The Hot Take: Microsoft going all in on Nvidia it seems. Xbox next?
Software King of the World Microsoft has confirmed that Nvidia’s RTX Spark platform will be featured at its 7 October Windows event, with new hardware announcements expected.
The event, taking place in San Francisco, will include Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Windows and Surface chief Pavan Davuluri and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
Vole says the event will feature “RTX Spark and new experiences designed to unlock more possibilities for developers and builders.”
Nvidia has shared a fresh teaser ahead of the event, suggesting that the two…
Intel's Nova Lake Desktop CPU lineup has leaked, revealing the specs of seven SKUs including the fastest Core Ultra 9 model. Intel Nova Lake "Core Ultra Series 4" Desktop CPUs Leak, Core Ultra 9 4970K Gears Up For LGA 1954 Platforms With 28 Cores & BLLC There have been a spate of leaks surrounding the Intel Nova Lake Desktop CPU family. We have covered many die and SKU configurations in the past, but the latest leak covers the exact details of specific SKUs with their official part identifier name. The leak comes from LC Tech Leaks, which…
The Hot Take: More push for cloud space I'd assume.
Windows 11 26H2 is out, and Microsoft has enabled Windows settings backup by default, a move that could send administrators scrambling to opt out where they once had to opt in. The latest release hasn't made a lot of shockwaves in the community featurewise. Users with up-to-date versions of 25H2 will unlikely notice much difference – 26H2 has the same code base, delivered via an enablement package. It even has the same set of known issues, although all are now "mitigated" in one way or another. However, administrators will spot several…
The Hot Take: E/P-Core CPUs getting more optimizations from Intel. We'll have to see how AMD does when they start dropping Zen with a similar setup.
Earlier this year Intel announced the "Optimization Zone" as their new initiative to provide a centralized place to collect all their resources for maximizing performance and software tuning on Intel hardware platforms. They've continued building out more resources for the Intel Optimization Zone and yesterday released v1.2 with more tuning guides and best practices for optimal performance on Intel hardware...
By ckasprzak | TkOut
| October 1, 2026 | AMD, GPU, Hardware
The Hot Take: If true, definitely an opportunity for AMD to take the performance crown for a time.
With GPUs and memory chips in incredibly high demand, 2027 is shaping up to be one of the more unusual graphics card release cycles. NVIDIA has been dominating the segment for years, but if recent rumors suggesting that the RTX 60 series is delayed until 2028 turn out to be true, AMD could find itself in a unique position to lure users toward its upcoming cards.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is taking a page from Counter-Strike with a new multiplayer mode built around one of the classic shooter's defining mechanics: buying your gear with money earned during the match. Called Collateral, the new mode puts an economy system on top of the familiar Search and Destroy formula, creating a version of Call of Duty where every death and purchase could have consequences.
Firefox 157 is here, but this time, Mozilla is making an unusual amount of noise about this release and its new look. This release has a new theme called “Nova,” which in the release notes Mozilla calls “Firefox’s biggest visual refresh in years.” The new theme is the flagship here, and aside from that, the new features in this version are fairly modest. They’re all welcome enough, though. Video calls which use WebRTC – Web Real Time Compression – now use hardware compression, and a bug which made video appear upside-down has been fixed, along…
By ckasprzak | TkOut
| October 1, 2026 | CPU, Hardware
The Hot Take: ARM/RISC-V/x86 hybrids coming?
When Nuvacore, a new CPU startup founded by legendary CPU and system architects Gerard Williams, John Bruno, and Ram Srinivasan, emerged from stealth earlier this year, it promised to "rewrite the rules of silicon," but did not say how it planned to do so. On Thursday, the company finally broke its silence and revealed that it is taking an unusual development approach that allows it to design a significant portion of its CPU core IP before committing to a particular instruction set architecture (ISA). Traditionally, CPU developers start…
It's been a while since any new Spectre vulnerabilities have come to light but that's changing today. The embargo has now lifted on BTR, Branch Target Reuse as a new Spectre-V2 attack affecting just-in-time (JIT) compilers...