The Hot Take: This is the biggest limitation to ARM SoC's as their GPU's are mid-range. So acceptance from gamers will require ability to get high end GPU for performance.
The Snapdragon X2 Elite might have doubled down on compute performance, but a multitude of tests show that its GPU continues to be one of the weakest links of the SoC. Fortunately, a user shows that the RTX Spark driver has introduced unofficial eGPU support through a USB4 connection, allowing you to experience competitive shooters like Overwatch at upwards of 200FPS. Redditor shares âsimple to followâ instructions on how to bring eGPU support to Snapdragon X2 Elite laptops Notebooks like the ASUS Zenbook A16 offer a solid configuration to help ARM laptop owners enjoy AAA and competitive titles without relying on [âŚ]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/snapdragon-x2-elite-egpu-support-nvidia-rtx-spark-driver/
Microsoft released Windows NT 4.0 to manufacturing partners on July 31, 1996. Codename Cairo marked an important milestone in the history of Microsoftâs original server OS and would far outlive Microsoftâs original plans as enthusiasts and administrators clung to it, as older readers will be aware. Headlining features of NT 4.0, which made it a winner, include the melding of the intuitive new Windows 95 UI into the fully 32-bit enterprise OS. It was also notable for being the last version of NT to support Alpha, MIPS, or PowerPC CPU architectures.Historical Windows NT timeline:Windows NT Server 3.1 â in 1993, the first version of Windows NT also introduced NTFSWindows NT Server 3.5 â in 1994, this update provided integrated support for Winsock and TCP/IPWindows NT Server 3.51 - client/server support added in 1995Windows NT 4.0 â in 1996, NT got the Windows 95 UI and the familiar My Computer, My Documents, and so onWindows 2000 Server â the 5th NT release started a new naming scheme, introduced Active Directory, plus NTFS 3.0 with file system encryptionFollowed by the more modern Server releasesâŚ(Image credit: Microsoft)After the initial Windows NT 4.0 release, Microsoft followed up with a version for embedded systems and its Terminal Server edition.The Windows NT line was critical to Microsoft as it led the charge against dominant Unix server software ecosystems. Its first public release was in 1993, with version 3.1, but NT 4.0 coupled the underlying data server and personal workstation tooling with Win95 UI elements such as the Start Menu, Taskbar, Task Manager, and so on. It would also support new components like the cryptography API, DCOM, TAPI 2.0, and some DirectX (v2) features.Despite all the new technology under the hood and the frills of the latest UI, Microsoftâs Windows NT 4.0 launched with remarkably low minimum requirements. Would-be users were recommended to install it on a PC with a CPU that ran at 33 MHz or better, had 32MB of RAM, SVGA graphics, and a hard disk with 256 MB capacity. This was in the Pentium / Pentium Pro era. NT 4.0 would become âthe server for the masses,â boasted Microsoft on the OSâs 20th anniversary. Another reason that NT 4.0 was so important is that it formed the foundation for the Windows XP release (2001), leaving the DOS-based 95, 98/SE, and Me versions of the consumer OS behind as archaic hybrids. In the half-decade between the release of NT 4.0 and XP, Microsoft had a lot of work to do, such as implementing Plug and Play, building out gaming tech, adding WDM drivers, and so on. Thankfully, PCs also grew in muscle, specs, and multimedia capabilities to make the larger and more demanding XP a big hit.Windows XP landed with a core marketing line that it was âBuilt on NT technology,â which felt uncomfortable to read if you were from the camp that believed âNTâ was short for âNew Technology.â(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)It is pretty easy to find an old Cairo release online for retro machine tinkering. Those interested in a more casual poke around in NT 4.0 out of interest, curiosity, or nostalgia will find there are some online installs you can play with via a web browser.
The Hot Take: They just said that iPhone model loss would be off set by datacenter sales. So i guess they'll be hurting for a bit.
Qualcomm has predicted its entry to the datacenter market will yield $15 billion of annual revenue by FY 2029 â huge growth, but also a modest number compared to its more established rivals. The chip design firm dangled the $15 billion figure on Wednesday along with its Q3 results, which included a warning that revenue from its business selling modems to Apple is about to crater. Execs told investors that supply chain constraints mean Qualcomm expects âan acceleration in the step down of Apple product revenuesâ as its contribution to the next iPhone âis expected to be materially lower than our prior estimate of 20 percent.â Apple has spent years working on its own modems, a shift Qualcomm has long acknowledged. Now the House of the Snapdragon has advised investors to expect less than $2 billion in sales to Cupertino next year. âThis obviously accelerates kind of the exit of Apple revenue out of our model,â said CFO Akash Palkhiwala. Qualcomm has a plan to replace Appleâs cash, by diversifying away from smartphones. Execs said the company thinks it will sell $40 billion a year of products not tied to handsets in FY 2029, with $10 billion of automotive sales and revenue from internet of things devices hitting $14 billion. The company sold $3.3 billion on non-smartphone kit in Q3 and previously forecast $22 billion of non-phone revenue in 2029. Growing its datacenter business from zero to $15 billion in a few years is impressive, but itâs worth comparing Qualcommâs plans to current results from its rivals like AMD and Intel, both of which won over $16 billion in datacenter revenue in FY 25 and are growing fast. And then thereâs Nvidia, which is on track to post over $250 billion annual datacenter revenue. Qualcommâs datacenter products compete directly with AMD and Nvidia. $15 billion of annual revenue in 2029 will mean Qualcomm is a minor player, suggesting its focus on cheaper inferencing wonât have wide appeal. Execs could at least point to initial sales of datacenter kit arriving just in time to replace revenue it used to win from Apple. On the companyâs earnings call, Qualcomm CEO and president Cristiano Amon foreshadowed price rises across the companyâs range and said he doesnât expect that decision will hurt the already-depressed smartphone market. âEven a double-digit price increase, which is just a pass-through of the input costs increase and wafer price increases, it actually is small when you compare it to the order of magnitude of the memory bill of materials,â he said, after blaming slow handset sales on the cost of RAM. Indeed, Qualcomm is banking on increased revenue from sales of its products for use in Android handsets, helped by a resurgent Chinese market. Amon thinks Middle Kingdom smartphone sales will rebound now that vendors have sold all the stock they warehoused and are set to launch new models featuring agentic AI. Q3 revenue came in at $9.95 billion, a four percent year-over-year dip. Net income fell 25 percent to $2 billion. Those figures werenât far off the companyâs predictions. Qualcommâs share price dropped by about five percent in after hours trading. ÂŽ
The Hot Take: Another company given x86 tech? Will it go the way of VIA, or will they run and enhance it to bring a 4th strong competitor to the x86 ISA market?
Intel is handing Atom chip IP to Rosaic, a startup run by one of Lip-Bu Tanâs old mates, Amarjit Gill.
Gill has history with Intel chief executive Lip-Bu Tan, who has spent years as a semiconductor investor as well as an industry operator.
According to Reuters, Gill invested with Tan in high-performance chip startup Nuvia and worked with him on RISC-V chip outfit Rivos. Chipzillaâs Atom chips are built for low-power jobs, where they mostly scrap with designs from British chip blueprint outfit Arm.
At one point, Chipzilla aimed Atom at Android devices through a partnership with Google, before that plan went pear-shaped.
The latest Atom chips arrived in the first quarter of 2026, after Chipzilla refreshed its P-series line. Those chips are aimed at server and networking jobs.
The refresh followed the announcement of two new Atom X series chips in the third quarter of 2025. Reuters said Chipzilla will transfer register-transfer level code for Atom processors to Rosaic.
That RTL code describes how input data moves through CPU registers before turning into output, which is proper crown-jewels stuff.
It seems likely that sharing would give Rosaic deep access to Chipzillaâs intellectual property and help it build custom chips. That makes the arrangement more interesting than a routine licence deal, especially given Gillâs ties to Tan.
Tan joined Chipzilla in 2025 and is trying to turn the company around through AI and its battered foundry business. Chipzilla and AMD remain the worldâs biggest designers and sellers of x86 chips.
Chinaâs Shanghai Zhaoxin Semiconductor and Hygon Information Technology serve Chinaâs domestic market for personal computing chips.
Under Tan, Chipzilla wants to ride the need for agentic AI computing, where traditional processors could get another spell in the sun.
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The Hot Take: APU is the cousin of ARM's SoC. Mid-range across the board if you ask me is what I'm seeing the industry shifting to.
Intel is reportedly developing a socketed Nova Lake-S processor with substantially stronger integrated graphics than recent desktop Core products. Information attributed to hardware leaker Jaykihn describes a configuration with twelve Xe3P graphics cores.
The Hot Take: AMD past manufacturing arm getting US funds? We will see if they do anything productive to the industry, as it seems they aren't since they were created in my eyes.
The US government has signed a letter of intent to provide GlobalFoundries with $300 million in CHIPS Act funding and, at the same time, receive a one percent stake in the company worth roughly $269 million. The money's supposedly not a tit-for-tat, but an investment designed to spur development of silicon photonics networking technologies that the AI industry needs for datacenters. âWith todayâs compute supply chain investments, the Trump Administration is accelerating Americaâs innovation engine,â Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in a canned statement. âThese strategic investments will enhance our countryâs domestic capabilities, create high-paying jobs and keep America at the forefront of the semiconductor industry.â GlobalFoundriesâ previously announced Silicon Photonics Co-Packaged Advanced Light Engine (SCALE) is one of the technologies itâs pushing in order to support 400 Gb/s per lane connectivity, which is about the speed at which copper interconnects become problematic for large scale systems. Both CPO, where optical engines are integrated directly into the compute logic, and NPO, where the optics reside in a module adjacent to the compute, are expected to be big business over the next couple of years. At Computex in Taipei last month, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang quipped that these technologies would make Marvell Technology the next trillion dollar company. Over the past two years, system designs from Nvidia and AMD have grown from eight GPUs in a box to rack systems packing six dozen accelerators into a single machine. To meet growing AI demand, the chip designers are plotting even larger row-scale systems using optical interconnects. Since its spinoff from AMD, GlobalFoundries has moved away from leading-edge CMOS technologies in order to focus on more specialized processes. The company has become a leading producer of silicon photonics used in modern AI datacenters. In addition to next-gen silicon photonics tech, GlobalFoundries says the CHIPS Act funding will also support the development of novel optical materials, advanced packaging capabilities like 3D hybrid bonding, which will support the rollout of domestically manufactured near-packaged optics (NPO) and co-packaged optics (CPO). And thanks to the Trump administration, regular Americans will have a stake in the success of these technologies â or at least the ones GlobalFoundries ends up manufacturing. GlobalFoundries would not be the first American fab operator that Uncle Sam has secured equity from in exchange for CHIPS Act funding. Last summer, the Commerce Department converted $5.7 billion in previously awarded but not yet disbursed CHIPS Act grants, along with $3.2 billion awarded under the Secure Enclave program, into roughly a 10 percent stake in the struggling chipmaker. Bootnote: On Tuesday, Intel announced the Rapid Assured Microelectronics Prototypes - Commercial (RAMP-C) program had reached its conclusion. The Department of Defense (DoD)-sponsored program offered incentives to industry partners to develop test chips in Intel fabs on the companyâs 18A process technology. The programâs end comes as Intel shifts its manufacturing might to a new government program called the Secure Enclave, which will manufacture semiconductors for use by US defense industrial base (DIB) customers. âEarly access to Intel 18A has positioned DIB customers to leverage Secure Enclave while meeting critical size, weight and power requirements,â the company wrote. ÂŽ
The Hot Take: Good, USA needs a strong Intel manufacturing.
Intel has overcome one big challenge that will lead to the creation of hyper-large chips beyond 12x reticle size through advanced packaging technologies. Intel Is Creating The World's Most Advanced & Largest Chips in the US at Its New Mexico "Rio Rancho" Facility, Leveraging Next-Gen Packaging Innovations Modern-day chips don't rely on a single piece of silicon, and instead utilize a range of silicon dies, interconnected together using the latest packaging solutions. The terminology used for such designs is chiplets, and chiplets were made to overcome scaling bottlenecks and the growing demand for compute. Inside Intel's Rio Rancho, New Mexico [âŚ]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/intel-cracks-encapsulation-wall-blocking-hyper-large-chips-using-advanced-packaging/
By ckasprzak | TkOut
| August 1, 2026 | Hardware, MSI
The Hot Take: Was only a matter of time. Warranties mean nothing with these shortages and price hikes.
An MSI Raider GE77HX 12UHS sporting an Intel Core i9-12900HX and an RTX 3080 Ti might be considered aged at this point, but the gaming laptop can still hold its own in a truckload of titles, assuming it still works. One Redditor has shared evidence that the company refused to honor a motherboard replacement for the machine, simply because it would have been too expensive for them. Talk about a punch in the gut for the customer who spent $6,000 on a top-tier gaming laptop like this. The Raider GE77HX 12UHS was deemed âBeyond Economical Repair,â but the customer still [âŚ]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/msi-refuses-motherboard-replacement-6000-gaming-laptop/
The Hot Take: Just deeper and deeper into our lives.... I dropped OneDrive because the "backup" nag screens. Thankfully I have Synology NAS with Drive client to replace it.
The year is 2026, and Iâm still amazed when I find a new entry in my Start menuâs All apps list for an app I donât remember installing. This time, itâs Microsoft again, and the product is OneDrive Photos, which appears to be yet another photo editor and viewer for Windows 11 that nobody asked for.
While searching for Microsoft Photos, a new app called âOneDrive Photosâ showed up in my results out of nowhere, and it appears to have arrived either via a Windows Update or an update for the OneDrive sync client on Windows.
For those unaware, Windows already comes with OneDrive pre-installed, and it syncs your personal files to the cloud.
Right now, you can manage OneDrive files directly in File Explorer and control sync from the system tray on the taskbar. It looks like the nagging during Windows setup to use OneDrive, along with the backup feature being turned on by default, wasnât enough, as Windows is now adding âOneDrive Photos.â
If Windows has already installed OneDrive Photos on your PC, you can find its entry in the Start menu or Windows Search, whether youâve signed in to a Microsoft account or not.
In my case, I have the OneDrive sync app installed because it was bundled with Windows, but I havenât signed in with a Microsoft or work account. I donât use it. Yet the OneDrive Photos app still appeared.
Testing the new OneDrive Photos app for Windows 11
In our tests, Windows Latest noticed that the new âOneDrive Photosâ app is part of the existing OneDrive installation and runs through âC:\Program Files\Microsoft OneDrive\OneDrive.App.exe.â I also noticed that itâs based on WebView2, so itâs not a native app.
OneDrive Photos doesnât need a Microsoft account to work, as it can also detect your local files. At one point, I started to wonder whether itâll eventually replace the Microsoft Photos app because OneDrive Photos immediately started acting like a second Photos app on my PC.
It already had access to the drives where I had images saved, and the experience isnât exactly terrible. Although OneDrive Photos is a web app and appears to load OneDrive.comâs new design, itâs actually quite decent in terms of performance.
As you can see in the above screenshot, OneDrive Photos has a beautiful interface, and it tries to mimic Windows 11âs acrylic effect on the web. On the left side of the app, you have dedicated sections for Moments, Gallery, People, Albums, Favorites, and This PC. These are the same sections youâd find on the OneDrive web app, with âThis PCâ being an exception.
When you open Gallery and are not signed in to your Microsoft account, you are automatically shown your local images. You also have the choice to switch layouts, but currently, there are only two layouts: River and Square. You can also choose between Roomy or Compact density and adjust the thumbnail size.
When you open an image, you can edit, share, favorite, copy, delete, print, open it in File Explorer, or set it as your lock screen or desktop background. Again, all of that might sound a bit similar to the Microsoft Photos app because image editing in the Microsoft Photos app is based on OneDrive.
Once you sign in, the app becomes a full OneDrive gallery, and you have access to AI-powered cloud search.
For example, you can search for anything vague, and OneDriveâs AI will find the most appropriate image or file. In the case of photos, it can OCR the content and locate the best one.
Thereâs also a People section, which goes a step further by grouping similar faces in your photos. Microsoft asks for permission before turning it on and explicitly warns that the facial data could be considered biometric data in some regions.
The company says only you can see the grouped faces, but wants you to believe the data isnât shared with third parties, and you can delete it by disabling the feature.
Overall, OneDrive Photos appears to be more of a full photo viewer than a simple extension of the OneDrive sync client. Unfortunately, you canât just remove OneDrive Photos and use only OneDrive sync, as the former is tied to the latterâs installation.
If you want to block the OneDrive sync client from installing OneDrive Photos, you will need to remove OneDrive entirely from Settings > Installed apps.
The post Windows 11 is quietly installing OneDrive Photos, and it wants to scan your photos for faces if you allow it appeared first on Windows Latest
The Hot Take: "Hey look an OS we can't control all of the users data or track and monitor them, ATTACK!"
GrapheneOS is defending its duress-password feature after an environmental activist used it to wipe his Pixel phone during a U.S. Customs search and was later indicted for allegedly destroying property under government control. The nonprofit says the operating system is "completely legal," cannot recover the erased data, and should not be weakened with encryption backdoors. Meanwhile, the activist faces up to five years in prison if found guilty. PCMag reports: In a post on Saturday, the Canadian nonprofit behind the operating system, the GrapheneOS Foundation, explained that the software offers a range of features to prevent data extraction. For example, one safeguard is the "auto-reboot timer" that'll reboot a locked device after a set period of time to put the data at rest, leaving all files inside encrypted.
The group's post subtly suggests that GrapheneOS phones can withstand law enforcement searches without requiring users to resort to a duress password. "People should carefully consider how to use it in an actual duress situation where there can be physical or legal consequences for wiping the device," the nonprofit wrote. "GrapheneOS doesn't require it to protect data from being extracted from the device, but it takes recovering it completely off the table even with the PIN/password for each profile on the device."
On X, the nonprofit has also said it can do nothing to help US law enforcement recover data from Tunick's phone. "Data cannot be recovered after the key derivation material is reliably wiped. It's not possible and there's nothing we can do to assist with it," the group wrote. "Similarly, it's not possible to assist with bypassing encryption because the hardware and software has been designed to prevent it."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.