The Hot Take: I'm hoping this gets resolved soon. Appears to be hinged on the Ai bubble bursting and I'm hoping that's soon.
PC shipments are falling, but revenue for manufacturers is still rising.
Read the full articleThe Hot Take: Linux seems to be hovering and Windows is apparently listening to it's end users Finally. We'll see where this goes.
StatCounter's June 2026 data shows Windows made up 56.55% of global desktop OS usage, dropping Microsoft's share below 60% for the first time in years. Linux, meanwhile, reached 4.39%, "one of its strongest recent showings in the company's desktop OS statistics," reports Linuxiac. From the report: Apple's desktop platforms also remain a major part of the picture. StatCounter lists OS X at 11.89% and macOS at 4.48% for June 2026, meaning Apple's combined desktop presence remains comfortably ahead of Linux in the global chart. Chrome OS follows with 1.21%. Of course, StatCounter's numbers should be read for what they are: web usage statistics, not a direct count of installed operating systems. The company calculates its Global Stats from page views across websites using its tracking code, analyzing details such as browser, operating system, and screen resolution. In other words, the figures reflect measured web activity rather than the number of machines actually installed worldwide. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read the full articleThe Hot Take: We'll have to see, they just keep milking Ai at the cost of liquidating a whole other industry.
The GeForce RTX 50-series desktop graphics lineup has remained unchanged for just over a year now (since the introduction of the RTX 5050), and none of the conversations we've had at major trade shows suggests that a mid-cycle Super refresh will occur any time soon. But there are still signs that such an update could still happen at some point, and the latest sign comes from Seasonic, which has listed an RTX 5080 Super, an RTX 5070 Ti Super, and RTX 5070 Ti Super in its PSU wattage calculator. Go deeper with TH Premium: GPUs(Image credit: Noctua)Desktop RoadmapEnterprise RoadmapRubin in-depthThe Stout Owl: The ultimate Noctua G2 PCYou can click through the calculator and assemble a hypothetical system with these unannounced products inside. To be useful, this calculator also provides board power numbers for these as-yet-unreleased cards, and that gives us another bit of juicy info. Given that no official specifications for these GPUs exist, it's impossible to say whether these figures are accurate. But it does allow us to speculate a bit on how they might stack up to existing products. Unannounced RTX 50 Super-series TGPsGraphics CardTotal Graphics Power (W)% ChangeRTX 5070250--RTX 5070 Super275*10% RTX 5070 Ti300--RTX 5070 Ti Super350*17%RTX 5080380--RTX 5080 Super415*15% *As listed in Seasonic PSU calculator. Unconfirmed by Nvidia. Seasonic gives this purported RTX 5080 Super a board power of 415W in its calculator, or 15% higher than the existing RTX 5080's 360W envelope. That makes sense, because the RTX 5080's GB203 GPU is already fully enabled, so any Super version of that card would have to lean on higher power limits and more aggressive clock speeds to see any baseline performance benefit. That figure could also partially account for slightly higher power usage from 8 GB more GDDR7 memory on such a card. Past RTX 50 Super-series rumors have suggested that Nvidia will boost VRAM capacity on those products by moving to higher-density GDDR7 modules with 3GB of capacity each. GDDR7's power consumption as part of the overall board picture is relatively small, but more of it will still matter. If Seasonic's figures are accurate, we should also expect a similarly sized TGP increase out of the RTX 5070 Ti Super, whose 350W rating is 17% higher than that of the RTX 5070 Ti. The RTX 5070 Super, meanwhile, gets only a 10% TGP bump over the RTX 5070, from 250W to 275W. Both of these cards rely on GPUs that are slightly cut down from their full available resources, so it's possible that Nvidia could boost their performance through a balance of enabling more Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs) in addition to boosting clocks through higher power envelopes. Beware of extrapolating performance improvements directly from these percentages, though. Our own testing has shown that any real-world performance benefits from these power limit increases are likely to be smaller than those figures would suggest. As our review of the MSI RTX 5090 Lightning Z showed, the largest performance boosts from higher power limits are likely to be concentrated in ray-traced and path-traced games, whose computational intensity is significantly higher than pure raster titles and is more likely to run the GPU into its power limits. In any event, we shouldn't expect to see these products any time soon. Nvidia has instead been focused on getting more out of existing Blackwell silicon with software improvements such as DLSS 4.5 upscaling and Multi-Frame Generation multipliers up to 6X. These technologies enable higher output frame rates and image quality with lower input resolution than past DLSS technologies, and the boost to both performance and image quality from those technologies in tandem has certainly made existing Blackwell products more appealing than they were at launch.But as monitor refresh rates continue to climb thanks to ongoing improvements to OLED and LCD panels, and next-generation HDMI 2.2 connectors looming over 2027, a hardware update of some kind that boosts baseline performance and potentially implements support for those standards seems practical at some point. Given these primarily consumer-focused improvements, an announcement at CES 2027 or Computex 2027 might make sense. As with any future product rumors, however, only time will truly tell.
Read the full articleThe Hot Take: Was almost like they were purposefully crippling their processors under past management.
Intel Nova Lake CPUs will mark the return of AVX-512, a feature that has long been abandoned by the company for its client CPUs. AVX-512 Is Coming Back To Intel's Consumer CPUs, Starting With Nova Lake Intel has had a love-hate relationship with AVX-512 on its consumer CPUs. The AVX-512 instruction set was last seen on Intel's Tiger Lake (11th Gen) family, and since then, the company has offered no support for it on its modern-day chips. Meanwhile, AMD has been offering AVX-512 support on its Zen 4 and Zen 5 chips, both client and server platforms. Last year, we […]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/intel-nova-lake-cpus-to-bring-back-avx-512-support-six-years-after-it-was-abandoned/
Read the full articleThe Hot Take: Competition is GOOD.
Intel has published a new patent on its XBM memory, which is proposed as a replacement for HBM4, offering much higher bandwidth capabilities. XBM vs HBM: Intel's New Proposed DRAM Solution Extends To 32 GT/s Speeds, While Reducing Costs Through UCIe Links HBM continues to be the standard for AI accelerators, but more recently, we have seen LPDDR memory being used to overcome shortages, prices, and power associated with the standard. Intel's past attempts at DRAM, such as HMC (Hybrid Memory Cube) and MCDRAM, faced various issues and never came to market, but with XBM, Intel is course-correcting its DRAM […]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/intel-xbm-memory-takes-aim-at-hbm4-32-gt-s-speeds-lower-costs-through-ucie-links/
Read the full articleThe Hot Take: Nice, but all to push cloud storage I'm assuming.
Microsoft has announced another new recovery method for Windows 11 PCs that will allow users to reinstall the OS using the cloud. The new recovery tool is called Cloud Rebuild which will restore a PC to a "clean, known-good state by performing an entire OS reinstall."The new Cloud Rebuild feature will download the Windows OS along with your devices drivers, and seamlessly install them during the recovery process so that your device is fully functional once the OS reinstalled, all without needing an external USB install drive."Unlike Reset this PC, Cloud rebuild downloads both the target Windows image and the device's drivers from Windows Update, so the device comes back fully functional without USB media, without a custom image, and without depending on the health of the currently installed OS."The new cloud rebuild option in the Windows Recovery environment. (Image credit: Microsoft)Reset this PC has had its own cloud download option for a while, but that feature is only useful when the Windows OS is bootable, and acquires drivers from the device locally. In scenarios where the OS has become unbootable, the new Cloud Rebuild option will be a life saver. Cloud Rebuild also doesn't include an option to maintain apps and files. Reset this PC includes an option to maintain all your data across the reset, but Cloud Rebuild is strictly for reinstalling the Windows OS as a clean slate with device drivers. The new Cloud Rebuild recovery option is now rolling out in preview to Windows Insiders in the latest Windows 11 preview builds, so it's not generally available just yet but it should begin rolling out to everyone in the coming months.Join us on Reddit at r/WindowsCentral to share your insights and discuss our latest news, reviews, and more.
Read the full articleThe Hot Take: Unix trying to come back from the grave? Or just a patent troll wanting another pay day?
The ancient dispute over ownership of UNIX, and perhaps Linux too, has returned to court. Again. As The Register has explained many, many, times since this matter first went to court in 2003, the roots of the case are the 1998 alliance between IBM and a company called the Santa Cruz Operation which sold a version of UNIX for x86 CPUs. Those two companies, plus Intel and Sequent, created “Project Monterrey” – an effort to create a unified version of UNIX that could run on multiple processors. By 2001, Project Monterrey was close to delivering a unified UNIX, an achievement made possible by blending code from IBM and SCO. By then, a little project called “Linux” already ran on multiple processors. Big Blue decided Linux was the future and bailed from Project Monterrey – then allegedly contributed some Monterrey code to the open-source project and to its own AIX and Z operating systems. SCO felt it owned some of that code, so sued IBM. SCO and its successors struggled to survive, but interested parties kept the lawsuit alive because the chance to emerge as owner of parts of the Linux codebase, and IBM’s code, had the potential to turn into a colossal payday. The case and its successors ended in 2021, with a settlement that saw litigants agree to end the matter without IBM admitting fault. But by then, SCO had sold its software to a biz called Xinuos that decided to fight on. The Xinuos case has burbled along quietly since, and on June 22nd reached the milestone of a hearing. The matter has become a little more modern, if only because this hearing was held online and the presiding judge appeared to unwittingly be on mute at one point. But the arguments otherwise seemed to revisit Project Monterrey, debated the relevance of past litigation, contested who owned what, when they owned it, and how they could prove it. Xinuos argued IBM never had a license for SCO code. Big Blue argued that it did nothing wrong. The core issue seems to be whether Xinuos even has the right to litigate the matter, or if some ancient legalese in the original agreements means the window for legal argument has long since expired. The matter continues and appears likely to do so until either the heat death of the universe or the year of Linux on the desktop – whichever comes sooner. ®
Read the full articleThe Hot Take: New Micro-FAB? Jim Keller involvement, interesting.
Atomic Semi, the semiconductor tooling startup founded by chip architect Jim Keller and DIY fabrication pioneer Sam Zeloof, has rebranded as Fab2 and moved its operations to Texas, according to the company's new site at fab2.com. The rebrand recasts the company around the idea they're calling a "fab fab," a factory that mass-produces small semiconductor fabs and the tools inside them.Fab2 designs and builds every tool in its fabs in-house, from pumps, valves, and gas lines to lithography and the vacuum chambers that house it. The company assembles those components into machines, the machines into complete fabs, and then aims to mass-produce the fabs themselves. It pairs the hardware with Studio, an in-browser, collaborative EDA tool for layout, schematic, and simulation work, previously branded as Atomic Studio.Rather than moving 300mm wafers through ginormous production lines, Fab2 targets small, software-defined fabs that pattern chips far smaller than a wafer and turn prototypes around in hours. Zeloof built the concept's proof point as a teenager, fabricating lithographic chips in his parents' garage down to roughly 300nm features before co-founding this company with Keller in 2022.The method's main constraint, however, is throughput. Electron-beam lithography writes patterns directly rather than projecting them through a mask, which makes it slow: a single patterning step on a small chip can take far longer than an EUV scanner needs to expose an entire 300mm wafer. That's a big tradeoff that only really suits prototyping and low-volume runs rather than high-volume production at commercial foundries.Fab2 now operates three sites: a 120,000 square foot facility in Austin serves as the new headquarters for research and production, a 30,000 square foot site in Lockhart houses the "fab fab" itself, and the original 25,000 square foot "garage fab" remains in San Francisco. Fab2 said it shifted its hiring focus to Texas after four years in California, and Tracxn lists the company at around 84 employees as of May 2026. The startup raised a reported $15 million seed round in 2023, led by the OpenAI Startup Fund, at a valuation of about $100 million, with angel backing from Naval Ravikant, Nat Friedman, and Fred Ehrsam.In moving to Texas, Fab2's model of many small, printable fabs now sits beside the likes of Tesla and SpaceX, which announced Terafab back in March, a single Austin megafab targeting a terawatt of annual compute at a cost of up to $119 billion. The contrasting businesses are clearly not competitors; Fab2 sells small fabs and prototyping speed, while Terafab is built for high-volume AI. But they represent competing answers to the same question of how the U.S. should expand its chipmaking capacity — consolidate everything in massive manufacturing campuses, or distribute production across many small, replicable fabs?
Read the full articleThe Hot Take: Yes! No new case possibly.
The company confirmed it in an unusual way, but it seems legit, and as per the announcement, the coolers should arrive soon. Noctua Announces NL-LC1 Chromax.Black AIO Series Despite Exclusion From the Roadmap; The New Variant is Expected to Arrive This Year The Noctua's latest and first-ever AIO cooler series was dropped two weeks ago. The NL-LC1 is what Noctua aims for, superior cooling, which is available in various form factors. Whether you want to cool a mid-range or a high-end CPU, it offers the AIO in various sizes, including 240mm, 360mm, and 420mm for enthusiast-grade PCs. Built using the […]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/noctua-confirms-nl-lc1-chromax-black-aio-series/
Read the full articleThe Hot Take: I really wonder if this will deflate the Ai bubble even a little bit.
The x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group led by Intel and AMD recently firmed up the AI Compute Extensions (ACE) specification for optimizing x86 for AI computation tasks around matrix multiplication and the like for machine learning workloads. The cross-vendor ACE extension is ultimately a successor to Intel's Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX). Posted to the GCC mailing list today by Intel engineers are the initial patches in preparing the compiler support for ACE...
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