Ukraine's military intelligence agency GUR released details of a new 3D-printed Russian cruise missile that was first deployed around September and October of this year. The missile is faster than traditional weapons, hitting speeds of 500mph, and has a range of over 700 miles. According to Business Insider, these cruise missiles, called “Filin,” are more affordable than the traditional Kh-101 cruise missile that costs more than $2,000,000 per launch. This is why some fear that these weapons would be used by the Russian military in “missile spam” tactics against Kyiv to overwhelm its air defenses.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which was originally planned to last just a few weeks, has turned into a multi-year war of attrition. This has made the frontlines a costly effort for both man and machine, which is why both sides are looking for more cost-efficient ways to conduct warfare. While drones have seen widespread use in this conflict, they’re relatively slow and are easier to shoot down. The Geran-5, which has been known to disintegrate in flight, could only hit a maximum speed of 270 mph, while the Filin can reportedly hit speeds of 500 mph and has a range of 745 miles. While this still isn’t as fast as modern fighter jets like the F-16 Fighting Falcon, the increased top speed could make it that much harder for Ukrainian air defenses to deal with the threat.

The GUR said that the Filin has a carbon and fiberglass fuselage, while also featuring some 3D-printed parts. It also said that Moscow was able to keep costs on the cruise missile low by relying on commercially available parts from both domestic and foreign companies. It used Russian-made engines instead of the Chinese turbojets found in many Shahed drones, while many electronic components, such as the flight controller, inertial navigation systems, equipment controllers, and counter-jamming hardware, are said to come from Western nations and their allies. The Ukrainian intelligence agency listed the following sources: 35 components come from the U.S., 22 from China, and 13 from Japan, Switzerland, Taiwan, and the Netherlands.

While 3D-printing isn’t necessarily cheaper than traditional manufacturing methods, it’s sometimes more cost-efficient for producing items that require unique geometries, such as solid rocket fuel or jet-engine turbine blades. It has even allowed a tech hobbyist to build a DIY MANPADS for under $100. While the Filin will likely cost way more than a home-made 3D-printed missile, the fact that it’s significantly more affordable than traditional cruise missiles could allow Russia to launch more of them, spelling trouble for the Ukrainian defenders.

These days, it's exceedingly difficult not to be jaded and weary about the tech market. Memory, graphics cards, and now storage are becoming impossible to obtain; there's basically no new consumer hardware being released; and there's AI everywhere. Technology YouTuber TrashBench (TB), too, is tired and was harkening back to the halcyon days when everything was fresh and straightforward — so he went back in time with a retro build.

More specifically, he recreated a facsimile of the first machine his parents bought him in 1996 when he was a wee lad, to play The Need for Speed: Special Edition — a PC-improved version of the first ever game in the series. According to the man, it was thanks to this machine that he fell in love with computers in general.

TB kicked things off with an Intel Pentium MMX 200 MHz CPU sitting atop an Epox Pronix EP-P55-BT motherboard, boasting what was at the time a new, fresh, convenient ZIF (Zero Insertion Force) socket. This motherboard popped up during the RAM transition from SIMM to DIMM, which is why you'll see two slots of each on the top. 32 MB of RAM went right in, a generous amount for the year.

Funnily enough, the CPU barely needed cooling, which is why a simple 40-mm fan suffices, although anyone who's lived through this era will tell you that those were guaranteed to start whining after just a few months of heavy usage. There is no case cooling, as it's just not needed.

However, he did need to correctly set the motherboard's jumpers, as such luxuries like automatically detecting CPU speed and voltage were just becoming normal. Yes, this meant that you could burn out a CPU if you played the jumper game wrong.

For graphics card duty, he enlisted an S3 Trio32 card, which was pretty, ahem, modest even in the era, and had no 3D rendering capabilities whatsoever. In this era, the now-ubiquitous 3D accelerator cards were just coming into fashion, and he eventually replaced the S3 with a Matrox Mystique 3D, another offering of dubious quality. Yet those were happy days, as any form of 3D acceleration was far better than none.

Storage comes by way of a Western Digital Caviar 22100 hard drive with a whopping two gigabytes of storage and the uncanny ability to emulate the dulcet tones of a jackhammer. TB eventually swapped it later for a roomier 80 GB unit. Again, due to the idiosyncrasies and constant transitions of the era — hardware doubled in speed and capacity nearly every year — he had to set a jumper to clip it to the likely amounts of either 8.4 GB or 33.4 GB, as the addressing space of BIOSes and disk controllers of the time were limited.

The build wraps up with an OG Sound Blaster 16 sound card and a CD-ROM drive. After test-driving the machine with Need for Speed, he moved on to Microsoft Flight Simulator 98, which necessitated a joystick. Naturally, he got the much-beloved Quickshot QS-123, a staple in many home PCs, and one that needed replacement in about six months, as its build quality matched its price.

A video purported to be “authentic, original 360p footage captured inside a CompUSA retail store in New York City” has been shared on YouTube, allowing retro computing fans to step back in time to November 2000. This was the Windows Me, Pentium III, and Athlon era, dominated by computers constructed using a lot of translucent plastics and beige boxes already a distant memory. However, computer stores like this bulged with displays and fast-selling stock before internet shopping would start to eat many of these businesses away.

The video reveals a nostalgic CompUSA, greeted by a wall of CRT monitors. The store looks crowded and almost chaotic with peripherals, PCs, and devices - and boxes filling a lot of space in the aisles.

The first item is a noteworthy trio of laptops. It looks like three stylish Sony VAIO machines in a line. In the center of this display is probably the most interesting device from the time, which we believe to be a Sony VAIO C1 Series ‘PictureBook’ PCG-C1VN subnotebook. Searches indicate this device was powered by the Transmeta Crusoe TM5600 processor running at 600 MHz, supported by 128MB of SDRAM, and a 12GB HDD. The tiny form factor, weighing in at around 2.2 pounds (1kg), was built around an 8.9-inch TFT display of 1024 x 480 pixels. It also had a dGPU, an ATI Rage Mobility with 8MB dedicated VRAM.

Above this trio of laptops, there's a spec card for one of the larger laptops available in store. Squinting at the 360p video, it appears the unnamed portable has an Intel Pentium III 700 MHz CPU, S3 graphics, 128GB of RAM, and a 20GB HDD.

Next up, the video shows some New Yorkers (or tourists) browsing desktop machines including Compaq Presario PCs, with characteristic translucent accent faceplates – clearly inspired by the iMac. Again, we would expect these came with Celeron/Pentium III processors, or AMD Athlon/Duron chips from that era. Graphics cards in these would typically be Nvidia RIVA TNT2 or GeForce2 MX cards.

Later on, the video shows a significant amount of store space stacked with boxes for perhaps 100 Compaq Presario desktops. On one box you can see the model number ‘5WV294.’ According to our searches, that model would come with an AMD Athlon 1.0 GHz, 128MB RAM, 30-40GB HDD, an optical drive, and Nvidia GeForce2 MX or S3 Savage4 / ProSavage 3D graphics.

The video also shows Apple Mac desktops powered up next to matching monitors. Even with Apple’s serious professional desktops, by 2000 the beige era was long gone. A spec card shows that one of the Apple desktops on display is the Power Macintosh G4 Dual 500. Yes, it had twin 500 MHz G4 processors, as well as 256MB memory, a 40GB HDD, a DVD RAM drive, and a 16MB video card, costing an eye-watering $3,500. We previously mentioned the ‘iMac era’ and indeed, an in-store wall of perhaps 50 boxed iMac computers is shown later in the video.

A 21-inch ViewSonic A110 monitor displaying a demo reel with Apple monitors and Apple Macs is also featured. It is a high-end model, priced at $750. Printers appear in the video too, with various HP models boxed up. The video also shows a shelf of unboxed printers and MFPs on display, and you can see someone pondering over one. Mice, mouse mats, and a Windows Me ‘Take Me Home’ promotional in-store display also catch the cameraman’s eye.

The video ends with a scene at the checkout, and folks buying sundries and peripherals. The last customer appears to be inquiring about a mail-in rebate for an HP printer. Some things never change.

CompUSA collapsed due to competition from big box stores, the ascent of online retailers, and various managerial missteps. The store brand saw mass closures and liquidation in 2007/8, with a handful of stores kept alive by Systemax/TigerDirect. The CompUSA retail identity was finally retired in 2012.

Razer has been updating its gaming mouse lineup systematically over the past two years, and it's finally the Basilisk's turn to get a real update. The last update we saw to the Basilisk line was the Basilisk V3 Pro 35K in October 2024, which was basically just the Basilisk V3 Pro with a new sensor.

The Basilisk isn't Razer's most popular gaming mouse line, but it is the more versatile, all-rounder line for people who aren't chasing performance above all else. The Basilisk V4 Pro maintains the general design of its predecessor — a contoured, right-handed gaming mouse with bright RGB lighting and a handful of extra buttons, for the serious gamer who isn't trying to break esports records. It features Razer's newest Focus Pro 50K optical sensor, gen-4 optical mouse switches, and up to an 8,000 Hz polling rate, plus multiple forms of connectivity and up to 200 hours of battery life (over 2.4GHz at 1,000 Hz).

It is admittedly pricey, like all of Razer's flagship mice, at $169.99 for both colorways (black and white), and it launched with Razer's Mouse Dock V2 Pro — which is sold separately for $69.99.

Design and Comfort of the Basilisk V4 Pro

Following in the footsteps of its other recent next-gen mouse launches, Razer has kept the design of the Basilisk V4 Pro largely the same. The Basilisk V4 Pro has basically the same size and shape as its predecessor — it has a right-handed ergonomic shape with a contoured thumb rest and a hump that sits slightly back and to the left. It has large primary mouse buttons with shallow finger grooves, and a slight contour on its outer edge that makes it relatively easy to pick up and move.

It's not exactly the same as the V3 Pro, however. The V4 Pro has two new buttons, for a total of 12 programmable buttons on the mouse: the left and right primary buttons, three thumb buttons (instead of the usual two) and a trigger button in the thumb groove, a clickable tilt wheel (three "buttons" — center click and left/right click), two buttons above the tilt wheel, and an extra button on the left side of the left mouse button. The third thumb button and the extra button on the left mouse button are the new ones; the third thumb button sits in front of the first two and is set to open up Razer's AI prompt by default, while the extra button on the left mouse button is set to switch through profiles by default.

I'm... actually not a big fan of the new buttons. Or, well, I don't really think they're necessary — the Basilisk already had plenty of buttons for a mouse that's not all about having buttons, and I don't really see myself incorporating these new buttons into my workflow in the near future. The extra button on the left mouse button is a little too far forward — this is a very long mouse (it measures 5.02 inches / 127.5mm long), and the extra button is right at the front edge. I have medium-sized hands and relatively long fingers, and the button felt too far for me to press comfortably. It's not a big deal if you plan to leave it set as a profile switch button (which are often located on the bottom of mice), but it's not really viable as a real extra button.

Worse, however, is the location of the third thumb button — the AI prompt button — which is located in line with the other two thumb buttons. I generally have no issue with three rows of thumb buttons, as my daily driver is the Razer Naga V3 Pro, but this new AI button is the same size as the other thumb buttons and it pushes everything back a little. This puts the first thumb button (MB4) back too far to press comfortably (and that's a mouse button I use often). And while you can swap the buttons around, the AI prompt button is slightly too far forward. Basically, there are now three buttons where there should be only two, and they all feel slightly off.

The tilt wheel has three different modes you can switch through with the button right above it: two tactile modes (24 and 48 steps), and free-spin mode. I generally love free-spin mode, but the tilt wheel on the Basilisk V4 Pro is a little too sensitive and will backscroll if you even think about moving your finger near it. The precision-tactile scroll hits a great balance and feels great, however, so this didn't bother me too much.

The Basilisk V4 Pro comes in both black and white colorways; ours came in white, which has shiny black accents so it's a little more Stormtrooper than iPod. It has a smooth matte white body with dimpled rubber texturing for grip on both sides. While it's nice to have built-in side grips, I suspect they will wear down like the grips on the V3 Pro — and then you'll have to find or make your own grip tape, as the mouse comes with none. The mouse is roughly the same size as its predecessor, but it weighs less: the black version weighs 3.53 ounces (100g), which is almost half an ounce lighter than the V3 Pro 35K (3.95oz / 112g). It's not an ultralightweight mouse (or anywhere close), but the weight difference is noticeable and the mouse is definitely easier to pick up.

On the bottom of the mouse, you'll find pure PTFE feet — two near the front, a strip at the back, and a strip under the thumbrest, as well as a strip around the sensor, a power switch, and a connection switch button that is not programmable.

In the box, the Basilisk V4 Pro comes with a USB-A dongle, a USB-A to USB-C converter, and a 6-foot (2m) braided USB-C to USB-A cable. While the cable is braided, it is not one of Razer's flexible HyperFlex cables — it's meant for charging the mouse and plugging the dongle into your PC, not for using the mouse in its wired form.

Specs

Performance of the Basilisk V4 Pro

The Basilisk V4 Pro sports Razer's latest optical sensor, which is the Focus Pro 50K Gen-3 optical sensor. It has a maximum resolution of 50,000 DPI and a maximum speed of 930 IPS, and it can handle up to 90 G's of force. This is the third Razer mouse to feature this sensor (others are the Viper V4 Pro and the Naga V3 Pro), and it's a solid sensor that works with Razer's dynamic sensitivity (the sensitivity can be set up to change based on how quickly you move your hand) and rotation tool in Synapse. It tracks well across just about every surface, including glass that's at least 4mm thick.

The Basilisk V4 Pro isn't an ultra-lightweight mouse, but its shape and grippiness mean it's pretty easy to pick up and move quickly if you're playing an FPS. The trigger button is right under your thumb, however, so you may accidentally trigger (haha) it if you have a tendency to pick up your mouse a lot. The Basilisk's shape isn't quite as natural-feeling as that of the DeathAdder V4 Pro, but it's a comfortable mouse for a variety of games — from multi-button-needing MMOs to competitive shooters (though, perhaps not for peak competition). While I still take issue with the placement of the new buttons, it is nice to have a few extra buttons without jumping straight to 19.

The Basilisk V4 Pro sports Razer's Gen-4 optical mouse switches, which are rated for over 100 million clicks. The switches have a nice, crisp sound that's not too loud (not as loud as Logitech's, anyway), though it's not a mouse for those trying to minimize mouse clickiness. The primary buttons have a solid, tactile feel, and I had no issues with misclicks or double-clicks while I was testing. While the tilt wheel's free-spin mode was too sensitive for me to get to work properly, I love the precision tactile mode — it blends speed and tactility perfectly.

Features and Software of the Basilisk V4 Pro

The Basilisk V4 Pro is programmable with Razer Synapse 4 (not Razer's web-based version of Synapse). You can use Synapse to remap the mouse's 12 programmable buttons (14 programmable controls, if you include scroll up/down; the connection switch button on the bottom of the mouse is not programmable). Synapse has a variety of remap options, as well as a built-in macro recorder / editor. Synapse is also where you'll be able to customize the mouse further by tweaking things like the scroll wheel, DPI stages, and surface calibration. There's also a sensitivity matcher that will match the Basilisk V4 Pro's sensitivity to match that of your old mouse.

You can also use Razer's Chroma Studio to customize the mouse's lighting and sync it with games and/or your other Razer peripherals. The Basilisk V4 Pro has seven RGB lighting zones: a five-zone underglow strip along the bottom curve of the mouse, as well as one in the scroll wheel and one in the logo on the palm rest. The lighting is bright and the underglow's five zones blend nicely — the underglow strip is tilted outward so it's pretty visible when the mouse is just sitting on your desk.

Wireless Experience and Battery Life of the Basilisk V4 Pro

The Basilisk V4 Pro has three forms of connectivity: 2.4GHz wireless, Bluetooth, and wired (via USB-C), though it doesn't really come with a mouse-ready USB-C cable. Razer rates it at 200 hours of battery life over a 2.4GHz wireless connection with a 1,000 Hz polling rate, which is excellent. This number does drop to 54 hours at an 8,000 Hz polling rate, which is... still pretty good, to be honest.

The Basilisk V4 Pro launched alongside Razer's Mouse Dock V2 Pro, which is a wireless charging dock with built-in RGB lighting and an integrated 8,000 Hz wireless receiver. The Mouse Dock V2 Pro is sold separately for $70, and comes with a wireless charging puck that slots into the bottom of the mouse. It sits on your desk (it's small — 3.28 x 2.2 x 1.71 inches / 83.5 x 56 x 43.5mm) and serves as a magnetic dock and wireless receiver for your mouse. It has eight RGB lighting zones around the base, and it lights up to indicate battery level (flashes red when the battery is low). It's made for the Basilisk V4 Pro and V4 HyperSpeed, but it will also work with the Basilisk V3 Pro 35K, the Basilisk V3 Pro, the Cobra Pro, the Cobra HyperSpeed, the Naga V3 Pro, and the Naga V2 Pro (up to 8,000 Hz polling rate for all except the Naga V2 Pro).

The Basilisk V4 Pro is also compatible with Razer's HyperFlux V2 charging mouse pad, but you'll need to connect to your PC via the mouse's dongle for 8,000 Hz polling.

Bottom Line

The Razer Basilisk V4 Pro is an expected update to the Basilisk V3 Pro / 35K. The bump in battery life, from 150 hours in the Basilisk V3 Pro 35K to 200 hours in the Basilisk V4 Pro, is very nice (and 54 hours with an 8,000 Hz polling rate isn't bad, either). While I didn't like the new buttons, I'm sure some people will (although I find it difficult to believe that every mouse and keyboard needs a dedicated AI prompt button), and the reduced weight feels good even if, at 100g, it's still nowhere near the ultra-lightweight category. The Basilisk V4 Pro is a great gaming mouse for gamers who want something a little more exciting and versatile than a DeathAdder V4 Pro, but not as button-heavy (or as heavy) as a Naga V3 Pro.

Micron's next-generation 3D NAND, which will enter mass production in 2H 2027, is set to offer three significant advantages: it will double storage density, increase I/O performance by 50% compared to the company's current-generation NAND memory, and decrease power consumption, the company revealed at an event this week. To achieve these aggressive goals, Micron plans to take a page from YMTC's book and adopt wafer-on-wafer bonding. Meanwhile, Micron is also developing new materials and denser memory cell architectures to extend 3D NAND scaling beyond G11.

"We had mentioned we will bring in wafer-on-wafer bonding technology at the right time when it’s cost-effective, and it brings in capability that is important for the product specs at the time, and this is the right timing for that technology," said Scott DeBoer, president and chief technology and products officer at Micron, during the company's event this week. "So this G11 technology is the world's most advanced NAND. It will ramp in the second half of next year, [and] it is based on wafer-on-wafer bonding technology."

G11: Over 400 layers and wafer bonding

Micron's G11 3D NAND represents a substantial advancement over its current G9 (N160) generation. The company expects the new memory to achieve approximately twice the bit density of G9 (3D TLC 21 Gb/mm² => 3D TLC 42 Gb/mm²?), which means a dramatic increase compared to Kioxia's BiCS10 or Samsung's V10; increase I/O speeds by up to 50% (3,600 MT/s => 5,400 MT/s?); and reduce data transfer energy consumption per bit by more than 25%.

These improvements should benefit both conventional high-capacity SSDs for client and data center applications and emerging AI-oriented storage devices, which require greater bandwidth and energy efficiency.

One of the key changes introduced with G11 is wafer-on-wafer bonding, which enables Micron to manufacture different parts of its NAND device on separate wafers using different process technologies — a new 3D NAND node to build a NAND array and a logic fabrication process to make peripheral circuits and I/O — and subsequently bond them together. The company has used CMOS-under-array architectures for several generations. Still, wafer bonding provides additional flexibility to optimize memory arrays and peripheral logic independently, which means more capacity and performance if all goes as planned.

Another important innovation is the transition to more than 400 NAND layers. Micron has not disclosed the exact number of active wordline layers or the number of memory decks used by G11, but the company says the technology will feature an industry-leading memory cell pitch, which suggests that its density improvements will come from both additional layers and smaller cell dimensions.

Micron expects to disclose more technical details about G11 in 2027, closer to the start of high-volume manufacturing in the second half of next year.

Beyond G11: New materials and denser memory cells

Without any doubt, Micron will continue scaling 3D NAND along all three dimensions rather than simply increasing the number of layers going forward. While conventional 3D NAND scaling initially relied primarily on adding more memory layers, future generations will also require reductions in cell dimensions along the X and Y axes to improve bit density while keeping manufacturing complexity in check.

To achieve this, Micron is developing what it describes as breakthrough high-mobility materials, ultra-dense cell architectures, and more energy-efficient devices and data paths. These technologies could improve transistor characteristics, enable further reductions in memory cell dimensions, and reduce the energy required to move data within NAND devices.

"Beyond G11, we have a strong roadmap, not going to go into great detail on it today, but really focused on new materials densifying the cell architecture, and continuing to focus on that XYZ scaling going forward," said DeBoer. "[…] The current industry direction and Micron’s direction is scaling both by adding layers [and] also by shrinking the cell dimensions."

The company has not disclosed specific architectural details, density targets, or production schedules for its post-G11 generations, though its roadmap suggests that future NAND scaling will increasingly depend on innovations in materials, cell architecture, and peripheral circuitry rather than layer-count increases alone. Meanwhile, since the number of active layers is arguably the easiest way to increase storage density, we would not expect the race towards the highest layer count to slow down substantially in the coming years, especially given strong demand for 3D NAND-based storage.

SK hynix early on Friday announced that it had decided to abandon plans for a potential initial public offering (IPO) of Solidigm, its U.S.-based enterprise SSD subsidiary, citing unfavorable stock market conditions and semiconductor share price trends. At the same time, SK hynix confirmed it plans to build a new fab for Solidigm in the U.S. to address growing demand for enterprise SSDs. Although an IPO could have helped finance a new fab in the U.S., SK hynix claims that its subsidiary’s expansion remains a priority.

Solidigm specializes in high-capacity data center SSDs based on floating gate 3D QLC NAND memory. As AI infrastructure deployments accelerate, demand for high-capacity storage increases, whereas Solidigm's existing manufacturing capacity is barely sufficient to address its projected needs. Consequently, SK hynix believes that Solidigm requires additional production facilities in the U.S., although it has yet to disclose the planned fab's capacity, investment requirements, or construction schedule. Such a facility could also strengthen SK hynix's American manufacturing footprint, which is important, given the current environment and on-shoring trends.

SK hynix had considered multiple options — including direct investment, a pre-IPO funding round, and IPO of Solidigm — to finance capacity expansion. An IPO would have enabled SK hynix to raise capital from outside investors without taking on more debt. Furthermore, it could have revealed the true value of the subsidiary, which SK hynix believes is not properly reflected in its own market capitalization. In addition to financing the expansion, the proceeds could have been used for dividends, share repurchases, and share cancellations.

However, SK hynix says that increased market volatility and the ongoing correction in semiconductor stocks have made an IPO less attractive. As a result, the company believes that current market conditions would prevent Solidigm from achieving a valuation that adequately reflects its growth prospects. Consequently, it has discontinued its review of both pre-IPO financing and an IPO, even though it will continue to evaluate alternative funding mechanisms.

The cancellation of the IPO raises an obvious question: why would SK hynix abandon a financing mechanism that could provide billions of dollars for Solidigm's expansion just as demand for enterprise SSDs is at a record high and set to increase further over the next couple of years? After all, constructing a modern 3D NAND fab requires tens of billions of dollars, and external financing could reduce the burden on SK hynix's balance sheet and preserve capital for other projects (e.g., new capacity elsewhere).

One possible explanation is Solidigm's exceptionally strong profitability. Micron's enterprise storage division recently reported a non-GAAP gross margin of 90%, and given Solidigm's unique position in the market (it controls 21.1% of the enterprise SSD market together with its parent company), its margins may well be higher as it sells exclusive products. If extraordinary margins are sustainable over the next two or three years, its operations could substantially boost SK hynix’s consolidated profitability and generate considerable cash for future investments. Given these circumstances, SK hynix could potentially finance Solidigm's U.S. manufacturing expansion through a combination of internally generated cash and debt even without diluting its ownership. Financing the entire project with cash alone may also be possible, even though such an approach would be less likely given the massive capital requirements of advanced semiconductor production facilities nowadays. In any case, it is natural for SK hynix to prefer retaining full ownership of a highly profitable subsidiary to selling part of it at a valuation it considers inadequate.

The latest board to land on our test bench is a small-form-factor Intel option, the Gigabyte Z890M Aorus Elite Wifi7 Ice. This Micro ATX motherboard costs only $209 on Amazon and packs most of the ATX version's features into a smaller package. The board is optimized for Intel’s Core Ultra 200S Plus processors and pairs best with Micro ATX chassis, but its best feature is its looks. It’s one of the better-looking Micro ATX options, especially if you’re looking for a white-themed build.

The Z890M Aorus Elite offers three M.2 sockets (2x PCIe 5.0) and four SATA ports for storage, 2.5 GbE and Wi-Fi 7 (160 Hz) for networking, and a basic audio solution. The rear IO delivers nine USB ports total, including one 40 Gbps Type-C port (with DisplayPort capability). All of that is typical fare for the form factor. You also get two full-length PCIe slots (one reinforced) and heatsinks covering all M.2 sockets, giving the board a more premium look than its direct competition. It also adds two RGB lighting zones, one by the VRMs on the left and the other under the chipset heatsink, adding glow to your chassis.

Overall, performance in our testing was average, with the board doing well in some tests and slightly below average in others. For gamers, it performed well in our 3DMark tests and in real games. In short, there’s nothing to worry about from a performance standpoint. The Z890M Aorus Elite also supports AI features, including AI Perfdrive, which offers customizable BIOS performance presets for one-click CPU improvements.

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

Specifications of the Gigabyte Z890M Aorus Elite Wifi7 Ice

Inside the Box

The box includes the usual accessories. You get two SATA cables (white), a rubber pad, an extra thermal pad for M.2, an EZ connector for the front panel, and an installation guide. The collection here is sparse, but typical for the price point.

Design and Features of the Aorus Elite WiFi7 Ice

For what tends to be a budget motherboard class (and typically, well, ugly), the Aorus Elite WiFi 7 Ice is an attractive Micro ATX SKU. Where its peers don’t offer complete heatsink coverage on the bottom half, this one does. It also uses a large heatsink for the primary M.2 socket, unlike its peers. It also has integrated RGB lighting (under the VRM and chipset heatsinks) for an extra bit of flair. All in all, it’s one of the better-looking Micro ATX motherboards around.

Zooming in on the top half, starting on the left, we get a better look at the Aorus eagle design, along with the RGB feature. The VRM heatsink below has a lot of mass and surface area, so it does a good job keeping the MOSFETs below running in spec. Above that are the two “UD” (solid pin) 8-pin power connectors (one required) for the processor.

Past the CPU socket, the next thing we run into is the four DRAM slots with the locking mechanism at the top (where there’s room). Gigabyte lists support for up to DDR5-9200(OC), which is plenty fast for the platform. Surprisingly, our fastest kit (DDR5-8800) didn’t play nice with this board, but the DDR5-8200 kit worked fine. As always, for best results, stick to the memory QVL.

Next to the RAM slots on the left are the first two (of six) 4-pin fan headers. Each header supports PWM and DC-controlled devices. Each header supports up to 2A/24W output, which is plenty, especially for a smaller chassis with fewer fans. Gigabyte Control Center (GCC) and the BIOS control the fans via the Smart Fan 6 applet.

Above the DRAM slots is the Q-LED feature. Four LEDs, CPU/Boot/VGA/RAM, light up during POST. If a failure occurs during that time, the offending RGB stays lit, giving you a general idea of where the problem may be. Next to it, in the upper-right corner, are three simple buttons: power, reset, and Q-Flash.

Down the right edge, you'll find the first (of three) 3-pin ARGB headers. The other two are along the bottom edge. GCC and the RGB Fusion app inside control these headers and the integrated lighting, offering users plenty of canned LED effects and customization. Below that are the 24-pin ATX connector to power the board, another 4-pin fan header, the front-panel USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) connector, and a 19-pin front-panel USB 3.2 Gen1 (5 Gbps) header. Between those is a front-panel HDMI output, making it easy to add secondary displays for monitoring or further chassis customization.

Power delivery on the Z890M Aorus Elite WiFi7 Ice is capable, but it doesn’t quite reach the level of "robust." The board has 15 phases, 12 of which are dedicated to Vcore. Power comes from the dual 8-pin EPS connectors and is controlled by the OnSemiconductor NCP81537 8-phase controller (teamed configuration). From there, power moves on to the OnSemi NCP302155 60A DrMOS MOSFETs and then to your processor. The 720A available isn’t a lot, but it can handle the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus, and even the Core Ultra 9 285K — though I’m not sure how hard I’d push it overclocking the 285K or 270K Plus. Just be sure to keep air flowing through your chassis, as these components will get warm under sustained heavy use.

On the bottom half of the board, starting on the left edge, we spy the audio solution. The Z890M uses the budget Realtek ALC897 codec, plus a few dedicated audio capacitors (yellow and black). While one of its direct competitors has a better one, this codec is fine for most users, and there's no reason to avoid it unless you're making music with the board or consider yourself a PC-focused audiophile.

In the middle of the board are two full-length PCIe slots. The primary slot, using Gigabyte’s PCIe UD Slot X reinforcement) connects through the CPU and runs at PCIe 5.0 x16 speeds (no bifurcation, FYI). The second slot at the bottom sources its bandwidth through the chipset and runs up to PCIe 4.0 x4. There’s plenty of bandwidth for expansion; just make sure your graphics card doesn’t cover the second slot if you need to use it.

Between and above the PCIe slots are three M.2 sockets. The top socket, under the beefy EZ-Latch heatsink (made good contact, note), connects through the CPU and is the main PCIe 5.0 x4 (128 Gbps) M.2 socket. Under the plate-style heatsink (also using EZ-Latch along with EZ-Click to secure the M.2 without screws) are two more M.2 sockets. Both sockets connect via the chipset, support 80mm devices, and run up to PCIe 4.0 x4 speeds. The bottom socket supports up to 110mm modules, while the middle socket supports the more familiar 80mm. If you need the additional speed or redundancy RAID offers, the board supports RAID0/1/5/10 modes for NVMe SSDs.

We've also captured several images of the ICs that make this motherboard work, including Realtek Ethernet and audio, ASMedia (for the front HDMI), and OnSemiconductor MOSFETs/PWM controller.

Moving right, past the chipset heatsink and the other RGB lighting element, we spot a couple of Thunderbolt headers and four SATA ports (supporting RAID0/1/5/10 modes). At the bottom of the board is a slew of headers, offering the typical connectivity in this area, with nothing worth calling out.

Below, we’ve listed all the connections across the bottom of the board.

• Front panel audio
• (2) 4-pin RGB header
• 3-pin ARGB header
• (2) USB 2.0 (480 Mbps) headers
• (2) 4-pin system fan headers
• SPI TPM header
• 2-pin reset jumper
• 2-pin Clear CMOS jumper
• Front panel header

The rear IO area is pretty sparse compared to high-end boards, but it uses some venting to help keep the VRMs running cooler. On the left (in white) are four USB 2.0 ports, followed by four USB 3.2 Gen 1 (5 Gbps) ports in blue. Below those is the DisplayPort (v2.1) output. Next to the blue USB ports is your sole Type-C port. In this case, it's USB4 (not Thunderbolt 4) at 40 Gbps and supports DisplayPort output as well. To the right, you'll find the 2.5 GbE port and, below that in red, the only USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) Type-A port. Finally, on the right, are the quick-connect Wi-Fi 7 (160 Hz) connectors and audio stack: dual 3.5mm jacks for mic and line-out, plus an SPDIF optical output.

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Firmware

Gigabyte’s updated “UC BIOS 2.0” defaults to Easy Mode. It’s logically laid out and displays a wealth of system information, including processor, RAM, fan speeds, and several selectable options such as XMP profiles, RAM tweaks, Re-Size BAR support, Smart Fan 6 access, and more. The Aorus Elite WiFi7 Ice uses a white background with the ‘Aorus orange’ accents and black text, creating a high-contrast, easy-to-read screen similar to the Aorus Infinity, but with a white background instead of Aorus branding. The BIOS also offers different themes in EZ mode via a dropdown if you want to change it.

All headings still appear across the top in advanced mode, but they are now larger ‘buttons’ and easy to select with a mouse. The highlight bar (where you are on the page) is a light blue here and easy to see. Every option you need and want is at your fingertips, and you don’t have to drill down several layers to reach the most commonly used functions – especially if you populate your selections in the Favorites section.

Software

Gigabyte Control Center (GCC) is a one-stop solution for controlling various functions, including RGB and Fan control, hardware monitoring, and overclocking. It also helps you find, download, and install driver updates for your system. It’s a simple application that does its job. It’s also a much cleaner tool than the previous App Center. It earns our approval for the breadth of functionality it offers users. There’s also the curiously named AI Snatch to help with overclocking.

Test System / Comparison Products

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

TEST SYSTEM COMPONENTS:

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

Benchmark Settings

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Benchmark Results

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

Synthetic Benchmarks and Real World Applications

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

Performance on the Aorus Elite was around the average among the tested boards. Some benchmarks were above average, while others were slightly below—nothing to worry about so far.

3D Games and 3DMark

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

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

As we’ve seen for a while now, the 3DMark tests don’t show much separation from worst to first, and we see that again across our varied datasets. 3DMark scores were fine; in fact, they were the highest so far in these tight results, while gaming results were average overall. Not only does it do work, but as expected, the board also plays games just fine.

Overclocking

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

You can extract even more performance from these processors by manually adjusting settings or using the fancy AI overclocking that board partners have been touting. Results will vary and depend on the CPU's cooling and quality. In other words, your mileage may vary. With that in mind, we’re not overclocking the CPU for these review articles. However, we'll test our different memory kits to ensure they meet the specifications.

Memory testing went OK, with the board surviving a 30-minute stress test using the DDR5-7600 and DDR5-8200 kits without issue. That said, it struggled with the DDR5-8800 kit and failed after about 5 minutes. If you really want to push memory speeds, stick to the QVL list for your best chance of reaching higher speeds.

Power Consumption / VRM Temperatures

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

Stress testing with our flagship-class 270K Plus and the Team Group DDR5-7600 kit at stock yielded a peak of only 330W at the wall, tying our lowest result so far. The board also sipped power at idle, dropping to around 56W, the lowest result we’ve recorded for the platform. This board sips power compared to some others.

VRM temperatures ran warm, but are not a concern. Throughout the 30-minute test, the system (excluding the monitor) averaged 232W, and our sensors on the back of the board, directly under the MOSFETs, recorded temperatures peaking at just under 60 degrees Celsius, while HWInfo and the internal sensor showed similar peaks at about 60 degrees Celsius. That value is well within specification for the MOSFETs doing all the work below. We’re confident that the power delivery can handle whatever you're likely to throw at it. Chances are, the CPU temperature will limit you before the board does, but keep airflow good to keep temperatures down.

Bottom Line

Gigabyte’s Z890M Aorus Elite WiFi7 Ice is a solid all-around motherboard for the Micro ATX form factor and smaller builds. Its icy-white aesthetic and ‘full coverage’ of heatsinks are rare for this class of board and give it a premium vibe compared to its peers. Hardware-wise, it includes most of what you’d expect from the Z890 platform, though I’d like to see another USB4 port on the rear IO, and perhaps a better audio codec. Still, this is one of the better-looking and better-equipped of the Z890M Micro ATX options.

As for the competition, the Asus Prime Z890M-Plus ($216.99) has more expansion slots (4), additional “AI” features, and SATA ports (6), but fewer rear USB ports, and it just doesn’t give off the same premium vibes as the Gigabyte Z890M. ASRock’s Z890M Riptide Wifi ($252) costs quite a bit more than the others and offers more robust power delivery (like the Asus) and decent looks, but its specs are otherwise similar. Aesthetically, the ASRock is also less pleasing than the Gigabyte, and it has only one PCIe slot (so no room for expansion if needed). MSI has the Pro B860M-A WiFi ($158), which uses a lesser mainstream chipset, offers 5 GbE (and slower 6E Wi-Fi), and is otherwise comparable to the Asus with its extra PCIe slots. Oh, and it doesn't look great.

Overall, the Z890M Aorus Elite WiFi7 Ice is one of the better-looking Micro ATX offerings and nicely priced, earning a spot on our best motherboards list (for Intel Micro ATX). The icy-white aesthetic and minimal PCB visibility will turn heads in a white case. Hardware-wise, it has the specs you expect for this class of board. If you’re in the market for a Micro ATX Intel board, the Z890M Aorus Elite Wi-Fi 7 Ice should be your first stop, especially if you want to show off your paired white components.

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If you've been thinking about making the transition from an IPS monitor to an OLED display to upgrade your gaming setup, today's deal is a great way to pick up a new QD-OLED screen for a great price. Save $50 at Best Buy on Acer's 27-inch Predator XB27OU QD-OLED gaming monitor, now only $329.99, a great price for onboarding the latest technology into your gaming setup. Experience gorgeous inky blacks and eye-popping colors with the amazing contrast offered by QD-OLED displays, perfect for accentuating your favorite games.

● Grab this Monitor deal at Best Buy

The Acer Predator XB27OU has a max resolution of 2,560 x 1,440 pixels; it's a QHD (2K) display that's superb for a mid-range gaming PC where the graphics card shouldn't struggle too much to meet the frame rate and resolution requirements. It has a very fast 240Hz refresh rate for seamless gaming, and thanks to the OLED tech, the gray-to-gray response time is a staggeringly low 0.03ms, giving your games very smooth motion and avoiding ghosting compared to slower monitors. This monitor also fully supports AMD's FreeSync Premium tech, so you can match the refresh rate of the monitor to the frame rate of your games to eliminate screen tearing completely, for a much better gaming experience.

Let's not forget about the other great aspect of QD-OLED displays - the color representation. The Acer Predator XB27OU sports an impressive 99% DCI-P3 color gamut, a Delta E<2 accuracy, and even supports HDR10, a 10-bit color solution that improves contrast, color depth, and brightness compared to standard dynamic range.

You can connect your gaming PC and even a couple of game consoles thanks to the inclusion of two HDMI 2.1 ports and a DisplayPort 1.4 port. Plenty of connections for the ultimate gaming battlestation.

Amazon will no longer build four new data centers on the site of the George Washington University's campus in Loudoun County, just outside of D.C., and will instead repurpose the majority of the 122-acre space for mixed-use and residential development following significant pushback from the local community. It will also donate 25 acres of the property to Loudoun County to be used for a community arts center and new recreational facility. On top of all that, it'll even give $5 million to the county's fund for housing, reports The Washington Post.

That's quite the turnaround compared to plans to build in a county that is already dubbed "Data Center Alley" because it has the largest concentration of data centers on the planet. But residents' concerns about the noise generated by such data centers and the incredible amount of power that they require to function have seen the county's approach to new data center buildouts change of late. Amazon first submitted its proposal to build the new facilities in July, and Loudoun County Board of Supervisors Chair Phyllis J. Randall and Amazon met in September, where it was put to the company that it may be better to find an alternative use for the land.

Josh Weissman, Amazon’s vice president in charge of data center development, said the company had jumped at the chance to purchase the former university campus when the opportunity arose, but added that the company considered the county’s “pointed concerns about data center development at this particular site.” Weissman added that “While we see the property’s legal development potential differently than the County does, we concluded that the best outcome for all is to come together on a shared vision for this campus rather than engage in costly litigation.”

The building of new data centers has always been a necessity given our growing use of cloud-based services and storage systems. But the recent boom in AI use has seen demand for additional, and larger, facilities ratcheted up to new levels. But with that demand comes opposition, with local communities wary of the impact these mammoth facilities can have on the areas in which they live, including spikes in the price of electricity. Officials have begun taking steps to try to grease the wheels of data center construction. Just days before this news broke, President Donald Trump called for data center builders and AI hyperscalers to pay local communities a dividend amid energy-related price increases. In a social media post, Trump went on to say that data centers would be required not only to make their own electricity but also to give or sell excess energy back to the local community. Water shortages and deforestation have also become key issues affecting the communities in which data centers are being placed.

Back in Loudoun County, officials pointed to what could be achieved when choosing dialog over confrontation. “By choosing dialogue over reflexive disagreement, Loudoun County and Amazon created an opportunity for the County,” Randall reportedly said via statement. “This agreement provides new places for our Loudoun residents to gather, create, and play. And, most importantly to me, we will provide more attainable homes for working families.”

Export controls have kept ASML's most advanced EUV lithography machines out of China. Instead, the country's chipmaking industry has relied on less-capable deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography machines. By using multiple exposures on critical chip layers, these older machines are still capable of producing performant silicon. However, as multiple patterns are applied there are more chances for defects, longer manufacturing times, and higher bills. We spoke to experts like Chris Mack, co-founder and CTO of semiconductor firm Fractilia, to find out how much further DUV can go.

For years, extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography has been seen as China’s biggest choke point in the country’s attempts to build cutting-edge chips. The machines, made exclusively by Dutch manufacturer ASML, use 13.5nm-wavelength light to print some of the most intricate features found on modern processors. Sales of ASML’s EUV systems are subject to export restrictions, forcing Chinese manufacturers to squeeze ever more out of older deep ultraviolet, or DUV, lithography instead. The EUV gap alone between China and the West is at least half a decade, according to some analysts.

But even without access to EUV machines, China has gotten surprisingly far in recreating what it offers through existing technology.

Teardowns of Huawei’s Mate 60 Pro in 2023 found the phone’s Kirin 9000S processor had been made by SMIC using a second-generation 7nm-class manufacturing process without EUV. More recently, analysis of Huawei’s Kirin 9030 found SMIC had pushed its DUV-based process closer still to the density associated with 5nm manufacturing – although it continued to lag behind the leading processes used by TSMC and Samsung.

Multiple patterning

The trick is multiple patterning. Rather than trying to print an overly intricate chip layer in a single pass, Chinese manufacturers are dividing up the complex design into several simpler patterns. Repeat the process enough times and you can etch up something approximating the proper layer you intended.

The trick works. But according to lithography expert Chris Mack, co-founder and CTO of Fractilia, asking whether a chip can be made without EUV overlooks the trade-offs manufacturers make in order to do it.

“When this transition first began, what everyone in the industry said as conventional wisdom is that cost-wise, three exposures on a 193 immersion tool cost about the same as one exposure on an EUV tool,” Mack said in an interview with Tom’s Hardware Premium. “At three, it was about even,” Mack explained. “But as soon as you hit four masks – 193 masks being replaced by one EUV mask – then EUV became more cost-effective.”

It’s also likely to produce a higher quality product with fewer defects. Each time a wafer is patterned, that new pattern has to line up perfectly with everything that’s already been etched beneath it. The more individual exposures needed to produce a single layer, the more opportunities there are for things to go wrong. “If you have, say, four 193 masks, you've got all those different overlays, and you've got all these different process variations that start to accumulate,” Mack said.

Chip designers can try and avoid that by leaving more space around features so the finished processor can actually be manufactured reliably. But that means the chip ends up bigger – and bigger chips become expensive very quickly. Making each die larger means fewer fit on every wafer, and wafers cost a lot of money – tens of thousands of dollars each.

“You don't sell wafers, you sell die,” Mack said. “The question is: how many die can I fit onto that wafer, and how many of those die yield, and therefore how many chips can I sell per wafer?”

The efficiency gap

There is some evidence of what that efficiency gap can look like in practice – albeit in memory rather than logic chips. In a June report, Morgan Stanley estimated that Chinese DRAM manufacturer CXMT was producing only around one-third as many bits per wafer as Western competitors. The analysts believed the older process node only accounted for around a third of that shortfall, but said access to lithography was a “hard ceiling” on Chinese memory development. “For advanced logic chips, in theory there could be other innovations to engineer around EUV, but they are not likely to be very efficient and effective,” said Douglas Fuller, a researcher at Copenhagen Business School, in comments to Tom’s Hardware Premium.

It is also why claims that China has reached a particular semiconductor process “node” need to be treated with caution. “If somebody says it's X node – the seven nanometer node, the five nanometer node, the three nanometer node – these words almost have no meaning,” Mack said.

That can be seen in SMIC’s latest chips. Reporting suggests its N+3 process represents meaningful progress towards 5nm-class manufacturing – but the actual measurements show it remains significantly less scaled than established 5nm processes from Samsung and TSMC. That doesn’t mean DUV has reached the end of its useful exploitation.

Stretching DUV's efficacy

Micron is an example of how far DUV can be stretched, producing competitive DRAM chips using DUV, multiple patterning and tight process control. Its 1-alpha generation of chips was developed without EUV. “They pushed 193 farther than any of the other memory makers did,” Mack said. “They were able to make very competitive chips with 100% 193 compared to Samsung and Hynix making them with many layers of EUV.”

Morgan Stanley believes CXMT’s planned move to 1-alpha DRAM – which it wants to use for HBM3e – is achievable without access to EUV, citing Micron as evidence. Indeed, “by the end of the decade, advanced packaging will allow firms to use DUV to produce the latest generations of DRAM,” reckons Fuller.

Micron also designed its products around the manufacturing technology available to it, rather than simply trying to recreate an EUV process on older equipment – something which could be a useful lesson for Chinese manufacturers. “If the entire ecosystem of 193 immersion were available to China,” Mack explained, “then they could probably push a long way with 193 multiple patterning, especially if they optimise designs for the fact that they're going to be using that.”

But Micron was making memory, whose highly repetitive structures make close co-ordination between chip design and manufacturing easier than it is for the much more complicated logic processors found in phones and computers.

“Memory is a lot easier than logic,” Mack said.

And even Micron eventually concluded that EUV was worth using. Its newer 1-gamma DRAM process uses EUV lithography, with Micron saying the technology helps it achieve more than 30% greater bit density per wafer than its preceding 1-beta generation.

EUV is hardly a magic wand, either. Mack points to stochastic effects – tiny random variations caused by the small number of photons involved in an exposure – which mean manufacturers can improve pattern control by increasing the EUV exposure dose. But it also pushes the cost back up quickly.

Because of that, Mack believes there is ultimately a limit to how far multiple patterning can economically substitute for EUV. “I would be hard pressed to really believe that a three nanometer or a two nanometer node is going to be economically viable without EUV,” he said.

That doesn’t mean Chinese chipmakers simply hit a technological wall and stop. They can keep pushing DUV while accepting larger dies, poorer yields, longer manufacturing times – or some combination of all three.

They can also throw capacity and money at part of the problem. Morgan Stanley assumes CXMT remains stuck on its 1-alpha process without EUV, yet still increases its share of global DRAM bit supply from 14% in 2026 to 16% in 2028 simply by building more greenfield capacity. The bank also expects China’s AI chip self-sufficiency to rise from 42% in 2025 to 70% by 2030 through new advanced-node capacity, improving yields and heavy state support – while EUV, HBM and advanced software leave a persistent gap. And so without EUV, the experts reckon China can only get partway to bridging the gap with the West. ““I would be hard pressed,” said Mack, “to really believe that a three nanometer or a two nanometer node is going to be economically viable without EUV.”

Bambu Lab’s long-anticipated tool changer will launch on November 3rd. Dubbed the H3C, the 3D printer has 9 tools held by a Vortex-like rack mounted on the front of the chamber. Tool changers are the wave of the future, as they can switch colors faster and with less waste than Bambu Lab’s current AMS system.

Unfortunately, most of the information about the new 3D printer is shrouded in secrecy, but there are plenty of details that are already public knowledge. Bambu Lab is quite proud of this latest engineering feat, which you can see in the video below, and I’ll admit, I’m pretty impressed, too.

Here’s what we can confirm about the H3C: It is a member of the H-line of flagship printers, which includes the H2S, H2D, and H2C. As you can imagine, it is most similar to its namesake, the H2C, which is a 7-tool induction-heated “nozzle swapper” with a motorized Vortex rack to hold tools not in use. The H2C is one of the larger Bambu Lab machines, with a 330 x 320 x 325mm build volume.

The 11-second-long teaser video shows the tool rack dropping down, along with a satisfying metallic snick. As you might imagine, tool heads that are stored above the build plate are not going to get in your way when you’re watching that first layer go down. This is an annoying problem with the Bondtech INDX system, which we reviewed paired up with a Prusa CORE One, which forces you to peer through the tool rack to see what's going on inside the printer. Visibility on the Bambu H3C is probably better.

If you type “H3C leak” on YouTube, you can find several YouTubers who do not have machines under review dissecting the clues sprinkled around the internet. One “AI-enhanced” image showed 10 spools, which I can now finally confirm is completely wrong. Today’s video clearly shows only nine colorful Bowden tools arching over the top of the printer. We’re not at liberty to say what’s holding the spools, but I think it’s safe to acknowledge that it's a very Bambu sort of system.

The H2 line has been touted as a home manufacturing hub, so you might wonder if the H3C is the same? Perhaps it is. I had an opportunity to talk to Dr. Tao at Formnext last year when the H2C was fresh, and he was very interested in creating multitasking machines that could do more than just 3D print.

Sadly, not everyone was impressed with adding a laser to the H2D, but since the Bambu Lab A2L has an optional blade cutting and embossing tool, we can safely assume that the notion of multitasking is alive and well. I once programmed an Ender 3 to pick up Sharpie markers, so just think about the things a much more sophisticated machine with a team of sharp engineers could program.

I can’t wait to tell you more about the H3C. There are definitely a couple of surprising things about this printer that are going to come out of left field. We’ll let it all out on November 3rd.

Lava, an Israeli security firm, says that it has been able to identify 32 Nvidia Blackwell Ultra B300 chips within the network of China Telecom, a state-owned company that provides telecommunications services within the country. These same chips have already been barred from export by U.S. export controls, a report by The Information notes, which begs the question of how they have turned up in a Chinese data center. Such chips can only be sold to whitelisted buyers who agree not to export them to sanctioned parties, including those in China.

However, banning companies from buying Nvidia's high-performance GPUs and AI data center chips hasn't always worked. In 2025, it was reported that Chinese companies smuggled $1 billion worth of Nvidia AI chips into the country in three months. At the time, the B200 chips were the most sought-after, but some distributors were already gearing up to sell B300-series chips when they became available.

While the latest finding shows that the proliferation of export-controlled chips into China continues to be an issue, Nvidia has downplayed the report but didn't deny the findings. "Governments, researchers, and media have all found insignificant diversion of controlled US products, less than one half of one percent in recent court cases — a drop in the bucket compared to the ocean of domestic compute China already has," an Nvidia spokesperson told Tom's Hardware. "With tens of millions of GPUs in service in approved countries, this report again demonstrates that smuggling is a nonfactor, blocked by governments on both sides of the globe."

It's unknown how B300 chips found their way into China Telecom's server racks, nor can Lava confirm exactly where within the company's network they are located. But they are there, with Lava identifying them via Nvidia's own DCGM Exporter tool. The software can be installed by data center operators and is used to monitor server health and performance, and while designed for internal use, it can oftentimes be accessed beyond the data center's network. Oddly, it doesn't always require password authentication, either. Nvidia previously confirmed it was working on a tool that would allow its chips to be located, but it is yet to be released.

It's easy to see why Chinese firms are keen to get their hands on the Blackwell Ultra B300. Announced in March of last year, the data center GPU is one of the most powerful on the planet, offering huge performance gains with 50% more memory and FP4 compute than the previous-generation B200. At the time, Nvidia touted that the chip was "built for the age of reasoning," while name-checking more sophisticated AI LLMs like DeepSeek R1. At the time of its announcement, the B300 was expected to ship by the end of 2025, and it didn't take long for it to become hot property. In August 2026, nine people were indicted in Taiwan over the illegal export of B300 GPUs to China. This came just days after Supermicro confirmed that it had fired several employees following an investigation into smuggling. The complicated smuggling process included the use of a Taiwanese server trading firm called Flying Tiget Tech — a firm with whitelisted status for GPU purchases.

Nvidia's chips have proven so vital to AI data centers that demand for even its older silicon has caused skyrocketing prices. The company's A100 servers have tripled in price, despite being five years old, and can cost up to $82.,000. The ongoing crackdown on Nvidia chip smuggling has even seen some resort to retooling gaming GPUs to run AI workloads where possible.

The FCC recently imposed a new rule allowing it to ban devices based on the internal chips instead of basing bans on individual products or brands, thus closing the loophole of rebranded products with parts from Chinese manufacturers on US export restriction lists. Using this new rule, the FCC has banned two devices from being sold and marketed in the US for the first time: a dashboard camera and a wireless video transmitter. As reported by The Verge, these devices were banned due to the HiSilicon Smart Vision SoC (System on a Chip) they contain, which features built-in detection algorithms for faces. HiSilicon is a subsidiary of Huawei, and the firm and its subsidiaries are on the FCC’s Covered List of entities that pose a risk to US national security.

The Hi3516CV610 UHD Smart Vision is an SoC for surveillance and camera products. The SoC is meant to be used for things like vehicle dashcams and wireless CCTV systems; fully equipped with WiFi, Ethernet, video encoding chips, an Arm Cortex-A7, and an NPU (Neural Processing Unit) for AI features. The NPU is what the FCC is concerned about, explaining that it is a device that contains logic-bearing “smart” components produced by entities on the Covered List.

On the SoC’s data sheet, the Intelligent Video Engine (IVE) uses the NPU that runs a built-in dedicated multimodal large model and transformer feature acceleration. The transformer feature acceleration allows the AI model to understand the relationship between objects from one video frame to another, keeping “attention” between related objects: pets, faces, human figures, and parcels, as the data sheet advertises. For consumers, this potentially means the AI in a surveillance camera can understand whether it is your pet that is escaping, or an unknown person is stealing your parcel after understanding that it was placed by a courier worker.

However, the FCC believes the logic-bearing AI in the SoC can do something much more nefarious, surveying US citizens and logging faces for foreign surveillance. Huawei already had a previous AI chip scandal, using shell companies to deceive TSMC into producing AI chips for them, going against the US’ request for TSMC to halt supplies to a list of Chinese customers; among other Huawei scandals leading to other product bans in the US.

Deepseek just upgraded its V4.1 Flash open-weight model to revision 1017. What looks like a mere point revision may actually be a significant step forward in model efficiency. On the product page, Deepseek uses the slogan "wish-driven programming made real," a likely reference to the colloquial "vibe coding," implying the model is a good fit for open-ended tasks with broad descriptions. However, while the model is indeed cheap and scores well, it can be hallucination-prone.

LLMs are roughly divided into two categories: closed commercial efforts from frontier labs, whose models are expensive to run but deliver excellent results, and Chinese open-weight competitors that broadly exchange reliability for a much cheaper running cost, particularly for long-running agentic tasks.

Deepseek V4.1 Flash (DSF) is a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model with 552B total parameters, 16B of which are active during runs. The model is multimodal, accepts both text and images as inputs, and its context window length measures the now-standard 1 million tokens.

According to Deepseek's internal benchmarks, the model slots in neatly between GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Opus 5, even beating Anthropic's LLM in task tests. That's already a strong showing, but this latest revision of DSF shines in the performance-per-task base and token efficiency. The upgrade from V4 Flash to V4.1 Flash significantly slashed hardware requirements, with V4.1 using only one-quarter of the HBM and one-eighth of SSD storage for its KV cache compared to its predecessor, spending only 890 bytes per token entry.

The company illustrates the point with a cost-per-task graph based on DeepSWE's dataset from September 2, adding its own data points for both DSF and DSF-1017. Both variants cluster in the desirable top-left area, and even low-effort runs of DSF-1017 offer a task completion rate in the ballpark of "max" settings for pricey competitors. It's worth noting that DeepSWE is only one of many benchmarks, but this is nonetheless an impressive result.

Even at Deepseek's own pricing (remember, this is an open-weight model you can run anywhere), the price at off-peak times per million tokens is just $0.15 for input and $0.6 for output. On cache hits, the input token cost drops to a mere $0.003. It's worth keeping in mind that third-party providers have undercut Deepseek API in the past, so those figures could go lower if you shop around inference providers. Deepseek also offers search functionality at $0.75 per 1,000 queries, an amount that undercuts competitors, with the closest one being Parallel at $1.

DeepSWE isn't the only benchmark around, either. Artificial Analysis ranks DSF-1017 (max) as only #2 on its intelligence index within the large open-weight class, with a score of 45. For reference, the most seemingly intelligent model, Claude Opus 5.5 (max with fallback), rings in at 58. It's one of the fastest models in its category, too, and its cost-per-task is edged out only by Xiaomi's MiMo V2.6-Pro.

This all sounds too good to be true, but everyone knows the adage of "fast, cheap, and reliable, pick two." So what's the catch? In one word: hallucination. Just because a model is smart doesn't mean it's reliable. Broadly speaking, users prefer models that don't answer when they lack supporting facts, and DSF-1017 doesn't seem very good at knowing what it doesn't know.

Artificial Analysis' Omniscience benchmark is quite clear on this matter, ranking the model among the lowest. It answered questions correctly 43% of the time, which is among the best for open-weight models, but inferior to the proprietary competition. That would be perfectly acceptable if it skipped answers without a foundation, but it hallucinated 67% of non-answers.

The benchmark's main index grants points for good answers and deducts them for wrong ones, and non-answers don't count. DSF-1017 gets 5 points, compared to Kimi K3-max's 20, with the frontier models coming in at 42+. Ultimately, this means DFS-1017 is by no means incompetent — much the opposite —but one should be careful about which tasks to assign to the model.

Tasks with verifiable outputs like programming, OCR with review, and format conversions will be fine, as the agent can run verification steps against its work and try again. However, open-ended research, looking up facts, and interpreting or drafting highly precise documents are tasks better suited to a frontier model — or, you know, a human — as hallucinations likely won't be properly reined in and results won't be very trustworthy.

"Fast and loose" seems to be a forming trend for highly competent open-weight models, too. Several months ago, when Kimi K3 was released, everyone raved about how effective and cheap it was, and how it proposed to offer frontier-level intelligence for a fraction of the price. My personal experience with Kimi was short-lived, as even short but precise fact look-ups came up with hallucinated information, and Artificial Analysis' data seems to back this observation up.

Nevertheless, open-weight models remain important both to make AI agents more accessible in absolute dollar terms and potentially as a tool to drive down the cost of intelligence when facing down potential price rises from frontier labs.

The UK government has outlined a set of plans for new powers and penalties to help it protect UK undersea cables during national security emergencies, the BBC reports. It follows reports that Russia is using commercial fishing trawlers to map undersea cables, with 500 incidents of Russian boats loitering above cables in the last four and a half years.

In a policy paper shared this week, the British government noted that the UK is "highly dependent" on undersea infrastructure owned by private sector companies. While the report notes that connectivity is "resilient," with "faults rarely causing noticeable disruption to data or energy availability," it's still "vulnerable to damage from accidents and potential sabotage."

As a result, the UK is consulting on changes to legislation to try and address these risks, especially as the "threats to the homeland from state actors are increasing" and "critical national infrastructure, including undersea cables and pipelines... continue to be a target."

The changes proposed include new criminal offenses. These include causing a security compromise to critical undersea infrastructure, capturing both physical and non-physical interference, including remote electronic interference, cyber activity and certain preparatory conduct directed at compromising infrastructure. There would also be further offenses linked to obstructing repairs and failing to preserve evidence, when requested.

With these new offenses, the UK government is threatening penalties on a three-tier scale. Up to 14 years' imprisonment is proposed for intentional conduct, 10 years for reckless conduct, and two years for grossly negligent conduct, along with potentially unlimited fines. It's also considering an even higher maximum penalty for more serious cases, and whether it'll apply solely within the UK's national waters or further afield.

The proposals also include new powers for government ministers. In a national emergency, UK ministers would gain powers that would allow them to order telecom companies to remove or disable services. Ministers would also be able to compel telecom companies to grant officials access to sensitive sites, including cable landing stations.

These proposals form a White Paper, the name for an official UK government policy paper for new legislation, with interested parties able to respond by online questionnaire until January 14, 2027.

UK relations with Russia, like much of the western world, have deteriorated since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, although other incidents, such as the Salisbury Novichok poisonings in 2018, have formed the backdrop of steadily worsening relations between the two countries.

Meanwhile, Russia has made several efforts to map and plan attacks against undersea cables in Europe. In September, reports suggested that NATO allies had foiled a Russian training exercise using a "secret weapon" against undersea cables in Norway. Meanwhile, back in January, Royal Navy attack helicopters were deployed to chase off a Russian ship loitering less than a mile from five undersea cables in UK waters, just one of the 500 incidents reported this week that have included Russian ships.

A new report claims that major U.S. banks have now detected AI agents accessing customer accounts, and that some are even attempting to make transactions. Axios reports that it’s hard to differentiate between an actual human and an unauthorized bot, which is why some institutions, including Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, JPMorgan, and Wells Fargo, are blocking the technology and changing their terms of service to account for this.

While an AI agent or AI assistant can access an account with a user’s permission and through the use of their login credentials, this often goes against bank policy that requires users to maintain control of their account and not share it with anyone else. One of the fears that executives have is when an AI agent with login access takes unauthorized steps, like spending money or moving funds around without the explicit instructions of the account owner. There have even been situations where an AI agent called the bank directly and took actions independent of direct user command. Even though it wasn’t explicitly told to do that transaction, it considered it a crucial step to accomplish the task assigned to it.

One hypothetical example of this is when a user tells an AI agent to purchase an item but gives it a credit card with no available limit. The AI agent could then have accessed the user’s bank account to move some funds from whatever account it sees that has available funds to then effect the transaction, even if the user did not explicitly tell them that they could use the money in that said account. This is just one example where an AI agent’s transaction could go wrong, which is why several U.S. banks are now restricting third-party AI agents from accessing their platforms. Nevertheless, they still recognize that their customers might want to use tools like AI agents to monitor their finances. This is why some institutions have given or are moving towards read-only access for AI agents, which is something that they’ve been doing for years already.

The move comes against a background of burgeoning AI agent use, coupled with the risk that agents can and often do act beyond their remit, making mistakes or performing tasks without instruction, often with disastrous results. An unsupervised AI agent recently deleted a TV show's entire edit weeks before broadcast, forcing the program off air. AI agents are notorious for deleting databases and directories, making it a small leap to imagine they cause some havoc with unfettered access to a bank account.

Financial institutions have deep experience when it comes to employing new technology while ensuring that their critical infrastructure remains safe — something that AI labs lack, according to a former OpenAI safety employee. Despite that, banks are still concerned about the speed at which AI technology is developing, fearing that the technology’s capabilities might outrun their ability to control it, which is why they’re preparing for worst-case scenarios and even planning for “day after” scenarios after a catastrophic AI event.

A Hacker News user who shared news about the recent PHP vulnerabilities revealed by ChatGPT Sol before an embargo, which they claimed to be unaware of, has taken to the platform to apologize for the post. According to petecooper, they shared the CVEs because they wanted to alert others who follow the four-week PHP release cycle about the importance and urgency of the matter, but they weren’t aware of the news blackout that went with the two identified vulnerabilities.

The user said they have "No connection or affiliation to any of the organisations involved." Noting, "I am a self-employed consultant for my day job, and a solo founder of a mental health non-profit on the side." Petecooper's original post about the vulnerability was among the first to break the NDA, though they claim they were unaware.

“I posted here about the then-upcoming PHP RCEs related to CVE-2026-109618 & CVE-2026-109619. I appreciate this has had considerable knock-on effects with the schedule for co-ordinated disclosure, and created additional workload. I am truly sorry. I take full responsibility for my actions,” petecooper wrote on the platform. “It was not remotely my intention to cause any of the subsequent side effects. At the time of posting, I didn’t know about any embargo. My contact had told me there was no embargo, and her contact had told her the same thing.”

CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 are two critical vulnerabilities, both scored at 9.2. It seemed that the PHP Foundation planned for a controlled public release, allowing affected websites and applications to be patched before the vulnerabilities became widely known. Unfortunately, it seemed that some recipients of the warning failed to share the embargo that came alongside the CVEs, spreading the news earlier than expected.

It should be noted that petecooper apparently wasn’t the only one who leaked the news early. Multiple leaks had already been circulating on social media and other platforms, which forced the PHP Foundation to move its announcement up by one day. Despite that, the organization mentioned that Chainguard broke the embargo by more than six hours. Dan Lorenc, the co-founder and CEO of Chainguard, defended the move on LinkedIn, saying that he made the call after talking to several other researchers and immediately notified the group after releasing the fix publicly, and not just his customers.

The vulnerabilities tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 were bugs in the PHP runtime itself that were discovered using AI tools, not attacks by rogue AI. Still, the abilities of this technology could make it easier for both security researchers and bad actors to find vulnerabilities that could have been lurking in widely used code for years, if not decades. This makes it a race to find and deploy a fix before they can be exploited.

CyberCartel, a hacking group with a long history of targeting Latin American businesses, has been using AI agents, including SpaceX's Grok and Anthropic's Claude, to automate attacks on financial institutions such as banks and mobile payment apps. Passwords and customer data have been stolen, while individuals' bank accounts have also been accessed with little input from criminals in the latest example of criminals turning to AI-powered cyberattacks. That research comes from a cybersecurity startup called Straiker, with its findings shared by The Information.

While CyberCartel has been an active threat since at least 2012, its new leveraging of the power of AI has leveled up its attacks in recent months. Now, the research shows that the group can attack more businesses at a speed previously not possible when using human-powered hacks. Straiker shared its research with both SpaceX and Anthropic, and both firms are working to lock CyberCartel out of their services. The latter has already been able to block access to Claude. Chinese lab Moonshot AI's agent has also been used by the hacking group, but Straiker is still trying to get in touch with the company.

While it's true that AI models normally have protections in place to prevent them from being used to carry out cyberattacks, they've proven surprisingly easy to bypass. In this case, CyberCartel reportedly simply told the models that they were being used in test environments. If one model refused to proceed, the hackers used a different model. If that also refused, the AI agents would be tasked with deploying malware instead.

Notably, CyberCartel doesn't appear to be using Anthropic's Mythos for its recent attacks. The company caused a stir earlier this year when it announced the new model, warning that hackers could use it and models like it for attacks like those carried out by CyberCartel. Its release also saw security teams around the globe rush to address thousands of vulnerabilities that the model had identified.

This is far from the first time that Anthropic has been faced with the news that its AI is being used by bad actors. The company shared details of its AI being used to carry out a cyberattack in November 2025. Later, Claude was used to break the security of OpenAI, an Anthropic competitor in the AI space. That hack was carried out by researchers rather than criminals, at least.

Raiker's research on AI-powered attacks on Latin American financial institutions comes just days after news broke that South Korean authorities are investigating a similar issue affecting local banks. Hana Bank, KB Kookmin Bank, and Shinhan Bank are among the South Korean banks affected, with at least 25,000 Shinhan Bank customers having their personal credit information leaked.

AI companies are well aware of the risks their products pose. Nvidia, the graphics card company that now focuses on producing hardware for AI data centers, recently launched the Open Agent Safety Platform. The software platform and reference system design were developed to secure rogue AI agents via a new hardware and software security stack. It's hoped that it will go some way toward preventing agents from escaping their sandboxes, executing unauthorized code, gaining unauthorized access to critical infrastructure, or bypassing guardrails.

China-state-aligned actor Storm-0940 used ARTEX, an open-source agentic AI penetration testing framework, in its large-scale ConnectWise supply chain attack, Microsoft wrote in its Security blog. After unauthorized access to the multi-tenant application, the group attempted sign-ins at more than 2,250 Microsoft 365 tenants, with stolen ConnectWise app credentials that authenticated as the apps with no interactive user sign-in. Some of the group’s attacks reached privileged access less than three hours after initial targeting.

Automated password guessing, or password spraying, also targeted 327 accounts across eight organizations with more than 151,000 failed logons and no successes. The use of ARTEX, “a system of LLM-driven agents that run an autonomous penetration test,” sped up scanning and reconnaissance, password spraying, and OAuth application abuse. The agents can work around the clock “with little needed human interaction,” at a pace that “leaves defenders with little time to detect and respond.” It’s uncertain how the ConnectWise credentials were stolen or how many tenants were actually compromised.

Storm-0940, active since 2021, is a “China-state aligned actor” with “no known industry aliases,” and its name follows the convention for a developing actor. Industries targeted this time include aerospace and defense, semiconductor, government, and think tanks, with 14 listed in total. The activity “did not result from a compromise of or a vulnerability” in Microsoft’s systems, products, or services.

At its peak on Oct. 11, the password spray engaged in 2,900 attempts, all failures, per minute, at more than 111,000 for that day, with 48 accounts logging more than 1,000 failures each. Almost 98% of this activity was locked out. However, with control of the identities of multiple ConnectWise cloud apps, the attacking AI agents signed in to customer tenants from the same IP range using those apps’ credentials, with more than 200 sign-ins in under four minutes using four application credentials. Operations taken within some tenants include Graph and directory operations, reconnaissance, app credential changes, plus changes to identities, groups, and privileged roles.

In one tenant on Oct. 15, Huntress, a security firm, saw an app add itself to the top administrator role, the behavior behind the Microsoft Defender alert “Application self-assigned Global Administrator role.” Actions included planting new secrets set to expire in 2028. It confirmed unauthorized sign-ins for 162 tenants by Oct. 16 and, a day later, almost 1,000 Entra tenants with sign-in activity from the attacking IP, with more than 300 succeeding. The attack’s sweep through tenants in sorted order, a few seconds apart, indicated “a script working from a target list.”

What differs from many traditional attacks is the use of the open-source pentest framework that, Microsoft says, can use any AI model. Threat actors in multiple regions are using the technology, and public reporting this month tied it to breaches at South Korean financial institutions. CrowdStrike said the suspect in those separate attacks was likely based in China and allegedly used ARTEX with Anthropic’s Claude Code. ARTEX’s developer, who goes by the handle “Autumn-27,” said on GitHub that the ARTEX project “will no longer be updated” and would become closed source, Reuters reported.

ConnectWise noted the unauthorized access and suspended Cloud Backup (formerly SkyKick) as well as SaaS Security and Cloud Management as a precaution. It has started a phased restoration with recovery expected to take several days and has no indicators to date that partner backup data was compromised. Microsoft notes that an affected app, or even a successful sign-in, doesn’t necessarily mean data was accessed or taken, and advises customers to keep affected app connections disabled until formal restoration instructions are issued, and to review activity from this month where logs allow.

Pre-built gaming PCs continue to provide some of the best value for gamers, especially if they're discounted. With that in mind, you can pick up this ABS Stratos II Ruby gaming PC for $2,549.99 right now at Newegg. You'll be saving $450 on a machine fitted with an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, and 32GB of fast DDR5 RAM.

● Check out this deal at Newegg

ABS builds are all over Newegg, which is no surprise, as the tech retailer owns the brand. As specs go, this is a rig that'll sit pretty near the top as far as performance goes. That's due to the combination of the 9800X3D, still one of the best CPUs available for gaming right now, with the RTX 5070 Ti. That GPU is current-gen and high-end, giving you a machine that'll give you high frame rates in the best games for years to come.

You'll see from our 9800X3D review why this eight-core AMD X3D chip is a formidable option for any gamer. AMD's 3D V-cache sets the scene, as this game-changing tech boosts the available L3 cache capacity to 96MB. Doesn't sound like much, but it means that your CPU doesn't have to fall back to the slower system RAM as often. That reduces latency, giving you better, more stable frame rates while you game.

The 9800X3D isn't at the very top in our CPU benchmarks anymore, but it's damn close, and it's still the top recommendation for most gamers. There isn't an Intel alternative that can truly rival the performance of an X3D chip like the 9800X3D, either. If 4K gaming with high, stable frame rates is your goal, then the 9800X3D will give you that in spades.

Alongside the 9800X3D is the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti. This Nvidia Blackwell GPU has 8,960 CUDA cores and 16GB of GDDR7 VRAM. This is a GPU that leaves 1080p in the dust, as this mid- to high-tier option is a 1440p and 4K powerhouse. It has the latest Nvidia tech baked in, too, including DLSS with multi-frame generation.

4K with ray tracing, supported by MFG if necessary, means you'll get high frame rates in current-gen games. Expect to use the best graphics presets, but you might need to tweak them for the most demanding games if you're playing at 4K. Luckily, 16GB of VRAM means you've got plenty of breathing room, especially compared to the lower-end RTX 5060 or RTX 5050 with 8GB of VRAM.

There aren't any compromises elsewhere in this build. You've got 32GB of G.Skill Ripjaws M5 Neo RGB DDR5 memory, split across two 16GB modules, with speeds of 6,000 MT/s. There's also a 2TB Team Group NV5000 M.2 SSD included here, offering Gen 4 speeds, with enough space for several big game installations. There's also Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 wireless connectivity, along with Ethernet, and the CPU is liquid cooled with a Bitspower 240mm AIO liquid cooler.

This $2,549.99 ABS Stratos II Ruby gaming PC is a great deal in the current market, especially fitted with the formidable combination of the 9800X3D and RTX 5070 Ti. Buying it now means you're saving $450 on its list price, but it's also the cheapest RTX 5070 Ti gaming PC you're able to buy on Newegg right now. Expect a deal this good to sell out fast.

Google’s Finland country manager has apologized for unauthorized forest clearings near Muhos, which have turned 816 acres of forest into an expanse of mud. The American search and AI giant has also been told to cease work where it has cleared roughly 500 acres of forest, 55 miles southeast of the village of Otanmäki. Now The Guardian reports that wolves, who used to live in the forests, are roaming into villages neighboring these man-made muddy wastelands.

Local anger continues to simmer over the damage done to Finnish forests, as Google seems to have ridden roughshod over regulations in the hurry to build new AI data centers in Finland. However, the report suggests that it isn’t just environmentalists who have a beef with Google. Some families say wolves and other wild animals have entered the countryside villages. This would be a serious human safety concern.

“We had wolves coming into the village because all the wild animals moved out of the forest,” explained Anni Ranta, 53, whose family has lived in Otanmäki for generations. Ranta also fears the U.S.-owned data centers will make Finland an even juicier target for Russian aggression.

Finland is far from the first place targeted by AI data center developers to complain about environmental effects. This latest report also cites locals grumbling about construction/factory noise, streams turning brown, and rare birds being pushed out, among other unwanted side effects. We’ve seen similar concerns voiced across the U.S. and in other countries.

Google’s flouting of environmental policy has been unprecedented and clear, a representative of the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation (SLL) indicated to The Guardian. The Finnish Licensing and Supervision Authority (LVV) seems to agree, as it issued an order for Google to stop development near Muhos and Otanmäki. Nevertheless, a Google spokesperson was upbeat. “We will fully comply with LVV’s requests in this matter,” they said. “We look forward to maintaining an active, open dialogue with all authorities to strengthen our partnership with Finland and local organizations.” Google must be hoping the touted business benefits of the data centers will sway the government and/or regulators.

We last reported on these in-development data centers in Finland earlier this month, after the Finnish government (LVV) gave notice to Google to stop its construction activities in Muhos and Kajaani (near Otanmäki).

A rare, prototype copy of Pokémon Red for the Nintendo Game Boy, originally released back in 1998, is on sale at auction, with a single bid of $25,000 currently registered so far. This prototype, spotted by Retro Dodo, is "incredibly rare" and features 32KB of readable data. According to the Goldin auction page, the cartridge has been authenticated by specialists at PSA, who examined the card. According to them, while a "complete data read" wasn't possible, the first 32KB of data was, a "technically unique" result. The PSA notes, however, that the game data is otherwise "completely identical" to the U.S. release version of the game, with PSA "expressing confidence" that the rest of the data, if it were readable, would match.

The PSA report does note two changes to the ROM's header data that don't affect the game data. According to PSA, "the difference is at offset 0x014C, which denotes the Mask ROM version and is incorrectly set to 55 when it should be 00. This has the effect of changing offset 0x014D, which is a calculated header checksum, to CB instead of 20."

This prototype development cartridge has a sticker reading DMB-MBC-16M-FLASH, with a part number DMG-(F)KGDB-01. DMB likely refers to Dot Matrix Game, the original internal codename for the Game Boy, while MBC likely means Memory Bank Controller, a custom chip that allowed games to use more than the Game Boy's 32KB ROM limit. 16M likely refers to a 16 megabit limit of flash-writable memory. Retro Dodo notes that the cartridge is longer than a standard Game Boy cartridge, too.

The auction notes that this uses a "previously undocumented" development board, although the DMG-(F)KGDB-01 part number has been seen before. The Rare Gaming Dump wiki, for instance, lists the same part number for a development cartridge from 2000. It, too, had a 16 megabit Sharp flash chip, with U1 FLASH MEMORY printed on the board. Close-up views from the Goldin auction page show an almost identical design, although the wiki entry shows a slightly different DMG-MBC3-16M-FLASH cartridge sticker.

Pokémon Red is a gaming classic that helped kickstart the global Pokémon franchise in the 1990s, along with Green and Blue. Combined with Blue, Pokémon Red is reported to have sold more than 31 million copies. There are several days left to go on this auction, so while the single bidder may secure this piece of gaming history for $25,000, it may sell for an even higher price before the auction process ends.

On this day in 2001, Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the original iPod. He began the presentation by teasing “a breakthrough digital device that’s not a Mac.” Ultimately, the iPod that was revealed that day became a pocket-sized digital music player phenomenon, and would be many gadget fans' favorite always-carry device before smartphones matured enough to make such things redundant. The key claim iPod launched with was that it could put your entire music library in your pocket for $399.

In October 2001, when the iPod launched, Steve Jobs had successfully steered Apple beyond the beige into the Mac OS X era, with iBooks and iMacs well established. A revival of the Cupertino company's fortunes was well underway, with these iDevices doing well among consumers – at a difficult time, not long after the dot-com bubble burst.

Jobs predicted that the “Mac could become the center of your digital lifestyle.” It would do so as a hub uniting digital cameras, digital camcorders, DVD players – and the portable music player. Apple decided to go down this avenue as everyone loves music and it’s a huge target market, without a market leader, reasoned the CEO.

Small companies like Creative and Sonic Blue, and the much larger Sony, already had portable digital music players, acknowledged Jobs. However, “none of them has really found the recipe yet, for digital music,” he told the crowd at the iPod unveiling. At the time of Apple’s iPod announcement, there were four mainstream portable digital music solutions: CD players, MP3 CD players, flash players, and hard disk-based jukebox players. Jobs saw that last one as the optimal choice for market entry.

After this long preamble, the iPod was introduced as an MP3 music player, offering CD-quality sound, capable of playing all the popular formats of the time (MP3, WAV, AIFF). Its 5GB capacity meant that it could hold 1,000 songs. Specifically, that meant 1,000 typical pop-song length MP3s at 160Kbps. “For most people it’s their entire music library,” enthused Jobs.

The Apple CEO then sketched out three big claims that would make the iPod a winner. First, its ultra-portable form factor made it desirable. This aspect of the design was aided by Toshiba’s newest ultra-compact and ultra-thin hard drive at 1.8 inches in diameter and 0.2 inches thick. The actual device would be the size of a deck of cards – 2.4 x 4 x 0.78 inches, with a weight of 6.5 ounces, “lighter than most cell phones.”

Despite its compact size, the iPod offered advanced features like 20-minute skip protection, fast file transfers, and charging via a single FireWire 400 cable. The iPod was heralded as the “first and only music player with FireWire.” The connection was fast enough to transfer an entire CD to the device “in five to 10 seconds,” according to Jobs’ presentation. The USB connections of the same era would keep you waiting around five minutes for the same single CD of MP3s data transfer to complete, it was claimed. To fill the iPod (1,000 songs), it was estimated it would only take 10 minutes vs. five hours for a USB digital music player.

A rechargeable lithium-polymer battery in the first iPod offered 10 hours of continuous music playback. An empty battery could be recharged to 80% in one hour, Apple said.

Secondly, the iPod benefitted from “an amazing Apple design,” with minimal and durable back and sides, noted Jobs. It was touted to offer “Apple’s legendary ease of use” in a portable music player. Its specially designed controls were single-hand friendly, with an accelerated scroll wheel using a piezoelectric clicker for tactile feedback. It enabled the fast location and playback of music by playlist, artist, or song. Quiz fans – the first song demoed on stage was 'Building a Mystery' by Sarah MacLachlan.

The third breakthrough for the iPod claimed by Jobs was its Auto-Sync with iTunes digital music libraries feature. iTunes 2 launched on the same day with several advanced features like MP3 CD burning and syncing support for the new music player. However, the Auto-Sync meant that the libraries you created, customized, and curated on your Mac would always be synced with your pocket player when you connected to transfer music or charge. The iPod also doubled as a FireWire HDD.

The first iPhone launched over five years later, in early 2007. Both devices would sit alongside each other in the Apple product stack for over a decade. However, the iPod’s star inevitably faded, with the final model being the 7th-generation iPod Touch in May 2019. The product line was left unmaintained but was only officially discontinued in May 2022.

Following reports over the weekend that an Nvidia RTX 5090 shipment worth $470,000 was stolen from a Brazilian airport, a contraband graphics card linked to the shipment has shown up for sale online. Brazilian media also reports that the police and airport authorities have identified three employees thought to have been involved in the heist, according to GMC. (Machine translated)

According to the report, Guarulhos International Airport has issued a statement confirming that "The investigation of the facts is the responsibility of the competent authorities to clarify the circumstances of what happened." A Brazilian TV news network appears to have identified one of the cards, a Zotac Gaming RTX 5090 for sale on the online marketplace OLX for over $6,000. Quite unfortunately, the reseller uploaded clear pictures of the card's serial number, linking it to the missing haul of graphics cards. Per the report, there is no information to identify the seller, and the listing appears to have since been taken down.

However, police information reported by the outlet does reveal a chain of events and some possible suspects in the case. The shipment, imported from the United States and thought to be worth nearly $500,000, arrived in Brazil on September 20 and was registered with customs on September 24. The two pallets went missing after being authorized for release on September 25. Police believe "two outsourced forklift operators" removed the pallets from the warehouse on September 21, an act apparently recorded by CCTV.

Police state the equipment was loaded onto a truck and hasn't been seen since. A third "checker" employee is said to have released the merchandise from the system to pass through electronic controls.

The RTX 5090 is the world's best consumer gaming GPU, but high demand for AI compute has seen it all but disappear from conventional retail, with the card now fetching upwards of $10,000 in the few remaining marketplaces it can be found, nearly always offered by third-party sellers. As such, an idle, unguarded shipment of such cards would make ripe pickings for thieves, a tempt

Blu-ray is fading after 20 years in the market, with Sony Japan finally discontinuing its last dedicated Blu-ray player. According to FlatpanelsHD, Sony Japan has finally marked the UBP-X700/K player as “Discontinued,” meaning customers in the country can no longer purchase a new standalone Blu-ray player from the company. This should not come as a surprise, as Sony stopped shipping the players in February of this year, suggesting that Sony only relied on existing inventory for its remaining Blu-ray player sales.

The PlayStation 5 is the only remaining Sony device that can play Blu-ray discs, but the company has also announced that it will end physical game disc production by January 2028. Because of this, some people fear that the upcoming PlayStation 6 will no longer have an optical drive. This move follows in the footsteps of LG, which ended Blu-ray player production in 2024. Japanese electronics companies Elecom and Buffalo have also ended production of Blu-ray drives for PCs this year, although Buffalo Americas says that it is “fully committed to supplying optical drives to the American market, and our DVD/Blu-ray drive products are anticipated to remain available for the near future.”

This move away from physical media and focus on streaming is worrying, especially to those who are concerned that we are moving towards a world where people no longer own anything. Because of this, sales of “retro media,” including CDs and vinyl, went up by 59% and 18% respectively. While you could still purchase a Blu-ray player from other manufacturers like Panasonic, Sony is one of the bigger companies that built and supported the standard, and its move to end the production and sale of Blu-ray players will leave this niche market even smaller. The audiophile market is facing the same dilemma, as some Hi-Fi player manufacturers ended production of selected products because optical drive makers have stopped making the components needed to read SACDs.

Ultra HD Blu-ray is facing the same upheaval that VHS and DVDs went through with the introduction of new formats. But while the older technologies were replaced by higher-quality formats, Blu-ray is being replaced not by more pixels, but by the convenience of streaming. However, it also comes with the caveat that people would no longer own physical media; a trend that worries data archivists.

TSMC, the world's largest contract chip manufacturer, is seeking alternative machinery without rare-earth components to reduce its dependence on China-dominated materials and avoid disruptions to factory operations caused by the country's export controls. According to a Reuters report on October 22 citing people familiar with the matter, the Taiwanese company has begun approaching its equipment suppliers to explore whether they can provide factory automation equipment equipped with motors that don't require rare-earth materials.

TSMC supplies the extremely powerful Nvidia chips that are facilitating the AI boom. It also manufactures chips for Apple, Broadcom, Qualcomm, and numerous other tech and automotive companies. The company operates enormous, highly automated semiconductor fabrication plants. These factories use industrial machinery that relies on electric motors with powerful permanent magnets made from rare-earth elements such as neodymium, dysprosium, and terbium.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), China accounts for roughly 70% of global rare earth mining. The International Energy Agency (IEA) says China also controls around 90% of refining and approximately 95% of the finished permanent magnets found in TSMC’s machines, giving Beijing a quasi-absolute monopoly over one of the most critical technology supply chains. In April 2025, the country placed seven medium and heavy rare earths and the magnets made from them under export controls, requiring exporters to seek case-by-case approval and export licenses, thereby choking shipments to manufacturers across the U.S., Europe, and Asia, including TSMC.

China expanded the controls on October 9, 2025, to include five additional rare earths, processing technology and equipment, and even products manufactured outside the country that contain more than 0.1% Chinese-origin rare earths, or are made using Chinese processing technology. It later suspended the October expansion for one year, until November 10, 2026. This has now been extended for an additional 90 days.

TSMC’s moves aim to reduce the risk that these controls will hinder production at its factories. Even with all other raw materials and machinery required to manufacture its chips, shortages of specialized motor components could complicate the maintenance, repair, or expansion of its production equipment. Several technological approaches allow motors to avoid rare earth magnets. Conventional induction motors, for example, generate torque using electromagnetic induction rather than permanent magnets. Switched-reluctance motors are another option, while some permanent-magnet motors can use ferrite magnets instead of rare-earth magnets. However, these technologies typically involve different trade-offs in efficiency, size, power density, precision, and control requirements.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world is undertaking the painstaking, drawn-out task of building a rare-earth supply chain outside China. Taiwan is reportedly pursuing domestic rare-earth production capabilities in collaboration with the United States, with both countries confirming their intent to reduce reliance on Chinese rare-earth and critical-mineral supply chains.

Taiwan's government is supporting the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) in establishing a pilot production line within three years that could supply about 50% of Taiwan's domestic rare-earth demand. Meanwhile, the U.S. is “working with Taiwan and other partners to develop alternative sources of supply, expand processing capacity and build more resilient supply chains,” according to the report. In February 2026, the Trump administration announced plans to create a $12 billion critical minerals stockpile to offset supply chain risks from China.

Nvidia's RTX Spark platform puts local AI inference and content creation first, but Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra really wants to game, too. The vented keyboard keeps the critical WASD keys cool under load by design, the smooth 120Hz screen can get as bright as 2000 nits with HDR games, and the built-in speakers may be the best I've ever heard on a laptop, period.

There's just one problem: that 3270x2180 screen asks a lot of DLSS upscaling. The computation that DLSS performs doesn't come for free, and the load increases with higher output resolutions. This is especially relevant with the Surface Laptop Ultra's high-density panel, which has just 14% fewer pixels than a 16:9 4K display.

The Surface's unusual 3:2 aspect ratio (at least compared to the average gaming laptop) also means that scaling content up to fill the screen isn't straightforward in many games. 16:9 and 16:10 content gets stretched vertically, causing obvious distortion of character models and objects like tires. And if you use windowed mode instead, playing in a 16:9 or 16:10 window on a relatively small screen like this quickly tires the eyes.

The thing is, all this is easy to solve—easy enough, in fact, that I'm surprised I had to do it myself at all.

Microsoft seems aware that lower 3:2 resolutions are useful for this system, as it put a 1600x1024 custom resolution in the list of display modes that's slightly less than half of native on both axes. But at roughly 1.6 megapixels in total, that image offers less resolution than even a 1920x1080 display does. Scaling up from such a low-res baseline on the Surface screen results in a noticeably soft image even before we dial in DLSS.

What we really want, for reasons of both performance and adequate sharpness, is a 3:2 resolution that comes close to the 2.07 megapixels that 1920x1080 yields. Some quick math and rounding to whole numbers gives us 1764x1176 as an optimal target.

With those ideal dimensions in hand, the next step was to create a custom resolution to match. The Nvidia Control Panel doesn't work on Windows on Arm, but we can still use the Nvidia App to set custom resolutions.

After diving into the System tab and expanding the Display Properties pane, I found the "Customize Resolution" button to open an editor to that end and added 1764x1176 at 120Hz. I then tested it and confirmed that it worked as a supported display mode. (If you want to match the 3.7 MP of 2560x1440, set up a 2352x1568 resolution while you’re at it.)

If for some reason you don't want non-3:2 content to fit the entire Surface Laptop Ultra screen, there is a Scaling pane in the Nvidia App that lets you control that behavior. The "Aspect Ratio" scaling mode will letterbox 16:9 and 16:10 material if you set the display resolution accordingly. But if you're paying $5899 for this system, I presume you want to use every one of its pricey pixels rather than leaving some of them dark.

So what does that bit of tweaking buy us compared to our initial gaming results with Control Resonant?

As someone who primarily games on our Ryzen 7 9800X3D GPU testing system and not a laptop, I wanted to make sure I wasn't setting unreasonable expectations for the Surface Laptop for input latency or CPU performance. So I hauled out an older 17" gaming laptop with a Core i9-11980HK and an RTX 3080 Mobile 16GB inside to get some perspective.

To level the playing field with the Surface Laptop Ultra and its native support for frame generation, I modded Optiscaler into Control Resonant on that system to enable Intel's Xe Frame Generation and Xe Low Latency features.

I conducted my testing with Control Resonant's High raster preset and medium RT preset, which gets you a noticeable boost in image quality thanks in part to DLSS Ray Reconstruction.

You can see that with these settings, trying to upscale Control Resonant to the Surface Laptop Ultra's native resolution is too much to ask for a smooth or responsive gaming experience. Even with DLSS Ultra Performance (an input resolution of 1090x727) and 2X frame generation, we only just break 60 FPS, and latency is at an unacceptable 87 ms average. There's no latency budget left to turn up MFG without turning down other image quality settings.

With our 1764x1176 custom resolution, however, we're off to a great start with DLSS Quality upscaling (an input resolution of 1176x874). The resulting 83.4 FPS average, 42.9 1% low FPS, and an average input latency of 67.8 ms is a fine experience. We still have room to dial in MFG 3X, leading to a 123 FPS average and 55 FPS 1% lows while keeping latency a reasonable 71 ms.

The RTX 3080 Mobile system with XeFG and XeLL, meanwhile, turns in an 87.1 FPS average, 53 FPS 1% lows, and a 69 ms average input latency at 1920x1080 with the same image quality settings. Its key advantage is in 1% lows, but that win comes with significant trade-offs.

Plugged into our Watts Up meter, the RTX 3080 system draws 250 W from the wall to deliver the experience it does, but according to a USB-C power meter, the Surface Laptop Ultra pulls between 110 W and 120 W under load. Silicon has come a long way since Tiger Lake and Ampere.

The RTX 3080 system and its enormous power adapter together also weigh over nine pounds (4.1 kg). It's technically portable but practically a pain to haul around. The Surface Laptop Ultra and its 140W adapter weigh just 5.3 lb (2.39 kg), which isn't featherweight but won't break your back.

And the Surface will actually fit on a tray table or your lap, with enough battery life that you can use it through a transcontinental U.S. flight, say, and still have plenty of juice left for either side of the trip.

So at least in Control Resonant, the Surface Laptop Ultra is delivering largely the same gaming experience as that high-end RTX 3080 Mobile system, but in a much smaller and lighter total package that draws less than half the wall power. And if you want to stretch frame rates further with MFG 3X, the Surface has MFG support that the older system doesn't. Just add in the 1764x1176 intermediate resolution that Microsoft forgot, and you’ll be well on your way to a better gaming experience.

Most everyone in the tech space has been living in interesting times, but this week isn't done yet, and it's already quite special for systems administrators worldwide. They already had to deal with the critical PHP RCE vulnerability, but they also have to update untold amounts of machines and software, thanks to eight insecure intermediate CA certificates that can allow attackers to impersonate any domain and/or pretend their malware is from a legitimate source.

An attacker anywhere in the path of your network traffic, like, say, in a company or government network, public Wi-Fi, your ISP, or one of any number of government entities, can intercept your connection and pretend that they're any website, like apple.com, amazon.com, or bankofamerica.com. If not updated, your operating system and installed software would be none the wiser. Additionally, with the code signing certificates, an application you download can be shown as completely legitimate from, say, Microsoft or Google.

The way that software checks a certificate is legitimate is by verifying its "chain." For example, a website like tomshardware.com has a certificate, issued and signed by an intermediate Certification Authority (or CA, a certificate-selling company), and whose certificate, in turn, is trusted and signed by root certificates — whose exceedingly precious keys are kept offline in safes. In this week's event, Indian CA firm eMudhra issued six TLS and two code-signing intermediate certificates with easily guessable keys.

Your operating system and potentially tens of different applications on your machine all keep a list of which root certificates and CAs are trusted. Browsers also keep a list of those not to trust, called a revocation list. These lists are updated periodically as screw-ups happen, just like the one that took place this week. And now they all need to be updated again, by revoking the eight CAs, removing the one affected root certificate, or just hard-coding a rejection of all eight affected keys.

There's a silver lining: recent versions of Chrome, Brave, Firefox, and Safari all enforce a feature called Certificate Transparency that consults a public read-only log of certificate issuances, and blocks any that aren't mentioned. Google reports that no certificates signed by the six affected intermediate CAs were logged, so if regular web browsing is all you did, you should be safe — but still check all your software for updates nonetheless.

The problem here is the sheer amount of machines and software that needs updating: PCs, servers, operating systems, phones, tablets, routers, web browsers, web browsers wrapped in apps, virtual servers, virtual machines, Docker and other containers, programming languages like Python, Go, Node.js, Rust, standalone download utilities like curl, and probably tens or hundreds of other categories. Additionally, we discussed things that are expected and likely to get updates. Old routers, smart and IoT appliances, and old computers could eventually present a problem.

As for the technical details, eMudhra issued six intermediate CA certificates and two intermediate code-signing certs with rather unadvisable private keys. The private key is the secret half of the two parts of a certificate, and for some reason, those of the aforementioned certs were only 1 byte long — thus a number from 0 to 255, trivial to brute-force in a split second. How the heck that happened is still under investigation.

We often criticise companies for misleading marketing, which typically falls in the direction of deceitful overpromising. With the Ryzen 5 5500F, we have the opposite problem. Its name and branding undersell what AMD is offering here. It’s a marked improvement over the base Ryzen 5 5500, giving AMD better standing among the best budget CPUs.

The 5500F is a Zen 3 CPU from the Vermeer family of chips, packing six cores, 12 threads, and a boost clock of 4.4 GHz. It’s modest by the standards of the best CPUs for gaming, but it also comes in at a suggested retail price of just $100. Those prices have drifted up toward $120, though hopefully they’ll settle down around list price before long.

Along with a 200 MHz jump in boost clock speeds over the 5500, the 5500F critically comes with access to PCIe 4.0. The original 5500 came from the Cezanne family of APUs, which all use monolithic dies and are limited to PCIe 3.0. Although the 5500F lives in the Vermeer family alongside the main Zen 3 stack, it’s still limited to the 16 MB of L3 cache that characterizes Cezanne (Vermeer chips have access to 32 MB of L3 otherwise).

The chip squarely targets Intel’s Core i3-14100F, a quad-core CPU available for around $100 that offers 11% better gaming performance at 1080p on average compared to the base 5500. The new 5500F tightens that gap to just 2.9%, and it manages to outclass Intel in multithreaded performance while offering a 10% average jump over the base 5500.

AMD Ryzen 5 5500F specifications and pricing

AMD gave the Ryzen 5 5500F a bad name. The “F” suffix across both AMD and Intel is typically used to note chips that lack integrated graphics. And indeed, the Ryzen 5 5500F does lack integrated graphics. But so does the Ryzen 5 5500. In reality, the Ryzen 5 5500F isn’t a re-released CPU with the iGPU sliced off, as F-series processors usually are, but rather an updated Ryzen 5 5500 that comes with better specs and, in turn, better performance.

If there’s any chip that falls in the bucket of a re-released CPU with the iGPU cut off, it’s the original Ryzen 5 5500, not this new F-suffix variant. The Ryzen 5 5500 comes from the Cezanne family of Zen 3 CPUs. These chips use the Zen 3 microarchitecture, but they have only 16MB of L3 cache and are limited to PCIe 3.0. Out of the full Cezanne family, the Ryzen 5 5500 is the only chip that isn’t either an APU like the Ryzen 5 5600G, or a laptop chip.

The newer Ryzen 5 5500F is from the Vermeer family, the same as other Zen 3-based desktop CPUs like the Ryzen 5 5600X. That brings with it an update to PCIe 4.0, which is a huge boon for GPU and storage performance, as well as a bump from a maximum boost of 4.2 GHz on the 5500 to 4.4 GHz on the 5500F.

Although the Ryzen 5 5500F falls in the Vermeer family, it still carries some Cezanne DNA. It’s the only Vermeer chip to have 16 MB of shared L3; all other Vermeer chips have 32 MB of L3, at least, with X3D options scaling higher. Both families retain the same L1/L2 setup, naturally, as they share the Zen 3 microarchitecture.

Otherwise, the Ryzen 5 5500F retains the 65W TDP, and 88W platform maximum, and it comes bundled with AMD’s Wraith Stealth cooler. The Wraith Stealth cooler is plenty to keep the Ryzen 5 5500F cool under load, saving you some money on an aftermarket CPU cooler.

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The Ryzen 5 5500F is AMD’s best budget gaming CPU right now, at least assuming you don’t already have a kit of DDR5 laying around. That was also true of the 5500, though begrudgingly. Deals on CPUs like the Ryzen 5 7600X are common, but the exorbitant cost of a kit of DDR5 right now nullifies any real savings there. Although the 5500F is still second chair to Intel’s Core i3-14100F, the battle between the two is much closer now. Plus, the 5500F has access to PCIe 4.0, solving a big sticking point with the original 5500 and its PCIe 3.0 limit.

With the Core i5-14400 and Core i3-14100 in the charts below, we tested both with DDR4 and DDR5. As we saw in our Raptor Lake Refresh DDR4 comparison recently, the newer memory standard brings about a 15% improvement in average gaming performance at 1080p. The DDR5 numbers are mainly here for context. The true battle is between DDR4 platforms, given the high cost of DDR5.

We followed the same testing procedure for this review as we do with any other. We have full platform details at the end of this review. For gaming, we used the RTX 5090 FE and tested at 1080p with a mixture of High and Ultra settings. Undoubtedly, some of our readers will have feedback about the decision to use such a high-performance GPU with such inexpensive CPUs, but this is our standard process for all CPU testing, and the choice to use the RTX 5090 is less impactful than you might think.

As you can see from our $100 CPU shootout, where we tested the 5500 and 14100F with an RTX 5090 and with an RTX 4060, average scaling was largely the same between the two GPUs, with only the baseline performance moving down on the RTX 4060. You’re going to remain CPU-bound with these chips and just about any modern gaming graphics card. Using the RTX 5090 allows us to take these results and compare them all the way up the stack rather than throw them in the bin.

With an extra boost in clock speed and access to PCIe 4.0, the Ryzen 5 5500F comes out 8.6% ahead of the 5500 in our 16-game geomean at 1080p. It’s now just 2.8% behind the Core i3-14100F, though. As we’ll see throughout some of the individual game tests, the four-core setup of the Core i3-14100F is a real limitation. 1% low performance jumped 11.7% from the 5500 to 5500F, as well, resulting in smoother performance.

The Ryzen 5 5500 occupies the bottom of our chart, and that’s mainly due to availability. There aren’t a ton of CPUs available around $100, unless you’re interested in spending $98 on a brand new FX-8300 (don’t). It’s a battle between the Core i3-14100F and Ryzen 5 5500F at this price. In order to step up to that next tier of performance, you need to spend around $150, which is a hotly contested area between DDR4 options like the Core i5-14400F (we only had the more expensive, non-F version on hand) and Ryzen 5 5600, and DDR5 options like the Ryzen 5 7600X.

AMD has brought 3D V-Cache down the Zen 3 product stack, all the way down to the Ryzen 5 5500X3D, though you’ll spend about twice as much on that CPU as the Ryzen 5 5500F or Core i3-14100F.

Still, both of these chips play a great role in a new budget gaming build right now if you have future upgrade aspirations. Compared to the Ryzen 7 5800X3D and Core i7-14700K — our recommendations for gaming on these platforms — you can save around $200 up front and put it toward a nicer graphics card. Intel’s platform has the additional flexibility of a future DDR5 upgrade with a new motherboard, as well.

Between the Core i3-14100F and Ryzen 5 5500F, Intel still holds a small edge in performance. Given how CPU-bound we are, that edge isn’t big enough to sway a buying decision, but the price is. The Ryzen 5 5500F has a recommended price of $100, but we haven’t seen it sold for less than $120. Neither the slightly higher price nor slight performance disadvantage are enough to sway things on their own, but together, they hurt the Ryzen 5 5500F’s place in the $100 CPU bracket.

That comes through clearly in our value geomean, where the Ryzen 5 5500 actually provides a better value than the new 5500F, due to the fact that it’s held onto its $90 price. The Core i5-14400 looks unsurprisingly bad here due to its $208 price tag. The Core i5-14400F is available closer to around $150 though, and it should provide identical performance with a discrete GPU.

With temperature and power, you can see the Ryzen 5 5500F takes better advantage of the 65W thermal design than the original 5500, climbing up to a 61W average in our test suite. Higher power draw is actually better in this case. We’re dealing with relatively low-power desktop chips, so if peak performance is the goal, we want every watt the thermal design can handle being used.

Given that the 5500F ramps up power, it’s less efficient as a result. Perhaps efficiency is important if you plan on using one of these CPUs around the clock in areas with high electricity prices, but in the context of gaming, the power difference isn’t big. It’s less than what a phone consumes with fast charging.

007 First Light benchmarks

007 First Light kicks off our individual game tests, and it happens to be one of the stranger results in our test pool. There was virtually no movement between the Ryzen 5 5500 and Ryzen 5 5500F, despite a jump in power with the 5500F. This is clearly an outlier in our suite, which will become clear as we go through the other games.

Baldur’s Gate 3 benchmarks

Baldur’s Gate 3 aligns more closely with our geomean, with the 5500F outpacing the 5500 by 7.2%. Intel still leads, however, with the Core i3-14100F beating out the 5500F by 5.9% and 5500 by 13.6%.

Cities Skylines 2 benchmarks

Cities Skylines 2 showcases an aspect of gaming performance that’s often overlooked, which is raw CPU compute. Here, we have a fully built city with a population of over one million people, stressing core count, clock speed, and memory capabilities. Although we only have a handful of chips here, the Core i5-14400 with DDR5 provides some important context for how this benchmark stresses different aspects of the system.

Crimson Desert benchmarks

Crimson Desert and its proprietary engine are remarkably well optimized, enough so to allow every CPU in our test suite to maintain a playable frame rate, even with Ultra settings. The 5500F is 7.8% faster than the 5500, though the Core i3-14100F still leads in performance, even when paired with DDR4.

Counter-Strike 2 benchmarks

Counter-Strike 2 shows the first major upset of our test suite, with the Ryzen 5 5500F winning out over the other CPUs we’re focused on; once again, the Core i5-14400 is mostly included for context. Although the 5500F beats out even the Core i3-14100F paired with DDR5, it suffers in the 1% lows, with even the Core i3-14100F paired with DDR4 offering better 1% low performance.

Cyberpunk 2077 benchmarks

One of the better showcases of the Ryzen 5 5500F, Cyberpunk 2077 shows the CPU up 9.2% compared to the base 5500. Intel still leads with the Core i3-14100F, though with a smaller 4.1% margin. Compared to the base 5500, the Core i3-14100F is 13.8% ahead.

The Blood of Dawnwalker benchmarks

The newest addition to our test suite is the UE5-based The Blood of Dawnwalker, and in particular a trot through a dense city in the middle of the game’s map, notorious for ramping CPU usage and introducing stuttering. The 5500F comes out on top by over 8% compared to the base 5500, but once again Intel leads with the Core i3-14100F.

F1 2024 benchmarks

With more modern CPUs, F1 2024 is normally a benchmark that skews heavily toward AMD, but this far down the stack, the opposite is true. Intel leads, even with a solid gain from the 5500F.

Final Fantasy XIV benchmarks

Final Fantasy XIV is balanced between AMD and Intel, though it heavily favors X3D CPUs. Without any of those in the mix here, the Ryzen 5 5500F falls behind the Core i3-14100F by 15%. There’s also little gained from moving to DDR5 with the Core i3-14100F.

Flight Simulator 24 benchmarks

Gaining a few frames in Flight Simulator 24 is nothing to sneeze at, and that’s exactly what the 5500F pulls off with a 9.6% lead over the 5500. Unfortunately for AMD, the Core i3-14100F is much faster in this title, with the 5500F trailing it by 18.9%.

Forza Horizon 6 benchmarks

Forza Horizon 6 shows more movement. The Ryzen 5 5500 already matched the Core i3-14100F in performance, allowing the 5500F to swoop in with a 7.8% lead. The Core i3-14100F with DDR5 unsurprisingly still leads, but this is a big feather in the 5500F’s cap.

Marvel Rivals

Marvel Rivals is an important benchmark, not only because the game is wildly popular, but also because it showcases exactly what AMD wanted to accomplish with the 5500F. The 14100F leads the base 5500 by over 12%, but the 5500F changes that story, leading the 14100F by 6.3%. This is presumably the target AMD set with the 5500, attempting to gain a performance advantage over the 14100F where the base 5500 originally struggled. And it hit that target in this case.

Onimusha: Way of the Sword benchmarks

Onimusha: Way of the Sword is the latest game sporting Capcom’s storied RE Engine, and it’s a title where the base 5500 and Core i3-14100F are in lockstep. The 5500F steps in to take the lead once again, beating the Core i3-14100F out by 6.9%.

Spider-Man 2 benchmarks

The notoriously CPU-heavy Spider-Man 2 jumps back to the pattern established by other titles in our test suite. The 14100F is over 20% ahead of the base 5500, and although the 5500F makes the battle closer, Intel still leads by 11%.

Starfield benchmarks

Starfield shows the Ryzen 5 5500F ahead of the 14100F, though only marginally, and with Intel coming out ahead with slightly better 1% lows. Still, this is another game where the 5500F successfully changes the power dynamic between Intel and AMD’s budget CPU offerings.

Warhammer 40K Space Marine 2 benchmarks

Finally, Warhammer 40K Space Marine 2 shows the 5500F matching the 14100F, whereas the base 5500 trailed by nearly 7%.

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The Ryzen 5 5500F is primarily a gaming CPU, clocked fairly low at a 4.4 GHz boost and packing just six Zen 3 cores. The six-core floor that AMD has maintained for several generations gives the 5500F a significant edge over the Core i3-14100F, which uses a true quad-core design, bypassing the hybrid design that Intel has used on its past several generations of desktop CPUs.

There aren’t a lot of quad-core chips on the market today, so it’s no surprise to see the Core i3-14100F at the bottom of the chart here, regardless of whether it’s paired with DDR4 or DDR5. The Ryzen 5500 already led Intel by 12.8% in our multi-threaded geomean, but the 5500F nearly doubles that lead to 24.2%. Compared to the 5500, the new 5500F is a clean 10% ahead in our multithreaded geomean.

The scales unsurprisingly flip looking at single-threaded performance. Intel usually leads in single-threaded performance anyway, but some context is important here. Zen 3 is much older than Raptor Lake, and those microarchitectural differences really show up in our single-threaded testing.

On microarchitecture, the Ryzen 5 5500F is 5% ahead of the 5500 in our single-threaded geomean, aligning almost perfectly with the 5% boost in turbo clock speed that the 5500F has. That’s a welcome bump, though keep in mind that a 4.4 GHz boost is still relatively low, and the 5500F only has access to 16 MB of L3. Other Vermeer CPUs, such as the 5700X, have 32 MB.

Rendering Benchmarks

CPU rendering workloads are intense, sustained tasks often pinning either an individual core, or all of the cores, at full utilization. Because they’re sustained and demanding, many of our rendering tests factor into the geomean above, and that’s a major driving force behind why tests like Cinebench are such a staple when measuring CPU performance.

For the headline tests like POV-Ray and Cinebench, the results fall as you’d expect. AMD leads in multi-threaded work, Intel in single-threaded work, and the 5500F ends up between 5% and 10% faster than the 5500, depending on the benchmark.

Encoding Benchmarks

Encoding workloads are similarly all-out for the CPU cores, and in heavy, multi-threaded video encoding via HandBrake, the 5500F is only marginally faster than the 5500. Particularly in these heavy video encodes, the fact that the 5500F has access to six cores matters more than anything else. That slight boost in clock speed helps it squeeze out an advantage; however, with any of these workloads, you’ll notice the 5500F struggles to get along, just like the Core i3-14100 and base 5500.

Single-threaded encoding via LAME shows an advantage for Intel, unsurprisingly, but the multi-threaded workloads are what matter here. As a demonstration, look at our VP9 HandBrake results. The 5500 actually ended up faster than the 5500F here, though by just 1 FPS, when the standard for these chips is managing just 4 FPS for this encode.

Creator App Benchmarks

The main CPUs we’re focused on — 5500, 5500F, and 14100F — aren’t the best choice when it comes to modern creative applications, particularly when it comes to the more demanding workloads in nonlinear video editors like Resolve and Premiere, as well as visual effects in After Effects. In Photoshop, the three ~$100 CPUs all hit a performance wall, though likely for different reasons, as you can see the DDR5-equipped 14100F run into the same bottleneck as the DDR4 version.

Web and Office Benchmarks

Web and office workloads are par for the course when it comes to the Ryzen 5 5500F. Although Intel retains a lead in our web and office benchmarks, the 5500F does a lot to close the gap compared to the 5500, at least in some tests. Looking at general web workloads through WebXPRT and Procyon, there isn’t much of a difference between the main chips we’re focused on.

However, the 5500F gains some ground in Excel with a 9.7% jump over the 5500. It was a massive 35% faster in Word, finally closing in on the 14100F, and it was 6.7% faster in PowerPoint. Even by the standards of budget CPUs, the Ryzen 5 5500 didn’t perform well in these applications. The 5500F puts AMD’s budget offering back in contention.

Chess Engines, Compilation, Compression, AVX, and Other Benchmarks

We run hundreds of tests on every CPU that comes across our benches, and not all of them are relevant to every chip. Here, we have a collection of more specialised workloads that don’t factor into our overall geomean. The tests are greatly varied here, including code compilation, compression performance, Java, chess engines, and cryptography, among other tests. We won’t be able to highlight all of them.

The most recognizable is Geekbench, showing a broader view of single-threaded and multi-threaded performance in a machine-gun-style benchmark suite that rips through different workloads in just a few minutes. What’s interesting is that Geekbench multi-thread shows the 14100F paired with DDR5 on top, likely taking into account the memory standard that isn’t represented in tests like Cinebench.

Another interesting test to highlight is memory throughput via WinSAT. This built-in Windows benchmark shows a clear performance wall for the DDR4 chips in our test suite. Of course, DDR5 provides much more throughput, but the interesting bit here is just how bottlenecked the throughput is with these late-stage DDR4 CPUs.

Elsewhere, there are a few broad trends that emerge. In security and cryptography workloads, AMD rules the roost. However, in many scientific workloads, Intel holds an edge. Again, these workloads aren’t particularly relevant for these CPUs, so we’d recommend placing more emphasis on the benchmarks in the sections above.

SPEC Workstation benchmarks

We run SPEC Workstation as part of every CPU pass, and although workstation application performance isn’t relevant to these budget desktop chips, it’s still interesting to see how these applications push against the limitations of such restricted CPU designs. Feel free to peruse, but don’t put too much stock in the actual rankings. These are unrealistic workloads for this class of CPU.

MORE: CPU Benchmark Hierarchy

MORE: AMD vs. Intel

MORE: Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus review

MORE: AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D review

In games, we saw the Ryzen 5 5500F consume more power than the base 5500, actually reaching toward its 65W thermal design. In applications, the opposite is true. The 5500F actually consumed slightly less power than the base 5500, particularly in all-core workloads where the 5500 pushes past its 65W thermal design.

In y-cruncher multi-thread with AVX enabled, the 5500F drew 14.6% less power on average compared to the base 5500 and Core i3-14100F. In Linpack, the 5500F shaved more than 20% of the wattage of the 5500, and in Handbrake using VP9, it cut 12%. We don’t use software monitoring for our power measurements. Results are gathered from the EPS cables themselves.

Looking at idle and active idle power measurements, the 5500F maintains Zen 3 low-power idle state, sipping just 7 watts during YouTube playback, dropping down to 6 watts at true idle. The 7600X provides a hint at where idle power draw has gone in the Zen 4/5 era.

As a result of lower power draw in some tests, it’s no surprise that the 5500F ends up more efficient than the 5500 in y-cruncher and Linpack. In Cinebench and Blender, however, the two CPUs are closely aligned in efficiency, with the 5500F actually coming out slightly less efficient in the Junkshop scene.

Our scatterplots are a good way to visualize efficiency. In Handbrake, you can see the 5500F provided better performance than the 5500 while consuming less power. In Blender, however, the two CPUs consumed roughly the same power, while the 5500F provided better performance.

Across all of our efficiency tests, the comparison for Intel isn’t great. Not only does the 14100F struggle in all-core workloads, it does so with higher power consumption, occasionally pushing above 80W.

Test Setup

As with all of our CPU reviews, we used as close to identical test setups as possible to isolate CPU performance. There are several steps we take with hardware to normalize results, such as using the same fan speed across each test bench, as well as tweaks we make to the software stack to represent true performance.

Our test images are based on Windows 24H2. We use the same Nvidia driver across both the RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 5090. Additionally, our test images never cross platforms, so chipset drivers on an Intel platform never see an AMD chip, or vice versa. Application versions are pinned where possible. For games, where pinning isn’t possible, we do regression testing in the event of an update, and if required, retest the pool of chips if the performance profile has changed.

Finally, we tweak the BIOS. Every system has access to EXPO/XMP, as well as ReBAR. Virtualization-Based Security (VBS) is disabled. For Intel systems, we use the default power profile, not more extreme power profiles that aren’t covered under warranty. Similarly, we disable AMD’s Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO), as it can push the processor outside warrantied specifications.

MORE: CPU Benchmark Hierarchy

MORE: AMD vs. Intel

MORE: Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus review

MORE: AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D review

The Ryzen 5 5500F is a compelling chip right now. When memory, storage, and GPU prices are at an all-time high, it offers a simple entry point into the AM4 platform, which remains relevant for midrange gaming rigs, on the heels of AMD re-releasing the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. The 5500F solves the major issues with AMD’s previous budget offering, upgrading the PCIe standard to Gen 4 and offering gaming performance that can rival the Core i3-14100F.

Price is the only issue. As is the case with many lower-end SKUs, availability of the Ryzen 5 5500F has been spotty at MSRP. It’s sold north of $120 in many cases, while the Core i3-14100F is available for around $100. AMD has the upside of a 5800X3D upgrade in the future; Intel has the Raptor Lake Refresh stack and DDR5 options. The right choice between them largely comes down to what your future upgrade plans are, especially if inflated RAM and storage prices persist.

Gaming is a major focal point here. You can buy a much better CPU for $150 or $200, but going with a $100 chip such as the 5500F gives you that much more money to spend on a graphics card. Intel still leads in our 1080p geomean with the Core i3-14100F paired with DDR4, though only by 2.9%. That’s enough of a lead to still call it a lead, but we’re not far off noise levels.

Intel comes out ahead overall, but as you can see from our gaming benchmarks, the 14100F and 5500F swap places for the top slot between them from title to title. What was consistent was the uplift the 5500F showed over the 5500, often running ahead by around 7%, and by as much as 10%.

Although the modern dynamic between Intel and AMD shows Team Red ahead in games and Team Blue ahead in applications, the opposite is true here. The lowly quad-core Core i3-14100F can’t muster better multi-threaded performance than the Ryzen 5 5500, and certainly not the 5500F.

That’s despite the fact that the single-threaded performance of the Core i3-14100F is superior. The extra cores on the Ryzen 5 5500F pull their weight in threaded applications, though neither chip is built for much beyond basic office and web productivity. As a host CPU for a server, the nT performance of the Ryzen 5 5500F is a safer bet.

It’s a toss-up between recommending the Core i3-14100F or Ryzen 5 5500F; as mentioned, both have their advantages when it comes time to upgrade. Hopefully the price on the 5500F will come down. As it stands, the extra $20 is an annoyance more so than a dealbreaker, but it would nice to see the 5500F on level footing with the 14100F when it comes to price.

MORE: CPU Benchmark Hierarchy

MORE: AMD vs. Intel

MORE: Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus review

MORE: AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D review

DRAM featuring 4F² memory cells has long been considered one of the holy grails of the DRAM industry, as they promise to reduce cell area by 33% compared with conventional 6F² designs and therefore enable building DRAMs with more memory cells in the same area. However, after working on 4F² memory cells for a couple of decades, Micron has concluded that the architecture offers no meaningful density advantages, increases manufacturing complexity and costs, and has fundamental scaling limitations. This has a dramatic impact on Micron's future plans.

"Micron invented 4F² DRAM," said Scott DeBoer, president and chief technology and products officer at Micron, during the company's event on Wednesday. "The path with 4F² DRAM is always been an option through time, and we have evaluated it and not pursued it due to increased complexity and cost through this past two-decade period of time."

Interestingly, both Samsung and SK hynix still have 4F² memory cells in their roadmaps (according to TechInsights), so Micron's rejection of the technology puts the company on a unique trajectory. Several years ago, the company delayed integration of EUV lithography into its manufacturing flow, contrary to what its rivals did, and still managed to retain competitive positions both in terms of costs and in terms of performance. Therefore, skipping 4F² memory cells is not completely surprising.

4F² is not the future of Micron's DRAM

The main attraction of 4F² DRAM is its theoretically smaller memory cell. The 4F² naming refers to a cell area equivalent to four times the square of the minimum lithographic feature size (F), compared with six times F² for conventional DRAM.

At identical feature dimensions, a 4F² cell occupies approximately 33% less area than a 6F² cell, which could theoretically increase the number of memory cells per wafer by 50%. Such an improvement would reduce manufacturing costs per bit and increase per-device memory capacity even without an equivalent reduction in feature dimensions. However, to make these advantages possible, DRAM makers must develop a suitable transistor architecture and a sufficiently compact capacitor arrangement. This is not easy at all.

The CTO of Micron says that the theoretical advantages of 4F² DRAM do not necessarily translate into higher memory density in practice. DeBoer explained that dimensions and pitch of DRAM capacitors, rather than the nominal area of DRAM transistors, ultimately determine how many memory cells can fit on a wafer. Both 4F² and 6F² transistor structures must fit beneath the capacitors, which means that reducing transistor area alone does not guarantee a corresponding reduction in overall cell size because transistors need a capacitor. Furthermore, Micron believes that 4F² introduces additional manufacturing steps and complexity that increase costs without delivering sufficient benefits.

"It is important to understand the capacitor pitch, the capacitor size, and dimensions, is what sets the DRAM bit density, not whether it is 6F², 4F², 8F²," DeBoer said. "From our investigation of this technology over the past couple of decades, it is a bit of a myth that 4F² actually provides anything versus 6F². It is capacitor pitch that defines the DRAM. You can build the cells, the transistors underlying them in different ways, but they still have to fit under the capacitor pitch, which sets the DRAM [cell size]. So, some of that is just smoke and mirrors in terms of talking about 6F² versus 4F²."

4F² memory cells may curb new process technologies

Instead of adopting the 4F² DRAM cell architecture, Micron plans to continue scaling conventional 6F² DRAM. The company believes it can increase bit density by reducing capacitor pitch and shrinking process technologies even without introducing a fundamentally different transistor architecture.

Advanced lithography, new materials, and wafer bonding should allow Micron to extend planar DRAM scaling for several more generations, according to the company. For example, its upcoming 1δ process technology, scheduled to enter volume production in the second half of 2027, promises a mid-20% improvement in bit density compared with its predecessor. Micron also plans to adopt High-NA EUV lithography for future DRAM generations.

Interestingly, DeBoer fully acknowledges that 4F² DRAM is technically feasible and that Micron itself has manufactured experimental devices based on the architecture. However, its manufacturing complexity and costs become increasingly problematic as feature dimensions shrink, so essentially Micron claims that it can either adopt 4F² or use more sophisticated process technologies, a claim that perhaps implies why China-based CXMT recently praised 4F². Although DeBoer did not identify any specific physical limitations involved, he stated that 4F² has no sustainable scaling path beyond a certain point. This suggests that Micron sees little value in introducing an intermediate architecture that would eventually require another major transition.

"When you look at a scaling path, you can go back a few nodes and absolutely, 4F² can be built back a few nodes, no question about it," DeBoer noted. "It is more complicated, it is more complex, it is more costly, but you can do that. When we look at scaling 4F² beyond where we are sitting today, there it is; it is physics. There are fundamental problems with 4F² scaling that ultimately will lead to 3D DRAM coming in instead of 4F²."

3D DRAM is the future

Indeed, Micron's preferred long-term solution is 3D DRAM, which would increase memory density by stacking memory cells vertically rather than relying exclusively on reductions in their lateral dimensions. Alongside development of multiple next-generation planar DRAM process technologies, the company is already developing multiple generations of 3D DRAM production nodes (which is not surprising, as 3D NAND nodes will rely on fundamental innovations developed for planar processes), although it has not disclosed when the new architecture will enter commercial production. DeBoer indicated that Micron will make the transition when 3D DRAM offers the right combination of density, manufacturing complexity, and cost.

Although both Samsung and SK hynix have 4F² DRAM products in their roadmaps, Micron believes that the assumption that reducing the nominal footprint of DRAM cells improves manufacturing economics is wrong and that extending 6F² scaling and eventually adopting 3D DRAM offers a better long-term strategy.

After years of delays, Atari released its reimagined hybrid VCS console-PC in mid-2021. Now the modern Linux-based AMD APU-powered device is being officially retired with the firm’s decision to shut down the Atari VCS software store early next year (scroll to the end of the page to see the October 21-dated announcement). It isn’t all bad news; the machine already had a PC mode users could take advantage of. But after the store closes, Atari says it will “make an OS update available that allows you to migrate all functionality to your local machine, removing any dependencies on Atari infrastructure for authentication and software.” All players will also get access to an Atari Homebrew App to let users build and add new games independently.

Via the above link and the lengthier statement by the moderator of the Atari Club Discord channel, you can see a few important dates broadcast to those who still cherish their VCS machines. You will still be able to add software to your library via the official store until January 31, 2027. The store will finally be closed on February 1, 2027. Then “After the store closes, our plan is to make an OS update available that allows you to migrate all functionality to your local machine, removing any dependencies on Atari infrastructure for authentication and software,” wrote an Atari Club mod. “Once that transition is complete, we will end support for the platform.”

Importantly, the Atari Home Brew app is being pushed to all players during the above transition period. This will allow anyone to add games to their console and devs to continue to build apps for the VCS and share with the community. If this affects you, it looks like it will be worthwhile joining the Discord community for walkthroughs of OS migration and using the Homebrew app, and more.

What was the Atari VCS (2021)?

The modern VCS shared the same chassis styling as the venerable Atari 2600 (the 1977 console was originally called the Atari Video Computer System, hence VCS). However, under the hood it was a far different beast. It came packing an AMD Ryzen Embedded R1606 APU with 2C/4T CPU and Vega 3 iGPU, 8GB of DDR4 RAM, and 32GB of eMMC storage. However, both RAM and storage were upgradable. The DDR4 could be upgraded using a SODIMM, and there was an M.2 (SATA) SSD slot. Completing the hardware spec, there was also Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n 2.4/5GHz, Bluetooth 4.0, HDMI 2.0, Gigabit Ethernet, and 4x USB 3.1 (2x front, 2x rear).

Even when it was launched, it was possible to run a mainstream OS like Linux, Windows, or Chrome OS on the VCS 2021. But Atari sold the machine with the Atari Custom Linux OS (Debian-based). This enabled a custom UI featuring 100 classic games, its retro-inspired store, and the ability to install popular streaming apps, like Netflix, Disney+, and HBO Max, among other things.

We reviewed the Atari VCS in July 2021, after it had become available to folks who weren’t crowdfunding backers. However, our editor’s nostalgia-tinted glasses were soon shattered by the price ($399), necessity for a keyboard and mouse for streaming apps, poor responsiveness, and its clunky PC mode. An unforgivably noisy fan didn’t help, either. The conclusion at the time was most would be better served by buying a budget mini PC or Raspberry Pi and making their own retro system with a joystick/controller of their choice. Even in 2026, with the component price crunch, there are still mini PC systems with far more grunt and RAM/storage pre-installed than the VCS, for under $400.

Electronic Arts (EA) is closing BioWare and its Edmonton studio, according to a recent letter to employees, which confirms that early development on the next Mass Effect game has also been canceled. The studio was behind Mass Effect and other popular franchises such as Dragon Age, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Neverwinter Nights, and Baldur’s Gate during its 31-year history. EA is focusing on Battlefield, Iron Man, and a Fight Night revival instead.

BioWare, a “legendary studio,” in EA’s words, had a small team working on early development of the next Mass Effect game, but the company “made the decision not to move forward with this development.” BioWare was acquired by EA in 2008, and EA itself went private in August. The next game in the series was first announced in November 2020 and teased that December with an official trailer on EA’s Mass Effect YouTube channel. In 2021, the Mass Effect Legendary Edition remaster of the original trilogy was released. Since then, the studio has been relatively quiet except for Dragon Age: The Veilguard in 2024.

EA spared only a few lines for BioWare, instead focusing on three priorities: Deepen Our Core, Expand Our Reach, and Transform Our Business. Battlefield 6 is touted as “a great success” as the company is focusing on Apex Legends modes, Marvel’s Iron Man, and the next Star Wars Jedi game. “Project Gridiron” falls under the EA Sports heading as a social-first, open-world experience from EA’s American football team, with a Fight Night revival currently in pre-production. The company hasn’t forgotten about The Sims, either, and intends to “prioritize [its] efforts on ‘Project Evergreen.’”

Those impacted will be supported “in exploring other opportunities within EA.” EA did not give a job count, and neither the Mass Effect nor the Dragon Age series was declared dead. BioWare’s released games were also not mentioned.

Veilguard, as EA described it early last year, engaged only about “1.5 million players during the quarter,” which was “down nearly 50% from the company’s expectations.” That reception may have played a partial role in the decision, though EA did not say so. Around the same time, BioWare general manager Gary McKay said that only “a core team” was working on the next Mass Effect game and didn’t “require support from the full studio,” as colleagues were matched “with other teams at EA.”

The move is not entirely unexpected, with job cuts being common in the industry, for example, with Microsoft announcing 3,200 Xbox job cuts in July, citing low margins.

EA did not reveal any dates for major titles, but it plans to discuss its direction and the work ahead with staff at its Global Town Hall in November. For now, it looks like EA is doubling down on its core franchises and dropping the studio to refocus on what’s been working.

Moscow is apparently using commercial fishing trawlers to map undersea cables connecting the U.S. and Europe. According to The Telegraph, it has uncovered over 500 incidents where Russian fishing boats loitered above critical communications cables over a span of four and a half years. All the data came from Global Fishing Watch, which uses satellite data to track vessels over the open ocean. The satellite tracks of these suspicious Russian ships are then cross-referenced over nautical charts that marked the locations of undersea cables.

While the general location of most undersea cables is clearly marked on nautical charts so ships can avoid them, any operation involving undersea cables requires more accurate positioning data. The Telegraph gave three examples of Russian trawlers seemingly surveying critical infrastructure. One ship followed the track of nine separate cables under the Atlantic, including the Atlantic Crossing 1 telecommunications cable and the decommissioned TAT-14 undersea cable owned by Sprint Corporation. Another ship loitered near the trans-Atlantic Hibernia Express cable and then followed the route of the Shefa-2 cable that connects Shetland to the Faroe Islands, while a third partially followed the tracks of the Amitie and Grace Hopper undersea cables, which connects the UK, France, and Spain to the U.S.

These ships have slowed multiple times, sometimes traveling at speeds between two and three knots. A senior naval officer said that the ships suspected of conducting these intelligence activities are large enough to house an uncrewed surface vehicle (USV) or remotely operated vehicle (ROV), and that they could deploy tethered units at very low speeds. “If you put a sonar-equipped ROV 100 meters above a feature of interest, you can map it with millimeter precision,” one naval officer said. A NATO representative also told the publication, “We’re absolutely aware of what Russian civilian fishing ships are up to and where ... Some of these ships have never seen a single fish on their deck.”

Undersea cables are the backbone of the modern interconnected world, and they carry economic activity worth billions, if not trillions of dollars. It’s estimated that around $87 billion worth of economic activity passes through this undersea infrastructure, and that they would be one of the first targets if ever a conflict between NATO and Russia erupts. These trawlers are part of Russia’s “gray-zone” warfare, where the actions of these commercial vessels cannot easily be traced back to the Kremlin.

There have already been multiple incidents of undersea cables getting disrupted across the world. Two undersea cables, one connecting Finland to Germany, and the other to Estonia, were disrupted one after the other in a span of a couple of months in 2024. Taiwan has also detained a Chinese freighter after it was suspected of severing an undersea cable connecting its Penghu Islands to the nation’s main islands, while another Chinese ship has been suspected of cutting an undersea cable connecting it to the U.S. More recently, NATO uncovered a Russian plot to sabotage the two largest undersea cables on Earth, while a cable connecting Australia and New Zealand to Indonesia and Singapore have also been damaged. Iran even threatened to sever undersea cables going through the Strait of Hormuz.

Even though undersea cables are considered critical infrastructure, the distances that they cover make it quite difficult, if not impossible, for nations to conduct constant patrols to protect them. The majority of their length also often sits in international waters, meaning vessels should be able to freely pass over and map undersea cables. While navies shadow these questionable vessels, their suspicious operation is generally not grounds for boarding, detention, or seizure.

In a world where SSDs with up to 256TB capacity are about to enter the scene to compete against hard disk drives that store over 40TB, magnetic tape storage may seem archaic. However, the 25-year-old Linear Tape-Open (LTO) format continues to evolve at a rather impressive pace.

The current LTO-10 generation stores up to 40TB of uncompressed data per cartridge, while HPE, IBM, and Quantum — the companies behind the LTO Program — now envision LTO-14 cartridges with up to 365TB of native capacity. But capacity is not the only advantage of LTO. In fact, the consortium has deliberately slowed its capacity roadmap in a bid to prioritize reliability, cost per terabyte, and manageable backup and recovery times over the previous goal of doubling capacity with every generation.

LTO began in 2000 with the LTO-1 format, which stored just 100GB of data natively and transferred it at 20 MB/s. Since then, capacity increased to 200GB with LTO-2, 400GB with LTO-3, 800GB with LTO-4, 1.5TB with LTO-5, 2.5TB with LTO-6, 6TB with LTO-7, 12TB with LTO-8, and 18TB with LTO-9.

The original LTO-10 media introduced in 2025 increased native capacity to 30TB, whereas an extended-length LTO-10 cartridge announced later increased it further to 40TB.

LTO cartridge capacity has increased by a factor of 400 in about 25 years without changing the form-factor itself. For comparison, the capacity of 3.5-inch hard drives increased by roughly 585 times over the same period, from around 75GB in 2000 to as much as 44 TB today, so tape has evolved at a slower pace. However, LTO has evolved without dramatic changes in internal complexity.

Two scaling vectors

The 40TB LTO-10 cartridge is noteworthy because its additional capacity is enabled by higher recording density and literally longer tape. The LTO-10 format uses 15,104 data tracks (enabled by the new barium ferrite recording layer), up 68.5% from 8,960 tracks with LTO-9, and combines them with higher linear density. To make this possible, LTO-10 uses a redesigned high-bandwidth servo system with a low-mass mechanism that enables the head to follow increasingly narrow tracks accurately, including in environments subject to shock and vibration.

Both 30TB and 40TB LTO-10 media use a strontium-doped barium ferrite (BaFe) recording layer, but the 40TB version uses a new Aramid base film that is thinner and smoother and therefore enables manufacturers to put more tape into the same cartridge. According to MagStor, the thinner substrate increases tape length from approximately 1,035 meters with the 30TB cartridge to around 1,335 meters with the 40TB version. Meanwhile, the 40TB cartridge works with the same LTO-10 drives as the existing 30TB media.

Therefore, modern LTO has at least two major scaling vectors: manufacturers can record more bits on a given area of tape, and can put more tape into a cartridge. Meanwhile, with LTO-10, the consortium had to drop backwards compatibility, which we will detail further within this article.

There appears to be plenty of room left on the tape front. Back in 2020, IBM and Fujifilm demonstrated a strontium ferrite tape technology with an areal density of 317 Gb/in², which they said could theoretically enable a cartridge capable of storing 580TB. The prototype used tracks only 56.2nm wide and a 29nm TMR read sensor, which proved that magnetic tape could reach capacities vastly beyond commercially available LTO products.

Capacity is not everything

Ironically, despite considerable technological headroom, the LTO Program has recently made its roadmap considerably less aggressive.

When HPE, IBM, and Quantum extended the roadmap through LTO-14 in 2022, they expected capacity to roughly double every generation. The plan envisioned 72TB for LTO-11, 144TB for LTO-12, 288TB for LTO-13, and a whopping 576TB native — or 1.44PB compressed — for LTO-14. But that changed in November 2025, when the three companies introduced the new roadmap for LTO that significantly slows down capacity scaling. The current roadmap targets 70TB native for LTO-11, 120TB for LTO-12, 210TB for LTO-13, and 365TB for LTO-14.

While the new roadmap is somewhat less impressive, it does not necessarily indicate that tape technology has encountered a physical scaling wall. The developers claim the revised targets are intended to prioritize reliability, affordability, efficiency, and cost per terabyte. The consortium also specifically says that lowering maximum cartridge capacities should help reduce the amount of time required to store and recover data, which is a legitimate argument even though it looks like an attempt to make a 'feature' out of a limitation.

"AI has turned archives into strategic assets," said Stephen Bacon, Vice President, Data Protection Solutions Product Management, HPE. "The new 40 TB LTO-10 cartridge will help enterprise-class organizations — across healthcare, financial services, media, research, manufacturing, the public sector and beyond — consolidate petabytes efficiently, strengthen cyber resiliency with true offline air-gapping, and keep long-term retention affordable and sustainable."

Bandwidth is becoming one of tape's more obvious limitations. LTO-8 offered 360 MB/s of native bandwidth, LTO-9 increased this to 400 MB/s, and LTO-10 remains at 400 MB/s, although hardware compression can boost effective throughput to as much as 1,200 MB/s when data can achieve the assumed 2.5:1 compression ratio.

As a result, while maximum native cartridge capacity increased from 12TB with LTO-8 to 40TB with LTO-10 — a 3.33X increase — native transfer performance improved by only around 11%. At 400 MB/s, writing 40TB sequentially would theoretically take around 28 hours (without the overheads). Future LTO generations will likely increase performance, but the consortium has not yet published transfer rate targets for LTO-11 and its successors.

No backwards compatibility

One thing to note about LTO-10 is that it has broken a long-standing LTO tradition, which is backward compatibility. Up until LTO-7, new drives could generally read cartridges from two generations earlier and write media from one generation earlier. LTO-8 and LTO-9 reduced compatibility to one previous generation. However, because LTO-10 redesigns its head, its backwards compatibility disappears completely: an LTO-10 drive reads and writes only LTO-10 media, although the 30TB and 40TB cartridges are of course interchangeable.

This creates a natural problem for operators that need to maintain archives for decades. Once they adopt LTO-10, they either must migrate all their archives to the new format from LTO-8 or LTO-9 cartridges, or keep the old drives in their fleet, which may be increasingly difficult.

Demand remains strong

Perhaps counterintuitively, the AI boom could strengthen demand for tape. AI infrastructure produces enormous datasets, but not every training dataset, checkpoint, model, log, or generated asset needs to remain indefinitely on expensive SSDs or HDDs.

LTO capacity shipments reached 160.3 exabytes in 2025, down 9% year-over-year. However, shipments in the first quarter of 2026 jumped 57% YoY, according to figures reported by the LTO consortium. The organization attributed the increase to AI-related data growth, traditional archival demand, cyber-resilient backups, continued LTO-9 adoption, and the beginning of the LTO-10 transition.

"We are seeing unprecedented data growth combined with increasing cost, energy, and cyber resilience pressures across the industry," said Hugues Meyrath, CEO, Quantum. "As organizations adapt to this new reality, tape is increasingly viewed as a strategic component of modern data infrastructure, delivering predictable economics and resilient long-term data retention at scale."

Indeed, tape has a number of fundamental advantages that are not going to disappear any time soon. Tape provides vast capacities at a low cost per terabyte, cartridges consume virtually no power while sitting offline, hardware encryption protects data, and physically removing a cartridge from a drive provides a genuine air gap against network-based attacks. LTO also supports the LTFS file system, which maintains indexing information on tape and makes archived files considerably easier to manage.

Meanwhile, tape's disadvantages are equally fundamental and are not going away: tape is sequential and therefore cannot provide anything resembling the random-access performance of HDDs or SSDs. Although nobody expects something similar from it.

LTO isn't going anywhere

25 years after LTO-1 offered 100GB per cartridge, LTO-10 can store as much as 40TB, and the roadmap calls for 365TB with LTO-14 several years down the road. Perhaps more importantly, laboratory demonstrations indicate that magnetic tape itself has considerable scaling potential beyond today's commercial products. Meanwhile, instead of pushing capacity as quickly as technologically possible, the LTO consortium is now deliberately balancing density with reliability, performance, and cost.

For a storage technology which demise has been predicted repeatedly for decades, LTO not only continues to evolve at a predictable pace, but its adoption is growing, while its relevance remains on a high level. Only time will tell whether it remains relevant for another quarter of a century, but its steady progress certainly increases this possibility.

There are a host of great laptop deals at Best Buy at the moment, but one of my favorites today is this fantastic $950 saving on an RTX 5070-powered Alienware 16X Aurora gaming laptop with OLED display for $1,949.99. A significant drop in price from the original $2,899.99 list price. A great choice for a gaming laptop that also doubles as a competent computer for work and studying. The combination of powerful graphics, CPU, and gorgeous display will bring your games and media to life.

● Grab this SSD deal at Best Buy

The Alienware 16X Aurora is a premium gaming laptop with a Core Ultra 9 290HX processor, a high-performance CPU featuring 24 cores and a boost clock speed of up to 5.5GHz. This is one of Intel's top laptop processors and an excellent gaming CPU. For the graphics, this model of the 16X Aurora uses Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5070 Laptop GPU, which is an excellent choice not only for powering your games to life, but also for getting the most out of the Aurora’s crisp 16-inch OLED 2560x1600-pixel display.

Having an OLED screen means the 16X Aurora will have an insanely low gray-to-gray response time of just 0.03ms, excellent for super smooth motion when gaming, plus the display sports a rapid refresh rate of 240Hz and a maximum screen brightness of 500 nits. Oh, and of course, amazing contrast, inky blacks, and eye-popping color representation.

Finishing up on what major components are inside this model of the Alienware 16X Aurora, we have 16GB of DDR5-5600 MT/s memory and a spacious 1TB SSD for storage, ample room for your favorite games.

We reviewed the Alienware 16X Aurora gaming laptop back in September of this year, praising the excellent 16-inch OLED display, solid gaming and productivity performance, sturdy, understated design, broad port selection, and good upgrade prospects. Making it an easy decision to award the laptop 4 out of 5 stars.

We tested the less powerful variant of the 16X Aurora, in its entry-level configuration, featuring a Core Ultra 7 270HX Plus processor, a GeForce RTX 5060 GPU, and 16GB of dual-channel DDR5-5600 RAM. It performed well against its peers, as you can see from the chart below, but bear in mind that the performance of this model will be higher due to the more powerful CPU and GPU combination.

So if you're looking for a powerful and well-built gaming laptop that also comes with a gorgeous 16-inch OLED display, this could be the option for you. With a price drop of $950, this is a great moment to snag a deal on a new gaming laptop.

Building a new gaming PC, especially one fit for 4K gameplay, isn't cheap at the moment. PC hardware prices have shot up over the last year, with RAM, SSDs, and new graphics cards all becoming extremely expensive. Still, if you're thinking about building a new rig or upgrading your existing one, you'll want to consider this Newegg combo deal that combines the formidable AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D with 32GB DDR5 and a Gigabyte X870E motherboard for just $1,029.99 right now.

● Check out this deal at Newegg

This kit means you'll save $238.99 by buying these components together compared to picking them up separately. That doesn't include the freebies you get with this deal, either, with a Cooler Master Elite Liquid Cooler 240 CPU AIO included for free, worth $79.99, along with a copy of Onimusha: Way of the Sword, worth $69.99.

This kit gives you the bare bones you'll need for your next 4K gaming PC. The extra savings, whether it's the $238.99 on the three parts here, or the full $388.97 if you include the freebies, will give you spare cash that you can put towards other parts for your build, whether that's a GPU, case, or any peripherals you need.

The AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D is the real showstopper in this bundle. This is one of our favorite gaming CPUs, and one of the fastest, as our CPU benchmark data will confirm. You won't find better options for gaming than an X3D chip from AMD; the tech has allowed AMD to dominate the market in recent years, with the extra 3D V-Cache giving the total L3 cache a boost to 96MB. That'll have a noticeable impact on gaming performance, with your PC needing to drop down and rely on the slower system RAM less.

This is a Zen 5 CPU with eight cores, and all eight are able to take full advantage of that increased 96MB L3 cache. It has a standard clock speed of 4.7 GHz, which can boost up to 5.2 GHz. As the benchmarks show, the end result for gamers is higher, more stable frame rates compared to any non-X3D rivals.

The 9800X3D needs an AM5 motherboard to power it, which is what you're getting with the Gigabyte X870E Aorus Elite Wi-Fi 7 Ice. This is a mid-tier offering from Gigabyte, with Ice referring to its fully white colorway, that comes with a range of gaming-friendly features. It has no less than 12 USB ports at the back, including two USB-C ports that are rated for speeds of 40 Gbps.

You also get four M.2 sockets for a whole set of SSDs, with three of them rated for PCIe 5.0 speeds over four lanes with this 9800X3D installed. One further slot is rated for PCIe 4.0 SSDs, too. Fast networking is included here, with 2.5G Ethernet and Wi-Fi 7 support as standard. You also get the ability to install a whopping 256GB of DDR5 RAM over four DIMM slots, with speeds of up to 8,200 MT/s.

While this deal doesn’t quite stretch to 256GB (sky-high RAM prices make that impossible at the moment), you’re still getting a fast set of 32GB memory from G.Skill. This G.Skill Trident Z5 DDR5 RAM is white to match the motherboard, with two 16GB modules offering speeds of 6,000 MT/s. It's RGB, too, which you can configure at the top. It has CAS and memory timings of 36-36-36-76.

Newegg combo deals come and go, but the $1,029.99 sale price for this 9800X3D bundle with a Gigabyte motherboard and 32GB of DDR5 RAM makes it one you'll want to pick up while you can. You've got a core set of parts here to start building out a 4K rig, especially with the Cooler Master AIO for free on top, as long as you get a GPU to match. Expect to see a deal like this sell out quickly.

OpenAI announced in a press release on Oct. 21 that researchers working under its “Patch the Planet” cybersecurity initiative used its AI model GPT-5.6 Sol to uncover critical security vulnerabilities in PHP (an open-source programming language that runs an estimated 70% of the internet). After the discovery, the company says it coordinated a coalition of researchers, PHP maintainers, security providers, and government cybersecurity agencies to fix the issues over two months. The company attributed the lengthy timeline to the task's complexity, which required major changes to the PHP engine.

The PHP Foundation has released patched versions PHP 8.2.35, 8.3.36, 8.4.27, and 8.5.12 to fix the vulnerabilities. PHP 8.1 and older versions will not receive official fixes. The coordinated release was originally scheduled for Oct. 22, but was brought forward to Oct. 21 following premature disclosures on Oct. 20, which led to public outcry.

OpenAI says every site using PHP can now safely upgrade its version to stay secure. The company highlights the incident — which it considers one of the biggest cybersecurity discoveries of 2026, given PHP’s ubiquity — as an example of the Defender's Window concept in action. OpenAI introduced the concept after its models hacked Hugging Face; it describes a critical, narrow timeframe during which organizations can use advanced frontier AI models to find, patch, and strengthen their cybersecurity defenses before those same AI-driven attack capabilities become widely available to malicious threat actors.

Operating as part of the Patch the Planet program, researchers from Calif, a California-based cybersecurity firm and the program's founding partner, began auditing PHP with OpenAI tools on July 30, 2026, at the PHP Foundation's request. The Foundation had known about the underlying flaw since 2024 but couldn't identify an exploitation method or a fix. Calif researcher Ryan A. first identified the exploitable vulnerability on Aug. 11, followed by OpenAI researchers that same day. Subsequently, another cybersecurity firm, Wiz, independently identified an additional vulnerability.

The two vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, involve flaws in how PHP manages computer memory and handles errors. The first occurs when PHP runs out of allocated memory while processing a request, potentially leaving behind incomplete internal data that the engine may later mistakenly treat as valid. The second involves a related problem in which a fatal error leaves PHP pointing to memory that has already been freed, allowing subsequent requests to access or corrupt it. Under certain conditions, attackers can exploit these weaknesses remotely — without needing login credentials — to execute malicious code on affected servers, potentially taking control of websites.

Using AI, the researchers also demonstrated that the flaws could expose sensitive information stored in server memory, including passwords, authentication tokens, and API keys. Most concerning, the vulnerabilities exist in PHP's core engine, meaning websites can be affected even if their application code has no security flaws. Both vulnerabilities received a critical severity score of 9.2 out of 10.

OpenAI says human developers and security teams examined the underlying code but couldn't fully resolve the flaws, allowing them to persist for two years after discovery. Meanwhile, AI-wielding researchers demonstrated practical ways to exploit it within two weeks. Conversely, one could argue that the flaws would never have been exploitable without AI, making them effectively harmless.

However, OpenAI is challenging this view with its Defender's Window concept. The company argues that powerful, revolutionary technology will inevitably be used by bad actors. It therefore maintains that it is a collective responsibility to act proactively to address any potential exploitable flaws. Anthropic's Claude Mythos recently identified 'thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities' in 'every major operating system and every major web browser.’

Google’s tensor processing units (TPUs) — its custom AI chips — now serve AI in production at Meta (creator of the widely used PyTorch AI framework) through a new PyTorch-native version of the SGLang inference engine, announced on Google’s developer blog. A matching version of vLLM, another widely used inference engine, was also announced as open source.

Previously, both engines used Google’s own JAX AI framework to run on TPUs. The new versions allow the hardware to be a native option for PyTorch, mostly without rewriting.

“SGLang-TorchTPU is running in production at Meta today” after “a close three-way collaboration between Meta, Google, and the SGLang team,” said Meta’s PyTorch-TPU lead Zongwei Zhou. That team works at RadixArk, a startup founded by SGLang’s creators, which built the engine with Google and Meta. The engine, he said, gives Meta “a remarkably mature, PyTorch-native serving stack.”

Jana van Greunen, director of PyTorch engineering at Meta, added in Google’s TorchTPU post that Meta “cannot be constrained by a single hardware architecture” and that TorchTPU “enables us to deploy our PyTorch workloads to Google TPUs.” Google said it co-developed TorchTPU with Meta’s PyTorch team.

This is not Meta’s first attempt at using TPUs. Google calls PyTorch/XLA, the older bridge from PyTorch to TPUs, a "predecessor" to the new TorchTPU, and SemiAnalysis reported last year that Meta research teams used TPUs through this bridge from 2020 to 2023 before Meta canceled those contracts. Google’s PyTorch-on-TPU push was aimed mainly at Meta, which did not want to migrate to JAX.

Although it is unclear where Meta’s production TPUs sit, talks last year reportedly included Google Cloud TPU rentals in 2026 with purchases in 2027, and Meta later reportedly signed a multi-year rental agreement.

The announcement came one day after Amazon said it was open-sourcing TorchNeuron, its own native PyTorch backend for its Trainium2 and Trainium3 chips, at the same PyTorch Conference. Both moves appear to be aimed at loosening Nvidia’s software lock-in.

On performance, a tuned vLLM setup serving Moonshot AI’s open-weight, 2.8-trillion-parameter Kimi K3 model reportedly tops 700 tokens per second for a single user on the seventh-generation Ironwood TPU. That speed figure comes from Inferact, the startup founded by vLLM’s creators that helped Google build vLLM-TorchTPU. Its test ran 16 Ironwood chips with speculative decoding, a method of speeding up large language model inference with a small draft model, against vLLM’s published setup on 16 Nvidia GB200s, which reached 452 tokens per second. Its kernels for Kimi K3 and Qwen 3.8 27B deliver roughly 1.4 to 2 times the GB200 baseline’s throughput at small batch sizes without speculative decoding.

SGLang-TorchTPU will keep adding models, starting with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and Reflection Beam. It's also working toward Day 0 TPU support for new open models, meaning support on release day, by the first quarter of 2027, according to RadixArk. Google, Meta and RadixArk plan to share more at SGLang Summit 2026, Nov. 12–13 in San Francisco.

A computer, found hidden behind a fridge in a Japanese hotel room, was responsible for sending around 480,000 phishing emails, Hackread reports. The computer was placed there by a Chinese couple who lived locally, and the pair have now been arrested for both the hidden phishing PC and a separate slew of purchases that were made using stolen credit card details. Ye Jiafeng, 39, and his wife, Shen Qi, 39, now face multiple charges including fraudulent obstruction of business and trespass as well as computer fraud.

The scam began on 15 May, 2025, when Ye connected the computer to hotel Wi-Fi and then hid it behind a fridge. There it stayed, sending around 480,000 emails. When it was discovered, the machine had around 2.4 million email addresses, presumably just waiting to be phished. The emails claimed to be from credit card companies and sent unsuspecting recipients to fake websites in an attempt to capture their credit card information. It's believed that the computer was administered remotely, allowing it to remain in situ without any in-person maintenance required.

Ultimately, the computer would likely have remained in place if the recipient of one of the phishing emails hadn't reached out to the hotel. The hotel's IP address was found in metadata linked to the messages, and staff discovered the computer before reporting it to the police. Police are still investigating whether the two scammers were the brains of the operation or simply working for someone else.

While phishing was the couple's chosen scam this time around, it isn't their first foray into using technology to part victims from their cash. Ye and Shen are claimed to have used credit card details stored on a smartphone to buy items in Kobe. But that wasn't the only phone that they had — media reports claim that police found 74 of them at their home, and the couple had spent 10 million yen (around $63,000) of other people's money using stolen card details since 2024. It's unknown whether the phones found by police account for all of those that were used, or if there were others that have yet to be identified.

Phishing has long been a lucrative option for criminals around the globe, but it has also spawned a spin-off industry recently. A China-based phishing-as-a-service operation was dismantled by the FBI earlier this year. The service made it easier for criminals to create scam sites using AI and is believed to have been responsible for almost $2 billion in losses and 3.87 million stolen credit cards.

Intel on Wednesday announced that it had started installing production tools at its Fab 62 in Arizona, and the fab is on track for mass production by late 2028. The company also reported progress on its Ohio One manufacturing complex and confirmed that it has integrated High-NA EUV lithography into high-volume manufacturing (HVM). Meanwhile, Intel continues to invest in its leading-edge process technology R&D, advanced packaging, and photomask production capabilities in the U.S., which puts the company ahead of the competition.

"There is an important difference between technologies made in America and technologies that are truly American-made," wrote Naga Chandrasekaran, executive vice president and chief technology and operations officer, Intel Foundry. "The difference lies in the research and development process that transforms ideas into manufacturable technologies."

Fab 62 to begin operations in 2028

Intel completed construction of its Fab 62 shell some time ago; now it is time for the company to begin installing production tools, which is what it is doing now. Intel expects the new facility to become operational before the end of 2028, although it has not disclosed when it intends to begin high-volume production or which nodes it will produce.

Intel has not officially assigned Intel 14A to Fab 62, although the facility has been discussed as a potential manufacturing site for the node. Meanwhile, there is an important distinction between Intel's original plans for Fab 62 and its current commitments. When Intel announced Fab 52 and Fab 62 in Arizona, it said the two facilities would manufacture its most advanced process technologies, including Intel 20A (2nm-class) and 18A (1.8nm-class). Intel subsequently designated Fab 52 for Intel 18A manufacturing. Yet, Fab 62 remains unassigned.

Given Intel's manufacturing process roadmap disclosed earlier this year, Fab 62 will be able to make chips on 18A, 18A-P, and 14A nodes. Intel currently manufactures Intel 18A chips at the neighboring Fab 52, whereas Fab 62 could potentially accommodate either additional Intel 18A capacity or the company’s next-generation Intel 14A process technology. However, Intel has yet to confirm its plans for the facility.

The facility will become Intel's Fab 62, the sixth high-volume semiconductor manufacturing fab at its Ocotillo campus, which has served as one of the company’s primary production sites for decades.

Intel has also not revealed Fab 62's planned wafer processing capacity, or the amount of capital expenditures required to complete the facility. Nevertheless, the installation of production equipment indicates that the project has progressed beyond construction of the building itself. The new fab will expand Intel’s manufacturing footprint in Arizona, where the company already produces leading-edge processors and operates advanced packaging, assembly, and testing facilities.

Intel confirms High-NA EUV insertion into mass production

Another noteworthy disclosure concerns Intel's deployment of High-NA EUV lithography. Intel was the first chipmaker to install a commercial High-NA EUV scanner at its D1X fab near Hillsboro, Oregon, and subsequently integrated the tool into high-volume manufacturing to produce its Panther Lake and other chips.

The Gordon Moore Park at Ronler Acres in Oregon is where Intel develops its most advanced logic process technologies and initiates volume production of the latest processors. Usage of High-NA EUV to produce select tiles for Panther Lake CPUs at D1X is a natural fit for the development fab, as it helps Intel to better understand how these lithography systems work. Meanwhile, it seems (though Intel has not explicitly confirmed) that, for now, High-NA EUV scanners are used to produce the same circuits as Low-NA EUV machines, so the use of next-generation lithography systems does not necessarily provide significant advantages over existing litho scanners.

Ohio One reaches another construction milestone

Intel has also made progress with its 'Ohio One' manufacturing complex in New Albany, Ohio. Construction workers recently installed the first major structural truss at the site's first semiconductor fab, which represents a milestone in the development of the company's manufacturing operations in the state. The project is clearly an important part of Intel's long-term strategy to expand domestic production of chips using leading-edge process technologies for years to come.

Unfortunately, Intel did not provide an updated construction schedule for Ohio One or disclose when the first fab is expected to begin operations. Intel also did not reveal which process technology the facility will eventually use or the estimated manufacturing capacity it will provide. Therefore, while construction continues, which is good news, the announcement does not clarify exactly when Ohio One will contribute to Intel's output.

Other investments across the U.S.

In addition to leading-edge manufacturing capacity in the U.S., Intel continues to invest in advanced packaging technologies. Oregon serves as the company's main research and development center for advanced logic and 3D interconnect technologies, while Arizona hosts advanced packaging R&D, assembly, and testing operations. Intel uses its site in New Mexico to produce its complex multi-chiplet processors relying on advanced packaging methods — starting with modest EMIB and all the way to next-generation EMIB-T and Foveros technologies.

Also, Intel recently broke ground on a new photomask manufacturing facility in Santa Clara, California. The new facility will be an important part of Intel's supply chain in the U.S., as the company will be the only chipmaker in America to develop and produce chips using leading-edge nodes completely in the U.S. (both Samsung and TSMC currently lack leading-edge process R&D in America; they do not run their own photomask shops in the U.S., and Samsung has abandoned its plan to build an advanced packaging facility in Texas). Of course, Intel critically depends on tools from Europe and materials from Japan, but even as its major rivals invest hundreds of billions in their U.S. production capacity, Intel remains ahead.

To highlight its American supply chain, Intel disclosed that its U.S. operations involve more than 4,500 suppliers across 49 states, as its annual domestic expenditures exceed $29 billion. The company stressed that domestic semiconductor leadership requires not only wafer fabrication capacity but also research, process development, advanced packaging, and a comprehensive supply chain.

At one point in time, it was the fastest PCIe Gen 4 drive you could buy. Now, the next generation of PCIe 5.0 drives is available, but the 4TB Samsung 990 Pro still offers extremely fast performance and whopping amounts of capacity in a single-sided M.2 2280 form factor. The main issue at the moment is price. Thanks to the AI boom driving up the prices of memory and storage, SSDs have reached insane highs, so to be able to take advantage of a large 27% discount in these times is nothing to be sniffed at. The 4TB Samsung 990 Pro has fallen from $1,099 to this new price of $799.90, a saving of over $300. This works out as roughly 20 cents per Gigabyte of storage capacity.

● Grab this SSD deal at Amazon

Having reviewed the Samsung 990 Pro 4TB when it was released, we found it to be one of the best 4TB SSDs on the market and among the best SSDs overall. The 990 Pro boasts maximum sequential reads of 7,450 MB/s and sequential writes of 6,900 MB/s, with random reads/writes coming in at 1.6 million and 1.55 million IOPS, respectively, while endurance is rated for 2,400 TBW.

Samsung uses 236-layer TLC V-NAND to achieve its 4TB capacity, while also using a single-sided design, making the 990 Pro ideal for use in computers where space is a finite resource. When we tested the Samsung 990 Pro 4TB, we found it scored above the competition on almost every test. On 3DMark's storage test, it had the lowest latency result, a big plus for responsive load times in gaming.

The Samsung 990 Pro is also excellent at sustaining strong write performance. In our IOMeter sustained sequential write tests, the 4TB 990 Pro was able to maintain a speed of 6.2 GB/s for 75 seconds thanks to its generous 10GB of pSLC cache. Once the data spills over into the TLC, it operates at 1.6 GB/s. The Samsung 990 Pro is also a leader in power efficiency, delivering 421.1 MB/s per watt. That number puts it ahead of all competitors but the Addlink A93 4TB and Lexar NM790 4TB.

The Samsung 990 Pro is certainly nowhere near the all-time low prices of years gone by, and I'm not sure at the moment when, if at all, we'll ever see those low prices again on storage, certainly not for some considerable time. If you want 4TB of storage now, then the Samsung 990 Pro is a formidable choice; just try to grab it when there's as much of a discount as possible.

Elon Musk says ASML and other critical semiconductor equipment suppliers have expedited shipments for the ambitious Terafab semiconductor manufacturing facility, supporting his aggressive timeline for the joint megaproject between Tesla and SpaceX. He made the announcement during a live broadcast of SpaceX's Q3 2026 earnings call on X yesterday, October 20. Musk also said the company is targeting volume chip production at the project's primary facility in Gibbons Creek, Texas, by the third or fourth quarter of 2028, emphasizing that the timeline is highly aspirational and carries "big error bars."

"These are very aggressive dates, and we're very appreciative of ASML and all of our other suppliers in accelerating equipment deliveries in order to achieve this outcome," said Musk, CEO of both companies behind Terafab. SpaceX plans to manufacture its first experimental test chip at its research fabrication facility in Austin, Texas, around Q2 2027.

Aside from Terafab, Musk also outlined near-term ambitions for his AI companies during the broadcast, saying he expects them to have 2.5 to 3 gigawatts (GW) of computing capacity active by the end of 2026. He also stated he is highly confident about bringing an incremental 10 GW online in 2027, saying he "would be surprised" if they do not hit a total of 13 GW of AI compute by the end of 2027.

Meanwhile, the next-largest project by planned capacity, the now-restructured 10 GW Project Stargate, was expected to reach full capacity in the 2030s. Meta's 5 GW Hyperion also has a similar timeline. To achieve the 13 GW milestone, Musk revealed that SpaceX and xAI are aggressively procuring upcoming next-generation NVIDIA architecture. He announced plans to get a massive 440,000-GPU Nvidia "Vera Rubin" training cluster online by the end of Q2 2027.

Shifting back to Terafab, Musk also boasted that once fully scaled and operational, the sheer commercial value of Terafab's advanced chip output will place it within the top 20 global country GDPs from a single physical building. For context, the 20th country on the list is Switzerland, with a GDP of around $1.14 trillion. The facility is a planned multi-billion-dollar, vertically integrated chip factory in Texas, with an ambitious goal of manufacturing 1 terawatt (TW) of AI computing power per year. Terafab will fabricate logic, memory, and advanced packaging internal architectures in one place. The project's massive planned output has mandated various collaborations across the semiconductor supply chain. Terafab will utilize traditional extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography systems utilizing Intel's 14A manufacturing node technology.

Intel officially joined the Terafab venture in April 2026 to help co-develop and refactor silicon fabrication technology, providing access to its state-of-the-art 14A manufacturing process. ASML, the world's sole commercial supplier of the $400 million EUV lithography systems required for high-volume, leading-edge chip production, is perhaps the project's most critical partner. Terafab's first EUV tool was reportedly slated for delivery in mid-2027, according to unofficial sources. It remains unclear if this is the expedited timeline Musk referred to in the broadcast.

Other major suppliers include American equipment manufacturers Applied Materials, Lam Research, and KLA Corporation, as well as Japan's Tokyo Electron. These companies will provide front-end processing, metrology, and process control machinery. Tesla and SpaceX are also in talks with about 10 South Korean equipment makers, including Hanmi Semiconductor, known for advanced packaging equipment, and HPSP, a high-pressure hydrogen annealing equipment manufacturer, as well as firms providing specialized piping components and process valves.

Musk's announcement says that several of these suppliers are expediting supply to Terafab, even as capacity remains tight across the semiconductor supply chain. The facility, which aims to mitigate future shortfalls of cutting-edge AI processors from external foundries like TSMC, will supply the chips for Musk's xAI clusters, self-driving vehicles, Optimus humanoid robots, and SpaceX's orbital AI data center, as well as the broader AI industry.

However, many experts have questioned the validity of Musk's 1 TW Terafab ambition. For context, research firm Gartner estimates the total global AI-optimized data center capacity is roughly 44 GW as of late 2026, 4.4% of Terafab's planned output. Although global AI computing capacity has grown by roughly 3.3x to 3.4x per year since 2022, according to EpochAI.

While Windows overclockers have spent years lazily sliding UI controls to adjust frequency curves and tweak voltages inside Ryzen Master, Linux users have largely had to treat their CPU tuning like an archaeological dig into the opaque veil of UEFI/BIOS firmware. Well, rejoice, Linux users, as AMD has officially published a fresh set of patches for the Linux kernel introducing AOD (AMD Overclocking Driver) support for Ryzen processors, Phoronix reports.

Instead of forcing developers to reverse-engineer closed-source firmware hooks or rely on messy, machine-specific ACPI workarounds, this new kernel driver is a direct pipeline to AMD's platform adjustments. By exposing core tuning capabilities straight through the standard sysfs interface, AMD is laying down an official, upstreamed foundation for software-level CPU management.

Right out of the gate, the driver handles platform-level SMT toggling, memory clock visibility, and power tunables. That's right: you can now toggle Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) dynamically through this driver interface. That works through the CPU hotplugging mechanism and acts as a clean alternative to passing the old 'nosmt' boot parameter to the kernel. The new driver also allows real-time monitoring of memory clocks, and initial power controls are being wired up, too.

Now, if you're expecting a polished, one-click official AMD application equivalent to Ryzen Master for Linux, just pump the brakes. AMD is following its open-source amdgpu graphics driver playbook here, building the kernel plumbing and then leaving the user-space presentation layer entirely up to the community. That means you're going to have to wait for utilities like CoreCtrl to build out interfaces for this new driver, but it shouldn't be long now before that work gets underway in earnest.

This approach is arguably a better fit for the Linux philosophy anyway. Because the controls are being exposed via clean kernel sysfs nodes, it won't be long before independent developers integrate these knobs into powerhouse open-source monitoring and tuning suites, or even write dedicated desktop environment extensions specifically for the purpose of tweaking Ryzen processors.

The new patches are currently winding their way through review on the mailing lists, meaning mainstream kernel integration is on the horizon. For a DIY enthusiast who loves squeezing every last MHz out of silicon while maintaining a fully open-source software stack, this is easily the most exciting hardware-enablement milestone I've seen in a long time.

President Donald Trump has issued a call for data center builders and AI hyperscalers to pay communities a dividend in order to overcome energy-related price hikes, or even to reduce prices, in order to make data centers more palatable to local communities. In a post on Truth Social post, he warned that data centers would be mandated not only to make their own electricity, as he has previously stated, but also to give or sell excess energy back to the local community.

Local communities all over the United States have protested against AI data centers, often owing to their outsized impact on local communities. Rising electricity costs, noise pollution, water shortages, air pollution, deforestation, and more are the things that small communities have to deal with because of these companies.

To ease the pain of local communities, Trump is demanding that these large companies provide the communities they affect with something that will hopefully make their presence more acceptable. The Trump Administration is keen to stay ahead of China in the AI arms race and is looking for solutions to win back some favor by making the data centers pay something back to the affected communities; how that will practically transpire is yet to be seen. Considering the electricity-focused post, the dividend might be in the form of partially paying rising electricity costs to alleviate a pain point that directly affects many homes within the vicinity of data centers. The Trump Administration had ordered these companies to make their own electricity, as we’ve covered previously. Excess electricity from their generation could be used to further lower the electricity cost for the locals, including a recently passed act that orders data centers to shoulder the cost for grid upgrades to avoid taking it from the taxes of local communities.

“Data Centers that were highly unpopular in a certain area have become extremely popular when a financial deal is struck.” Trump further says in his post, aiming to have more data centers built, “MAKE DEALS, and get them built!!!," the President said in closing.

Whether the dividends will be enough to win over communities is yet to be known, as the economic aspect is only one facet of the problem. There are still plenty of problems to face; enormous water consumption, ecological damage, and pollution are still major challenges that make AI data centers a hard sell anywhere they’re located.

Qualcomm has told employees it will cut jobs worldwide after its annual performance reviews, and it expects to begin informing affected employees in November. According to a Reuters report, CEO Cristiano Amon framed the move as a “performance-focused reduction” intended to build a “stronger performance culture,” stating that the company will consider organizational needs, business priorities, and employees’ skills and expertise when determining affected positions.

“The reduction will address employees who have consistently fallen short of expectations,” said Amon. The memo did not specify which departments would be affected or how many jobs would be cut. The company had roughly 52,000 employees at the end of its 2025 fiscal year, typically in late September.

Qualcomm, one of the world’s largest smartphone chip manufacturers with customers including Apple, Xiaomi, and Samsung, has been hit by an industry-wide decline in consumer electronics sales as rising memory costs reduce demand. Its shares have risen just 1.5% in 2026, compared to gains of almost 60% for the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index.

As a result, Qualcomm is strategically pivoting to AI infrastructure and edge computing, following a broadening trend across the semiconductor industry. The company unveiled its AI200 and AI250 AI inference accelerators in October 2025. After its latest earnings report projected lower quarterly profits than initially estimated, the company said that growth in its data center business would offset any lost revenue by fiscal year 2027.

Qualcomm’s layoff decision comes as it tries to position itself for future growth. While mobile chips remain its core business, its best future opportunities might lie in data center silicon, automotive platforms, personal computing, and edge computing, and all those fields require specialized engineering talent. A performance-based reduction could let the company retain its most valuable employees in those fields while cutting duplicated roles, lower-performing teams, and positions that no longer fit its strategy.

"As we have expanded the business, so have the competencies ⁠and skills ​we require," Amon wrote. "We must have the right ​people in the right roles so they can perform at their best and the company can continue ​to succeed." The move comes on the back of Q3 2026 financial results that included a 4% year-on-year decline in revenue and 25% lower net income. The core handset business recorded a 20% decline in revenue on the year, too. The company reportedly recorded $97 million in severance-related restructuring charges in the first nine months of its fiscal year.

Qualcomm’s move is part of a larger industry transition, largely driven by AI. After several years of aggressive hiring, many tech companies are now trimming their workforce to fund AI ambitions. Meta announced plans to cut 8,000 jobs to fund AI infrastructure. Even as companies are cutting jobs that don’t fit their AI roadmap, they're fiercely competing for process engineers, chip designers, and AI software developers. McKinsey and the SEMI Foundation estimate that the United States could face a shortage of up to 157,000 semiconductor workers by 2030, while 73% of chip companies report difficulty filling engineering roles.

SSD controller designer FADU’s new File-Semantic SSD (FS-SSD) was announced at the 2026 OCP Global Summit. The new device promises to move the file system into the SSD itself. As detailed in a white paper, this enables GPUs, DPUs, and NICs to open and read files with “no host filesystem, no block layer, and no storage-server CPU in the path.” FADU told Tom’s Hardware Premium it expects partner samples by Q3 2027.

FADU is a Seoul, South Korea-based fabless SSD controller designer. Its FS-SSD technology is designed to handle and improve the control path, as the data path side moved to accelerators years ago. FADU’s measurements show that the file system, plus block layers, can consume about 30% of CPU cycles in a GPUDirect Storage (GDS) random-read workload. It notes that bypass options give up the files, and the company claims its solution promises the best of both worlds.

In FADU’s own preliminary Network File System (NFS) over NVMe test, on a drive built on its FC6161 Gen6 controller in a PCIe 5.0 host, remote file throughput held steady as the server downshifted from what FADU labels 16 cores to just one, maintaining about 460,000 ops/s.

The NFSv3 operations are carried inside standard NVMe commands, and the drive handles path lookup, access control, and file-to-flash mapping. FS-SSD’s performance is remarkable when compared to Linux NFS-over-RDMA, which achieved a third of the ops/s with 16 cores and only 40K ops/s with one core. The technology remains “under active development,” and FADU told Tom’s Hardware Premium it expects Gen6-host results by Q1 2027, with partner samples in Q3 2027.

FADU chooses to use NFSv3 because it’s “small (21 operations), OS- and filesystem-agnostic, and stateless” with low firmware overhead. FS-SSD supports PCIe today, with NVMe-oF over RDMA and TCP working without any new transport needed. Reusing an existing protocol is a smart move, in our view. Under the hood, the file system and flash translation layer are merged with a file layer derived from F2FS. Node and data blocks are aligned with the natural flash pages, sections at corresponding erase units, so that the F2FS node table becomes a “File Map” pointing the node IDs at physical flash addresses.

One big advantage is that the DRAM mapping metadata overhead is considerably smaller: it uses the same amount of DRAM as a standard SSD, ~0.1% of NAND capacity (about 1 GB per TB), which a standard SSD fills almost entirely with its mapping table. Here, most of that DRAM, ~95%, can act as a hot-path node cache.

One garbage collector also replaces two, avoiding what FADU calls the “double GC” of host F2FS, where file-system cleanup and the drive’s own garbage collection amplify each other. Write amplification is also 63% lower versus a host F2FS solution on a mixed sequential and random workload with FADU’s research prototype, the company said. FADU told Tom's Hardware Premium that the prototype runs synthetic fio workloads on NVMeVirt, an open-source software SSD emulator from Seoul National University, so it is not a hardware result.

Most importantly for this method, it ensures host-free access. The GPU builds NFS-over-NVMe commands in queues in its own memory, which could include HBM. Alternatively, a remote SmartNIC or DPU with NVMe-oF target offload can drop commands in the drive’s submission queue. The data goes from SSD to NIC via PCIe peer-to-peer DMA, coming out as RDMA writes. FADU’s explicitly named use cases for this include GPU file reads and checkpoints, DPU-served HTTP content delivery, and a JBoF (just a bunch of flash) file server.

FADU’s numbers for its internal test come from a client and server Intel Core i5-13600K, a CPU with 20 threads that clocks up to 5.1 GHz with 128GB of DDR5, and a Mellanox ConnectX-6 100 Gbps NIC. Synthetic testing is compared using fio with the baseline F2FS and Ext4 on block firmware versus the FS-SSD via a kernel client and an SPDK user-space client. The sequential test is 1 thread, queue depth (QD) 128, with 128KB blocks, while random is at 4 threads, the same QD128, but with 4KB blocks.

These block sizes are typical for client workloads in our experience, so they are a fair measure, with detailed preliminary results in the table below. Against SPDK on the raw drive, figures FADU provided to us, FS-SSD’s SPDK client keeps about 93% on 4K random read and 53% on 4K random write, via fio, with around a 7% and 47% cost for the in-drive file layer. Though the raw drive’s 13,240 MB/s random write is above the ~12 GB/s FADU gives as the NAND’s program bandwidth, those runs likely weren’t at steady state. The Filebench result is particularly interesting, as the SPDK random gains apply to a plain block device too.

This should be the workload most favorable for the technology, as the Filebench file server is metadata-heavy with relatively high host overhead: FADU says it uses 10,000 files in a multi-level tree, mean directory width 20, and a mean file size of 128KB with 50 client threads.

One important thing to recall is that although this test is on a Gen6 drive, the test results are on a PCIe 5.0 host. Therefore, every sequential read config tops out at around 14.1 GB/s, which is roughly the link limit. The testbed also uses a consumer-class desktop CPU, while the one-core NFS server is a showcase example. The kernel client ends up 11.5% behind Ext4 on random read and 5.3% behind on random write, again by our math.

One example of a tough question more generally is: how do concurrent GPU, DPU, and host writers coordinate? How does a kernel mount’s page cache stay coherent with GPU access? NFSv3 storage devices, by the pNFS Flexible File Layout spec (RFC 8435), are “always treated as loosely coupled,” which means “Mandatory byte-range locking cannot be supported.”

Credentials riding in the NVMe command may also face security issues, as loosely coupled devices get only “a level of security equivalent to AUTH_SYS,” NFS’s basic scheme, in which the server trusts whatever user and group IDs the client sends. FADU’s published material also does not describe features such as snapshots, encryption handling, quotas, ACLs, crash handling, and so forth, related to this. Statelessness is what makes it work, but it doesn’t solve all problems, so the trust factor moves elsewhere.

In reply to our questioning, FADU said that there is no cross-host locking, as NFS’s lock manager isn’t implemented. The drive applies each write whole, in order. If two writes hit the same spot, the second one wins; this is “last-writer-wins.” Coordination depends on the clients: kernel-mounted ones get the usual advisory locks among themselves, GPU and SPDK clients coordinate in the application, and at scale a pNFS metadata server handles the coordination. Caching is also handled like ordinary NFS, with kernel clients, or is not done at all, for GPU and SPDK clients. This is stock NFSv3 behavior.

The drive has to check user/group IDs against the file permissions itself. Because those IDs ride inside the command, a client could fake them, but FADU says it closes that issue with capability-based authentication. Each command carries a capability issued by an outside authentication server, plus a code computed with a key shared only between that server and the drive. This is not detailed in its published material. FADU adds that support for the Kerberos authentication protocol is planned. For networked drives, the standard NVMe-oF protections are used, with only pre-approved hosts admitted. A drive trusts a single host’s kernel like any NVMe drive.

However, as FADU described to us, ACLs and other features are missing in the current release, aside from encryption, which in this case is handled by the FC6161’s standard TCG Opal self-encrypting drive support. Power loss is also typically handled with capacitors flushing metadata, the write buffer, and a log of in-flight operations. On restart, the drive replays the unfinished operations, and every write is durable if the drive acknowledges it.

FADU’s longer sights are on producing a JBoF storage solution with no server in front: FS-SSDs, a PCIe switch, and a DPU or NIC for handling NVMe-oF in hardware. FADU’s model puts this at about 42% lower power, about 57% lower cost per 16-drive server, and higher rack density with significantly lower five-year total cost of ownership. The drives would slot in behind existing pNFS metadata servers and could scale. FADU’s controllers already ship with drives such as the SN861, which Western Digital launched and SanDisk now sells, but this would expand the options and solutions it can provide.

Next year should bring real numbers and samples, with the JBoF reference design also expected. There may be an NVM Express or OCP Storage proposal down the line for a file-semantic command set to further cement and mature the approach. FADU has a good idea, is building it on an existing framework, and has a testbed with results and a hardware path forward on its Gen6 controller, with a trust model in mind. A Gen6-host run is now needed to support the company’s claims.

Intel and AMD are integrating their CPU optimizations for PyTorch into a unified library, offering tuning for both AMD and Intel chips through the oneDNN library. AMD has maintained a downstream version of oneDNN called ZenDNN, which is now moving into the open-source oneDNN, published by the UXL Foundation and driven by Intel. AMD also announced it's joining the UXL Foundation as a "steering member," which "influences the future of the UXL Foundation" in exchange for a contribution of $20,000 per year.

AMD says the move to unify these efforts under oneDNN was recommended by the x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group (EAG), which is a joint initiative that primarily exists between Intel and AMD and was established in 2024. The two companies have collaborated through the EAG previously, such as with the ACE extensions for x86 that we learned about earlier this year.

The oneDNN backend is used for CPU inference, and it's built to accelerate that workload for the latest Intel (and now AMD) chips in frameworks like PyTorch. When oneDNN was added to PyTorch as a backend in late 2023, it showed a 1.24x improvement with the Float32 data type, and 2.21x for the BFloat16 data type.

From the oneDNN GitHub, the library "detects hardware features at runtime" to generate optimized kernels for the platform, as well as provides low-precision data types. It also features optimized instructions for common AI and machine learning operations, such as matrix multiplication and convolution.

For developers, the move simplifies working with PyTorch across different systems, ensuring a single backend provides the proper optimizations for whatever hardware you're running. Although the news here is focused on the x86 guard, oneDNN is a cross-platform library that works on Arm and RISC-V architectures as well.

Intel originally developed oneDNN, built on top of previously deep learning libraries, before it was folded into the UXL Foundation. Intel was among the founding members of the UXL Foundation, alongside Arm, Qualcomm, Google Cloud, and others.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has described several undersea fiber cables that run through the Strait of Hormuz as "legitimate new targets." The area has become a hotbed of conflict since the start of military action by the United States, Israel and others in February. General Hossein Mohebbi, a spokesman for Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, referred to the cables in comments at an event this week, The Telegraph reports.

"Seven large cables pass beneath the Strait of Hormuz, and all internet and commercial data pass through them," according to Mohebbi. He went on to describe the cables as "legitimate new targets" for future assaults. Meanwhile, another IRGC General, Yadollah Javani, who serves as the IRGC's political deputy, has since suggested that if Iranian infrastructure is attacked, Iran will respond by attacking the cables, according to comments reported by Iran International.

The conflict between the United States and Iran has cooled, but it isn't quite over yet. Mohebbi suggested that a "third phase" in the war would reveal a "new geography" that would include "new targets and new weapons." One particular cable referenced by the IRGC appears to match the Asia-Africa-Europe-1 cable, a cable stretching 15,050 miles from Asia to Europe, traveling through Oman, the UAE and Qatar. Both the UAE and Qatar share direct maritime borders with Iran.

Experts believe the threat is credible. Professor Alesso Patalano, a war and strategy professor at King's College London, told The Telegraph that "not only is it possible, but it's been a rather clear possibility for a long time," adding that divers could "go down to the seabed... and cut them or destroy them." Such attacks aren't "unheard of," going on to reference the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline attack near Denmark in 2022, supposedly by Ukrainian agents, as an example.

Meanwhile, further comments, made to The Telegraph, suggest that Iran had considered cutting the cables several times since the war began. However, up until now, Tehran had avoided doing so, as it would mean "declaring war on the whole world and building new enemies," according to another unnamed Iranian spokesman, although stating that it would continue to be "an option if Trump escalates."

Iran isn't the only country that has taken a special interest in undersea infrastructure. A Russian ship, for instance, was chased from British waters by a Royal Navy attack helicopter earlier this year as it loitered for 14 hours less than a mile from five undersea cables that connect the UK with Spain, Portugal, Canada, and the U.S.

The two biggest NAND flash memory manufacturers on the planet, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, are reportedly working to upgrade their Chinese factories to produce more advanced chips for use in AI data centers, Reuters reports. The move comes as the two companies continue to fight off competition from the fast-growing Chinese memory makers like CXMT. Fierce competition in the lucrative AI RAM market has already seen manufacturers slash consumer-focused production to allow them to increase production capacity for the more advanced — and money-spinning — components.

Citing four people familiar with the companies' plans, the report claims that Samsung Electronics aims to switch its Xian plant to the production of 286-layer flash chips by the end of the year. SK Hynix has its sights set a little lower, targeting chips with 240 or more layers at its Dalian facility. That factory was taken over back in 2021, but a timescale for the new upgrades isn't clear.

However, while Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are well placed to deal with the growing threat from Chinese chipmakers, both are faced with additional complications in the form of U.S. regulations. Export controls on chipmaking equipment were applied in 2022, with the aim of slowing China's technological progress. Both companies, based in South Korea, must now get licenses in order to install U.S.-built hardware in Chinese factories. The report points to this as a reason for the recent growth of Chinese firms like Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. (YMTC). The company told investors at a recent IPO preparation meeting that it aims to become the world's largest NAND flash producer by the end of 2027.

While both Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix say that they are working in consultation with the U.S. authorities, there's little doubt that this extra step has hampered the companies' ability to upgrade their factories to better meet the new AI memory demand.

It's impossible to overstate just how key Samsung and SK Hynix are to NAND supply. Samsung's Xian factory produces around 40% of the company's global output. It currently produces chips that have around 200 layers, but Samsung's plans aim to boost that to 286 layers for V9 NAND chips. For its part, SK Hynix's Dalian plant currently produces chips with 192 layers, with the company's aim for 240-layer chips reportedly confirmed by three people familiar with the plans.

Meanwhile, CXMT, China's premier chipmaker, is looking to move beyond DRAM production. A report from September 2026 noted that it was eyeing production of 3D NAND memory for use in solid-state storage (SSD) products. The country's largest DRAM producer, CXMT, posted $22.41 billion in revenue and $11.57 billion in net profit in the first half of 2026 after years of losing money. But despite this purple patch, the company is still much smaller than the likes of Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron.

"Best gaming headset for audiophiles" is one of the categories on our list of best gaming headsets, and it's easy to look at that and wonder if you shouldn't be looking at just audiophile headsets to begin with. Headsets are mainly about audio, after all, and it does seem to logically follow that audiophile headsets would have the best audio (I mean, it's in the name).

Well, not so fast.

Headsets are mainly about audio, but that doesn't mean that the "objectively" best-sounding headset by audiophile standards translates to the best-sounding headset by gaming standards. Nor does it mean that you should choose your gaming headset based on audio quality at the expense of everything else.

Audiophile headsets, including headphones, are primarily designed around one thing: audio fidelity. In other words, they're designed and tuned to reproduce audio exactly as it was recorded, which is exactly as the artist heard it when they were recording it, and is therefore exactly as the artist intended for it to be heard. This doesn't necessarily mean it's going to sound amazing to everyone. In fact, to many people it will probably sound somewhat underwhelming, but it's really the only objective way we have of measuring what makes audio "good," since how something sounds depends largely on individual listeners' preferences.

Gaming headsets, on the other hand, are designed around... well, everything else. This doesn't mean they ignore audio fidelity completely, but it tends to not be the priority. (Many premium flagship gaming headsets have been focusing more on audio fidelity in recent years, but it's still generally not the priority.) Gaming headsets tend to focus on other features, such as comfort, convenience, and communication. And when they do focus on audio, their priority is about making games sound good — which is generally not the same as making them sound accurate to their original recording.

Don't get me wrong, some of the "audiophile" elements do help games sound better; for example, detailed, layered sound and a wide soundstage make virtual environments sound more realistic. But ultimate realism isn't always what gamers are looking for. If you're playing a competitive first-person shooter, you're probably looking for audio cues to give you a tactical advantage: you want sound that's directionally accurate and that singles out specific details, such as footsteps and gunshots. You're not here to appreciate the individual details you can pick out from different layers of audio if those details prevent you from hearing what's important. If you're playing a game that's designed to make you feel something with the sound, an epic fantasy or a horror RPG, for example, then the goal isn't really accurate sound reproduction; it's for the game to sound epic (or horrifying, I guess).

There isn't a universally perfect answer, of course, because it depends on how you're going to use the headset. It's easy to get swept up in the audiophile hype, but you shouldn't ditch your mainstream gaming just yet. Here's what you should consider before buying into either side.

Comfort

There are plenty of audiophile headsets and gaming headsets that are comfortable — and plenty that are... not so much. While both categories tend to put comfort at least somewhat high on the priority list, comfort means different things for different listeners. Audiophile headsets tend to be larger and more open — larger drivers can produce more sound with less movement, and less movement means less distortion; an open-back design lets sound waves move through the headset instead of bouncing off the enclosure for a wider soundstage and better spatial accuracy. Open-back headsets offer more listening comfort: you won't feel like the sound is closing in and overwhelming you like you will with closed-back headsets, and you'll be able to listen for longer.

Gaming headsets, on the other hand, are largely closed-back (though there are several open-back gaming headsets on the market now, including the Corsair Virtuoso Pro and the Turtle Beach Atlas Air), with smaller drivers, so there's not as much consideration toward listening comfort. They do, however, tend to focus more on physical comfort. They are lightweight and flexible, with gamer-oriented features such as Turtle Beach's "ProSpecs" earpads, which have softer foam near the front to prevent discomfort for gamers who wear glasses. Or the hinge-free design of Logitech's G735 headset, to prevent snagging on longer hair and piercings. Audiophile headsets are designed to be physically comfortable, but gaming headsets are specifically designed around the gaming audience.

Convenience

Convenience is one area in which gaming headsets will basically always win, hands-down. Not only are audiophile headsets not designed with convenience in mind, they're usually the opposite: wired, with very little non-audio-focused tech, and many require a separate audio interface to even work with a PC or gaming console.

Gaming headsets, on the other hand, are packed with technology to make your life easier. Headsets like the Turtle Beach Stealth Pro II and the Razer BlackShark V3 Pro let you connect to multiple devices and switch between them seamlessly, listen to two audio sources simultaneously, and quickly cycle through game-ready EQ presets. Gaming headsets try to put as many controls as possible at your fingertips, from on-ear dials and buttons to detailed app-based EQ tuning to separate desktop base stations (such as the one included with the HyperX Cloud Alpha 2 Wireless).

Even wired gaming headsets often include multiple ways to connect to various devices. For instance, the HyperX Cloud Alpha Air is wired, but it comes with a standard 3.5mm analog cable for plugging into a standard audio jack, a USB-C extension (with USB-A converter) for plugging into a USB-C/USB-A port, and a PC headset extension for plugging into separate audio/mic jacks.

The wireless gaming headsets from the audiophile sector that have these features still manage to implement them in a way that is... well, inconvenient. Audeze's Maxwell and Maxwell 2 allow for dual-wireless connectivity but do not give you a way to manually switch between the two. Instead, Bluetooth always takes precedence over 2.4GHz wireless — full stop. It's infuriating, and it's one of my only real grievances with those headsets.

Communication

A standalone USB gaming mic will almost always make you sound better than a built-in headset mic. But that doesn't mean that you should ignore headset mics or how gaming headsets implement other features that help you communicate with others, whether they're team members or stream viewers, while gaming. (Besides, some headsets, such as the Razer BlackShark V2 Pro (2023), have microphones that actually can rival the best USB gaming mics.)

If you go with an audiophile headset — or headphones — you'll likely need to invest in a separate gaming mic regardless. There's more to communication than just the mic, though. Many gaming headsets, such as SteelSeries' Arctis Nova series, have built-in ChatMix, which lets you channel your game audio and your chat audio through different channels and mix them together on your headset. This lets you dial up (or dial down) chat if you need to hear what's being said over whatever epic music or sound effects are playing in the game. Gaming headsets are also backed by peripheral software that, while often frustrating, is, ultimately, designed around the needs of gamers. Software-based noise reduction/cancellation, microphone EQs, and sidetone are all particularly useful communication tools that you won't find on most audiophile headsets.

Audiophile or gaming headset?

At the end of the day, audiophile headsets tend to focus on audio above everything, which is exactly what audiophiles want. But it's not really what most gamers want. A great gaming headset does have to sound good, but that's not all it has to do.

There are, of course, gaming headsets from audiophile companies, such as the Audeze Maxwell and Maxwell 2, as well as headsets from gaming companies that implement audiophile features, such as the open-back Corsair Virtuoso Pro. And while a headset like the Audeze Maxwell 2 does a decent job of bridging the gap between audiophile and gaming, it makes some sacrifices; it's a very heavy headset (thanks in part to its large, 90mm planar magnetic drivers), though it is relatively comfortable for its weight. It sounds great, but it doesn't do the best job of implementing the gamer side of things — while it has a wide soundstage and decent spatial immersion, that's not the same as pinpoint spatial accuracy when you're listening for footsteps and gunshots.

And while the much pricier Audeze LCD-GX sounds incredible, it's basically the perfect example of how an audiophile headset focuses on sound at the expense of all else, as its gaming features are... mostly non-existent. The only thing that really makes the LCD-GX gamer-friendly is the fact that you can plug it directly into a PC because it comes with a 3.5mm cable and a PC (dual 3.5mm headphone/mic) converter.

So, should you get an audiophile headset in lieu of a gaming headset? Probably not. If you need a gaming headset for its gaming features: multi-device connectivity, super accurate positional audio for tactical advantage in shooting games, the ability to mix chat and game audio on the spot, convenient microphone, connection, and volume controls at your fingertips, or physical comfort for a marathon gaming session, definitely not. Yes, you will give up some audio fidelity and quality by picking a gaming headset over an audiophile one, but you aren't going to miss that when you're arguing over voice chat while trying to determine how far away the enemy is.