The 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...
The Hot Take: Intel Ramping things up to play catch up and win volume from TSMC.
Intel this week initiated expansion of its Bowers Campus in Santa Clara, California, in a bid to produce more photomasks (reticles) in the U.S. The company intends to build a new manufacturing facility and a new utility building at the site, which will reinforce the site's position as a key producer of photomasks for Intel.Go deeper with TH Premium: Chipmaking(Image credit: tsmc)A deeper look at the chipmaking supply chainTSMC's $165 billion U.S. investments examinedChina reportedly reverse-engineers EUV toolChina bets on DUV, as EUV blockade reshapes chipmakingEarlier this year Intel obtained approval to build a new 107,000 square feet (9,940 square meters) manufacturing facility with Class 1 cleanroom at its Bowers Campus, and this week it formally began construction on the expansion, which it kicked off at a ceremony attended by its top executives and Santa Clara mayor Lisa Gilmor. The new facility will be able to write 6-inch Ă 6-inch photomasks both for DUV and EUV layers and a variety of nodes (from 32nm down 1.4nm-class), though the primary focus of the facility is to produce reticles for leading-edge process technologies â such as Intel's 18A, 18A-P, 14A, and more advanced â that rely on advanced DUV, EUV and eventually High-NA EUV tools and require more advanced photomasks, such as those that feature extremely dense patterns and use curvilinear optical proximity correction (OPC) with curved geometric shape.(Image credit: Intel)Intel is one of a few leading chipmakers in the world that still maintains a world-class mask writing shop â which is important, as every advanced product requires hundreds of masks, and every mask revision directly affects production schedules. In addition, producing masks in-house is getting particularly important when it comes to reticles for EUV layers as EUV tools tend to damage masks over time (despite usage of protective pellicles), so having the ability to make new masks in a short amount of time is crucial. Furthermore, Intel is the only semiconductor producer to make its own tools for photomasks writing at its IMS Nanofabrication subsidiary. Historically, reticles were patterned using a single e-beam tool, which was slow. By contrast, IMS produces multi-beam mask writers (MBMWs) that project 262,144 independently programmable electron beams simultaneously, which increases throughput by orders of magnitude at a nanometer-scale placement accuracy.(Image credit: Intel)"Santa Clara has been home to some of Intel's most important manufacturing innovations for decades," said Dr. Frank Abboud, VP Intel Foundry & GM of Intel Mask Operations. "By expanding the Bowers campus mask operations, we're strengthening a critical capability that supports advanced process technology production around the world and reinforces Intel Foundry's commitment to advancing U.S. semiconductor manufacturing leadership."Intel's Bowers Campus in Santa Clara has been dedicated to mask production since 1986. The site forms the company's primary mask manufacturing infrastructure supporting together with the company's facility in Hillsboro, Oregon. Production of non-critical masks has historically been outsourced, though we do not know whether the company still does that.IntelIntel
The Hot Take: Nore more docker on Windows? Interesting.
Windows 11 can now build, run, and manage Linux containers on its own, without Docker Desktop in the background. Microsoft calls this WSL Containers, and after installing the preview and running a few real workloads through it, here is what works, what still needs Docker, and how to get it running on your own PC.
WSL Container should not be confused with the next version of WSL 2, as we already covered how Microsoft shut down the WSL 3 rumors. It has now shipped as a public preview, so we installed it, built a custom container image from scratch, and pushed it through a few workflows to see where it holds up.
What is WSL Container in Windows 11
WSL Container is a built-in feature of the Windows Subsystem for Linux that lets you create, run, and manage Linux containers directly from Windows, without installing Docker Desktop, Podman Desktop, or any other third-party runtime. It ships in two parts:
The first is wslc.exe, a command-line tool that is added to your PATH as soon as you update WSL. Microsoft also ships an alias called container.exe, so both commands point to the same binary. Anyone who has used Docker before will recognize the syntax, since commands like wslc run, wslc build, and wslc container list look like Dockerâs own structure almost one-for-one.
The second part is a WSL Container API, distributed as a NuGet package with support for C, C++, and C#. Windows application developers can use it to embed Linux containers directly into their own apps.
Instead of asking users to install a separate runtime, a Windows app can quietly spin up a Linux container in the background to run a piece of Linux-only code, then tear it down when the task finishes. Microsoft demoed this with Moonray, an open-source Linux rendering engine used on films like The Wild Robot, running inside a Windows executable with no visible sign that Linux was involved at all.
Moonray is a Linux-based rendering engine that can run inside Windows through WSL Container
Every Windows application that uses the API gets its own Hyper-V-backed virtual machine, separate from every other appâs container. The CLI flow gets its own VM too. Docker Desktop, however, runs every container inside one shared VM, which as youâd expect is more efficient.
WSL Containers trade some resource efficiency for a hard isolation boundary between apps, which explains why Microsoft is pitching this as enterprise-ready.
That said, both entry points talk to the same WSL service that already manages your regular distros, and inside the Linux VM, the container runtime doing the real work is Moby, the open-source engine that also powers Docker. Note that WSL Containers is not reinventing containers. It is, instead, giving Windows a first-party front door to them.
How to install WSL Container on Windows 11
WSL Container only ships in the pre-release channel of WSL for now, so you will need to opt into that before wslc shows up on your PC.
Open Windows Terminal or PowerShell as an administrator.
Run wsl âupdate âpre-release and let it finish downloading.
Restart WSL with wsl âshutdown command, then close and reopen your terminal.
Confirm the install with wslc âversion. You should see the version number 2.9.3.0, which confirms WSL Container is installed.
Run wslc âhelp to see the full command reference and confirm the binary is working.
In our test machine, the update took under two minutes over a decent connection. If wslc is not recognized right after the update, restart your terminal, and if that does not help, restart the PC. Since itâs in the pre-release channel, there might be some rough edges, as a few developers on Microsoftâs own devblog reported a Catastrophic failure, Error code: E_UNEXPECTED when running their first container. Fortunately, we didnât face the issue.
In case you are wondering, you do not need a Copilot+ PC to try this since WSL Container ships as a plain WSL component, but the Hyper-V-backed isolation model needs the support of modern virtualization, so a recent CPU with virtualization enabled in BIOS or UEFI counts for more here than it does for a regular WSL distro.
Building and running a container with wslc
Once wslc was working, we skipped the basic hello-world example everyone else is running and went straight to something closer to real use, building a custom image from a Containerfile and exposing a working service from it.
Creating a project folder for WSL container test
First, a quick sanity check. We pulled and ran a Debian container interactively:
wslc run -it debian:latest
Inside the container, running uname -a returned a Linux kernel string tied to WSL2, confirming we were sitting inside a real Linux environment instead of some translation layer.
Running uname -a inside a WSL container confirms it is a real Linux kernel, not a translation layer
Detaching with Ctrl+P, Ctrl+Q and running wslc ps -a listed the container by its autogenerated name (mossy_sawtooth), alongside how long ago it started and its current status.
wslc ps -a lists every container, whether it is running or has already stopped
Reattaching with wslc attach mossy_sawtooth dropped us straight back into the same shell.
reattaching to the container name mossy_sawtooth
Next, we wrote a Containerfile, which works the same way a Dockerfile does, to package a small Linux inspection utility that runs file, exiftool, and binutils against whatever gets dropped into it.
The Containerfile packages a small Linux inspection tool, working the same way a Dockerfile does
Here is roughly what that file looked like:
FROM python:3.12-slim
RUN apt-get update && \
   apt-get install -y âno-install-recommends \
       file exiftool binutils bsdmainutils coreutils && \
   rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*
WORKDIR /app
COPY requirements.txt .
RUN pip install âno-cache-dir -r requirements.txt
COPY app.py .
EXPOSE 5000
CMD [âpythonâ, âapp.pyâ]
Building it was one command:
wslc build -t my-linux-inspector .
Building the custom image with wslc build
The build cached its base layers, so a rebuild finished in seconds instead of minutes. Running wslc image ls confirmed the image existed locally with a fresh timestamp.
wslc image ls confirms the custom image built successfully
From there, we started the container with a port mapping so the Flask server running inside Linux could be reached from Windows:
wslc run -d -p 5000:5000 âname inspector my-linux-inspector
Loading 127.0.0.1:5000 in a browser on the Windows side brought up the toolâs web interface without any extra networking setup.
The Flask server inside the Linux container, reached through localhost on Windows with no extra networking setup
A service running on a Linux kernel, reachable through localhost on Windows, with zero third-party software installed, sums up WSL Container in one sentence.
Testing GPU access inside a WSL container
GPU passthrough is the feature most developers doing AI or machine learning work will care about most, since it decides whether a Linux container can reach the graphics card instead of running on the CPU alone. WSL Container supports this through a --gpus all flag, the same syntax Docker users already know:
wslc run --rm --gpus all pytorch/pytorch:2.5.1-cuda12.4-cudnn9-runtime \
python -c "import torch; print(torch.cuda.is_available())"
The clip below shows this in action, a container reaching the GPU directly, then racing a compiled PyTorch model against the same model running in plain eager mode. The gap between the two is not subtle.
https://www.windowslatest.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/testing-GPU-access-inside-a-WSL-container.mp4
WSL Container for enterprise environments
Microsoft is pitching WSL Container as enterprise-ready from the preview stage.
Microsoft Defender for Endpointâs existing WSL plugin now understands container events, so security teams monitoring WSL distros get the same visibility into containers without deploying separate tooling, though the feature is currently limited to a private preview with its own signup form.
IT admins can already control WSL Container today through Group Policy and an ADMX policy, with two capabilities that count most in a managed fleet:
First, admins can decide whether people in their organization are allowed to use WSL distros, containers, or both.
Second, and this is the one Microsoft says came up constantly in customer requests, admins can set an allowlist of which container registries are permitted, so a company can restrict pulls to an internal or approved registry instead of leaving Docker Hub wide open.
We expect full Intune dashboard support for these settings within a few weeks of the preview shipping.
VS Codeâs Dev Containers extension also picked up wslc support starting in version 0.462.0-pre-release. Switching to it just means opening Dev Container settings, finding the Docker Path field, and changing it to wslc, no need to reinstall extensions or reconfigure projects.
What is still missing from WSL Container
WSL Container does not ship with anything resembling Docker Compose at this stage, so multi-service projects that use a compose.yaml file to bring up a database, a backend, and a cache together are not a good fit yet. Every container we tested had to be started individually.
And of course, the biggest omission is that there is also no GUI dashboard, or anything like Docker Scout for scanning images. Also, the extensive plugin ecosystem that Docker Desktop has built up over the years does not exist here. WSL Container is not meant to replace Docker Desktop, Podman Desktop, or Rancher Desktop, and all three of those tools stand to benefit from the same low-level platform work, including the new virtiofs file system that Microsoft says makes Windows file access twice as fast inside containers.
Networking has also been reworked with an experimental mode called Consomme, which relays Linux traffic through the Windows networking stack instead of the older NAT setup, aimed at fixing the VPN and proxy compatibility issues that have annoyed WSL users for years. Both virtiofs and Consomme are currently exclusive to WSL Container, though Microsoft has said it wants to bring them to regular WSL distros eventually.
Should you switch from Docker Desktop yet
For a single container running a database or a small service during local development, WSL Container already does the job without asking for a separate license. For anything that needs Compose files, multiple linked services, or Dockerâs extension ecosystem, Docker Desktop is still the more complete tool for now.
Microsoft is targeting WSL Containerâs general availability for fall 2026, and given how closely the CLIâs syntax already tracks Dockerâs, most of what is missing looks like a matter of when rather than if.
If you already run Linux container workloads on Windows, running the pre-release build alongside Docker Desktop costs nothing and gives WSL Container a head start before it becomes the default choice.
The post I built a Linux container on Windows 11 without Docker Desktop, and Docker users should pay attention appeared first on Windows Latest
The Hot Take: Samsung playing catch up and hopefully over take TSMC? Only time will tell.
Korean chip manufacturing giant Samsung is developing simulation technologies for lithography that rely on quantum computing and artificial intelligence, suggests a report from the Korean press. The technology will be used to run simulations of the first stage of the chip manufacturing process, and Samsung will also rely on artificial intelligence to streamline the process. Through the technology, the firm aims to reduce the time and cost of the lithography and etching processes. Samsung Is Developing Algorithms To Boost Its Photolithography, Say Sources In the semiconductor manufacturing process, lithography is the first and most important step. It involves high-end machines, [âŚ]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/samsung-chases-tsmc-with-quantum-powered-chipmaking-as-ai-reshapes-the-most-critical-step-in-fabrication/
The Hot Take: Oh so the Ultra series aren't just crap then? /smh
It's curious to call this one a leak, exactly, since the original source is direct from AMD and live on the web, but here we go: AMD's Vishal Badole submitted a patch for the Linux Kernel that he describes as adding support for "a Low Power core type, in addition to the existing Performance and Efficiency types." That's pretty clear-cut.
Now,
The Hot Take: Software development world is condensing fast with Ai....
Microsoft is expected to announce another round of layoffs soon. Less than 2.5% of the company's workforce will be affected, according to sources that spoke with Business Insider. Due Microsoft's size, even that small percentage means thousands of people will be affected.An SEC filing from June 30, 2025 showed Microsoft had about 228,000 employees. That figure has fluctuated since then, but it gives a gauge of the size of Microsoft's full-time workforce.Division cuts & AI infrastructureThis round of layoffs will affect thousands of roles across sales, consulting, and within the Xbox division. Microsoft is expected to announce the layoffs next week, though plans are subject to change.July layoffs have become commonplace for Microsoft because the company's fiscal year starts on July 1. Over 9,000 layoffs were made by Microsoft last July. Microsoft also lays off workers during other times of the year, such as the 6,000 layoffs made in May 2025.Microsoft is one of many tech giants looking to reduce head count and lower expenses in certain areas. Increased AI spending and the rise of AI has affected jobs at several levels.Voluntary retirements lowered the impactThis July will reportedly have fewer layoffs because several employees took voluntary retirement. Microsoft offered buyouts to employees level 67 and below in the United States who had 70 or more combined years of service and years of age (for example, someone who was 50 years old who had worked for Microsoft for 20 years).Roughly 9,000 Microsoft employees were eligible for that buyout and around one third of those eligible took the buyout, according to Business Insider.Xbox restructuringLayoffs have been expected, and not simply because they've become an annual occurrence. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma is overseeing a restructuring of Xbox, much of which will occur within a 100-day reset.As is the case with all layoff-related stories, I understand the business decisions that lead to layoffs but feel bad for the employees affected.Join us on Reddit at r/WindowsCentral to share your insights and discuss our latest news, reviews, and more.
A new class-action lawsuit filed in California accuses SK hynix, Samsung, and Micron of coordinating DRAM production to artificially restrict supply and maintain elevated prices for consumer memory products.
The Hot Take: About time. I've been saying they should have one for a while.
The big story in computing these days is how an ongoing shortage of RAM (dubbed RAMageddon or the RAMpocalypse) has led to massive increases in hardware costs. The conventional explanation of the situation has been that shortages have been driven by the widespread construction of AI data centers. However, a new lawsuit (Garciaguirre et al. v. Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., et al.) filed against RAM manufacturers Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, alleges that these companies are exploiting market conditions to artificially inflate prices.
The Hot Take: Slowly Windows becoming more and more Linux.
Microsoft has shot down the idea that WSL 3 is on the way. The articles that have been calling it WSL 3 mixed up a different feature, WSL Containers, which the company showed at Build 2026 and is now days away from shipping. The correction came straight from the team that builds Windows Subsystem for Linux.
TL; DR: WSL 3 does not exist. WSL Containers does, and it shows up in less than a week.
Microsoft has officially denied that WSL 3 exists.
Craig Loewen, the Product Manager at Microsoft responsible for the Windows Subsystem for Linux, posted on X to clear up: âAs a PSA, there is no such thing as WSL 3! Iâve seen some articles talking about it, and itâs not currently a thing.â Loewen was addressing a wave of articles that misidentified a different announcement.
The confusion started from Microsoft Build 2026, where the company announced WSL Containers, a new built-in feature that lets you create, run, and interact with Linux containers directly on Windows without third-party tools like Docker Desktop. Popular publications reported this as WSL 3, partly because the abbreviation WSLc was floating around.
According to Loewen, WSL Containers is not a versioned successor to WSL 2. It is a new capability built on top of the existing WSL infrastructure. He also confirmed it will be available in just a week or so from his post on June 23, 2026.
What is WSL, and what are WSL Containers
If you are not a developer, hereâs a quick primer. WSL stands for Windows Subsystem for Linux, and it is a feature built into Windows that lets you run Linux environments directly inside Windows, without the need to dual-boot into a separate OS or set up a full VM.
However, a container is a lightweight, isolated environment that packages an application along with everything it needs to run, including dependencies, libraries, and configuration. Unlike a VM, a container does not simulate an entire operating system. It shares the host OS kernel but keeps its own file system and process space.
The advantage is that containers are faster to start, easier to share, and portable across machines. WSL Containers brings this container functionality directly into WSL itself.
WSL Containers vs WSL 1 and WSL 2: what is different
WSL Containers is not a version number. It is a new layer of capability on top of WSLâs existing virtual machine infrastructure.
WSL 1 launched in August 2016 as a translation layer that converted Linux system calls into Windows ones. There wasnât any real Linux kernel, so containers were a non-starter.
WSL 2 arrived in preview in May 2019 with a full Linux kernel running inside a lightweight managed VM, which made Docker Desktop possible.
WSL 1 (2016)
WSL 2 (2019)
WSL Containers (2026)
Primary purpose
Run Linux command-line tools on Windows
Run a full Linux OS inside Windows
Run isolated Linux containers natively on Windows
Engine
Translation layer, no real Linux kernel
Real Linux kernel in a lightweight Hyper-V VM
Dedicated Hyper-V engine built for OCI containers
Container support
No
Yes, but needs Docker Desktop
Yes, natively via wslc.exe
Control surface
Windows Command Prompt or Linux terminal
Linux terminal inside a distro (e.g., Ubuntu)
wslc CLI from any Windows terminal
So, what problem is WSL Containers solving?
In case you didnât know it already, developers who wanted Linux containers on Windows used Docker Desktop, which uses WSL 2 as its backend on Windows 11. Docker Desktop works well, but it comes with per-seat licensing costs for larger teams and needs a complex setup that IT administrators in enterprise environments have to manage separately.
WSL Containers removes the need for Docker
Containers can now be built, run, and deployed directly from Windows using wslc.exe, without installing Docker Desktop or any other third-party tool. The command syntax closely mirrors Docker, so developers do not face a steep relearning curve. WSL Containers also supports GPU passthrough via the Container Device Interface, which means you can run GPU-accelerated workloads like CUDA-based machine learning pipelines inside a Linux container on your Windows GPU drivers.
For enterprise IT administrators, the feature integrates into the existing Windows management infrastructure. Policy-based enablement through Group Policy or MDM controls, which containers can run and where images can be sourced from. Administrators can see running containers through standard Windows auditing tools, which is something Docker Desktop did not offer natively.
Microsoft announced WSL Containers at Build 2026
At Build 2026 on June 2, Microsoft positioned WSL Containers as a core part of its developer-optimized Windows 11 story. The official announcement, published by Executive Vice President Pavan Davuluri, described it as âa built-in way to create, run and interact with Linux containers on Windows.â
https://www.windowslatest.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/WSL-containers.mp4
WSL Containers has two components:
The first is the exe CLI, which lets developers build, run, and deploy Linux containers directly from the command line, out of the box.
The second is the WSL Container API, which allows Windows application developers to use Linux containers programmatically as part of app logic, covering scenarios like running local AI workloads, container-based testing pipelines, and Linux-based data processing from within native Windows apps.
Build 2026 also had a few other Linux tools for Windows 11. Coreutils for Windows is now generally available, bringing over 75 familiar Linux command-line utilities like ls, grep, cp, and mv natively to Windows without WSL or a VM. Built on the open-source uutils project in Rust, these commands run directly on Windows, which means scripts that use them work without modification. The Intelligent Terminal, an experimental feature that brings context-aware AI assistance directly into the terminal, was also previewed at the same event.
Why Microsoft keeps investing in Linux on Windows
Microsoftâs investments in WSL and Linux tooling are not altruistic. The company knows that if Windows becomes the easiest place to run Linux workloads, developers have fewer reasons to switch to macOS or a native Linux setup. We wrote about this when Microsoft outlined plans to upgrade WSL with faster file access, better networking, and easier setup.
Modern software development is overwhelmingly Linux-first. Build pipelines run on Linux. Cloud infrastructure runs on Linux. AI frameworks like PyTorch, TensorFlow, llama.cpp, and Ollama are built and optimized for Linux environments. Developers working on Windows have historically had to either fight their tools or maintain a separate Linux environment alongside their Windows machine.
With WSL 2 handling Linux kernel compatibility and WSL Containers eliminating the need for Docker Desktop, Microsoft is trying to remove every reason a developer might have to reach for a different platform. Coreutils on top of that means even the command-line muscle memory that belongs to macOS and Linux now works on Windows out of the box.
Itâs good news for developers. Each iteration of WSL has consistently improved the experience. Iâm also a fan of how WSL Containers arrive as a routine WSL update, available to every Windows 11 user without a major OS upgrade.
The post Microsoft denies WSL 3 exists, reveals Windows 11âs WSL Containers ship next week appeared first on Windows Latest