on console first, with no announcement date yet for when the PC version will arrive. But because GTA VI is such a highly anticipated game, with some fans going to great lengths to predict when its next trailer will come out, it’s also a juicy target for some bad actors. In fact, the company was hit by a hack back in April, with the group threatening to release confidential data if the company did not pay up.

The previous leaks were supposedly based on footage that’s already a year old, but many members of the community agree that the recent leaks are new ones. As many are saying that the most recent leaks are from the game build, Rockstar has its work cut out, with the company issuing takedown notices left and right. The company could actually just release the extended look early, taking the flame out of these leaks, but it likely couldn’t do that because of its deal with Netflix, which will show the third trailer starting August 27. Still, we don’t know how much damage Cyberleek is going to do to the game, especially as many people will still likely purchase it despite the leaks. Nevertheless, the people who worked on GTA VI would probably be displeased to see their work leaked out on the internet.

Synopsys has published silicon results for what it calls the first 3D PCIe 6.0 test chip, a 5nm PHY built into a face-to-face stacked package that runs 64 GT/s per lane and up to 128 GB/s across an eight-lane link using PAM4 signaling, with receiver eyes clearing the standard's bit error rate requirement. The company says it got there by pulling apart an existing 2D PCIe 6.0 test chip, adding through-silicon vias, and redoing circuit design and signoff against 3D process design kits, according to its blog post.

In monolithic chips, PCIe PHYs sit at the perimeter of the die, right next to the package I/O connections, helping keep traces to the substrate short so attenuation and reflections remain manageable. A 2.5D package preserves that layout by parking the PHYs along the outer edge of the outermost chiplets. Face-to-face hybrid bonding removes the option. The bottom die is flipped so its redistribution layer meets the redistribution layer of the logic die above it, which leaves the PCIe PHYs facing away from the substrate they need to reach. Instead, the signals travel down through vias cut into the silicon.

Every TSV passes through active silicon and needs a buffer around it, so the vias can't be dropped wherever the PHY happens to sit. "You rarely drill straight down into the package substrate," Manmeet Walia, executive director of product management at Synopsys, said to Electronic Design, which reported that routing has to climb to one of the upper metal layers and reverse direction before descending.

Walia told the publication that electromigration and layout rules change substantially in 3D, that via count is a tradeoff between bandwidth and signals corrupting each other, and that customer logic sitting over the PHY's path down to the substrate is a challenge that Synopsys expects to work through iteratively, design by design. PAM4 leaves less room for that kind of error than the NRZ signaling used through PCIe 5.0, since it packs two bits into each symbol.

Fujitsu's Monaka processor takes the opposite approach, instead stacking four N2 compute chiplets carrying 144 Armv9 cores face-to-face on N5 SRAM chiplets using hybrid copper bonding, then putting the memory controllers and the PHYs for its 12 DDR5 channels on a separate and comparatively large I/O die rather than inside the bonded stack.

PCIe generations arrived roughly five to seven years apart for most of the standard's life and now release about every two years, with the Gen 8 specification due in 2028 at 256 GT/s per lane. Walia told Electronic Design that a further shift is coming with 3.5D packaging, where the PCIe PHYs get stripped out of the bottom die entirely, replaced with UCIe, and relocated to a side chiplet on the interposer that acts as a multi-protocol hub for Ethernet, PCIe, and CXL. Synopsys hasn't put a date on that. Its blog says leading-edge customers are evaluating angstrom-class process technologies for the top dies in their stacks.

Loudon County, Virginia, located just 22 miles west of Washington, D.C., has the greatest concentration of data centers in the United States. According to The New York Times, after years of booming data center construction that has brought lots of benefits to the local region, the county is beginning to rein in data center construction in response to local residents' complaints.

It all started when a federal government demand led to the installation of fiber internet lines in the area, owing to its proximity to Washington, D.C. This grew even more during the dot-com craze of the late ‘90s, when many companies built a ton of fiber connections in the region. This made it ideal for building early data centers in the area, with AOL moving its headquarters in the region in 1996. By the year 2000, the county voted to categorize data centers as office parks, meaning companies can build these structures with little oversight and approvals.

This incentivized tech giants to build data centers in the area; by 2007, there were already 29 such facilities in Loudoun, with the number growing almost ten-fold nearly 20 years later. Interestingly, it seemed that the negative impacts of these projects in the area were little to none. In fact, the people of Loudoun appreciated them, as they brought in a lot of money for the county. Data centers brought in a $150 million income in 2015, but this number has grown to $1.1 billion in 2025. This cash windfall allowed Loudoun to cut property taxes to just $0.805 per $100 of assessed value — that’s less than 0.8%, making it among the lowest in the United States, especially for a suburban area.

Aside from that, the tax windfall from data centers allowed the county to fund more schools, with two new ones opened in the area, plus another one under construction, build a $102 million recreation center that has multiple pools and hydro massage chairs, plus spend $22 million converting a former presidential estate into a public park. This also allowed the county to expand its fire and emergency services, and ensure that its roads, bridges, and tolls are in excellent shape. Because of this, many residents support data centers in the region; in a July town hall meeting discussing it, some people attended wearing shirts that said: “I Support Data Centers Because I Like: Lower Taxes, Excellent Schools, Better Job Opportunities, and More.”

This is a stark contrast to what the rest of the country is seeing when it comes to data centers. New developments have raised various issues nationwide, from electricity price hikes up to 76% in the biggest power region of the U.S. and excessive water consumption that caused low water pressures for neighboring communities to 24/7 noise pollution that basically made the area unlivable and allegations of air pollution brought about by unpermitted gas turbines needed to power the data center. It’s for these reasons that many people are protesting the development of these projects in their communities, and several counties and states have passed data center moratoriums.

Despite widespread support for data centers in Loudoun, people are starting to push back against more recent developments. Loudoun Board of Supervisors member Juli Briskman, who is among the people in charge of its land, zoning, and economic policies, said, “It’s gone way too far. We’ve become addicted to the data centers for their tax revenues, but at what cost?” Some residents have also started complaining about data center developments in their vicinity. A Vantage data center, which has started operations recently, was the center of a noise complaint because of its diesel and gas turbine generators, while another resident in nearby Ashburn is raising an issue about Dominion Energy planning to put up a 185-foot-tall high-voltage electricity transmission tower in her backyard. There have also been reports that another tech company is buying over 100 homes in a luxury community for $4 million apiece, which is double their current market value.

Because of these issues, Loudoun ended its policy of zoning data centers as office parks, meaning anyone who wants to build a project in the area must now go through an approvals process from the public. This will make it significantly slower to get projects like these off the ground, and there’s also no guarantee of approval. Just last month, Amazon applied to build four more data centers in the region, and some board members have already signaled that they will reject the project.

When done right, data centers can bring economic prosperity for the community that they are in, which is exactly what Loudoun County was able to achieve. After all, data centers aren’t just about AI — they’re also used to serve the digital economy and keep the internet running, so that online services like Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, Spotify, Google Maps, Uber, and more can operate smoothly at scale. However, the massive processing power demanded by artificial intelligence workloads means that data centers serving its needs use up tons more power and water, which can make living near one untenable for most residents unless the local government takes steps to protect their interests.

After posting record profits amid high memory prices, SK hynix ran into a dispute with employees over profit sharing and wage increases, which threatened to escalate into collective action by the company's union. This week, SK hynix management and the labor union reached a preliminary 2026 wage and collective bargaining agreement that significantly changes how the company's profit-sharing bonuses will be distributed, reports Maeil Business citing Yonhap. The good news is that no strikes are planned at the memory maker.

The tentative labor package reportedly calls for a 6.3% wage increase and an increase in welfare points provided by the company. In addition, under the proposed arrangement, employees will receive 40% of their performance-based profit distribution in cash, while the remaining 60% will come in the form of SK hynix shares. The proposal changes SK hynix's 2025 profit-sharing scheme, which allocated 10% of the previous year's operating profit to employee profit-sharing program, but the bonus was to be paid complete in cash: employees received 80% in cash immediately and remaining 20% over the next two years.

The union argued that stock-based bonuses expose employees to potential losses if SK hynix shares decline and could create tax complications, as income tax may be calculated using the share price when the stock is awarded. Specifically, the workers argued that performance bonuses normally paid in cash should not be converted into assets that carry investment risk. Yet, the SK hynix management and union have agreed to remove the 10% ceiling, potentially providing more money to employees, maintain the mechanism for 10 years, and pay the bonuses in cash and stock.

If SK hynix meets current market expectations and earns 25 trillion won ($17.897 billion) in operating profit this year, the profit-sharing pool would amount to 2.5 trillion won ($1.79 billion) based on the 10% formula. SK hynix reportedly has approximately 35,000 employees, so on average every employee will get 70 million won, or $50,120 ($20,048 in cash and $30,072 in stock). Yet, actual compensation will differ depending on an employee's position and individual performance assessment.

On August 4, before the fifth round of negotiations, an SK hynix union told members that if management did not present a revised proposal, it would be difficult to settle the dispute through negotiations alone and the union would have to take necessary action, which was obviously a way to threaten the management with a strike. Yet, the parties have come to terms.

The dispute comes as Samsung Electronics has faced similar labor action over compensations.