The Hot Take: Will have to take this with a bit rock of salt until we see the benches and real world performance. Just a price grab or actual performance?
AMD is apparently no longer satisfied with being perceived as a perennial underdog, and is reportedly choosing to make a bold statement by pricing its Helios rackscale solution at a hefty premium to NVIDIA's Rubin. What's more, AMD has reportedly managed to rope in Microsoft as the product's first confirmed client, demonstrating the utility that Helios offers even at its supposedly elevated price point. Futurum believes AMD will price Helios at $5 million to $5.5 million per rack, versus an expected retail price of $3.5 million to $4 million for the second-gen NVIDIA Rubin rack As we explained in a […]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/amd-is-reportedly-pricing-its-helios-rack-40-above-nvidias-second-gen-rubin-confident-that-customers-will-pay-the-premium/
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The Hot Take: The more the merrier and helps Intel get back to track making and developing x86 CPUs. Hopefully GPUs too.
Fortinet on Tuesday revealed it will use Intel Foundry to fab its sixth-gen Security Processor (SP6), a nice win for Chipzilla's sputtering chipmaking biz. The chips feature dedicated accelerators designed specifically for the security and cryptographic operations required by modern hardware firewalls. The custom chips are one of Fortinet's defining features. Many cybersecurity hardware players build appliances around commodity hardware like x86 and Arm CPUs, but Fortinet prefers custom application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). The two companies haven't said when the chips will enter production, much less what the SP6's speeds and feeds will entail, though we imagine it'll have a bit more pep than Fortinet's SP5 chips. The SP5 launched in 2023 and boasted support for layer 7 firewalling and IPsec VPN connectivity at speeds exceeding 30 Gbps. Throughput fell when advanced threat protection or SSL inspection was enabled, but Fortinet still claimed a speedy 4.3 Gbps and 3.3 Gbps, respectively. As you might have already figured out, Fortinet's SP line is designed primarily for smaller appliances like SD-WAN gateways, rather than larger datacenter-centric appliances built around its beefier NP and CP-series parts. While Intel couldn't offer much detail on the chip itself, we're told it will use the older Intel 4 process node rather than the leading-edge 18A process tech. Chipzilla also suggested Fortinet will draw on its experience in disaggregated semiconductor design and advanced packaging, which could mean a chiplet architecture with greater scalability. With so little detail, we can only speculate. Intel declined to say which technologies beyond Intel 4 the chip will use. The x86 giant also declined to comment on the availability of the product, noting only that "details regarding the Fortinet Security Processor 6 availability will be announced at a later date." While SP6 won't use the latest chipmaking tech, it will be built in an American fab by an American company, offering a level of supply chain security that remains difficult to find. If you want even remotely leading-edge silicon, Intel, Samsung, and TSMC are your only options. US-based production can still mean settling for a less advanced process, although TSMC's first Arizona fab has already begun churning out 4 nm silicon and Samsung aims to bring its new Texas plant online this year. Fortinet would not be the first to enlist Intel's manufacturing might for sensitive workloads. Under DARPA's HIVE program, the chipmaker built an eight-core, 528-thread processor with 1 TB/s silicon-photonics interconnects specifically to accelerate graph analytics workloads. But it doesn't stop at the DoD. Supply chain security is something Intel has leaned into as it has sought to reinvent itself from an integrated device manufacturer serving mainly itself, and occasionally the US government, into a full-fledged foundry ready to compete with Samsung and, ultimately, TSMC. In mid-2024, Uncle Sam awarded Intel $3 billion to establish a secure enclave for manufacturing chips for government agencies. Since then, the US government has taken a 9.9 percent stake in the American chip biz. ®
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By ckasprzak | TkOut
| July 23, 2026 |
Gaming
The Hot Take: Hope it makes it past the finish line before the can all the devs.
As is tradition, Ubisoft is playing catch-up with leaks concerning its games. The company has told fans to expect new announcements about the Ghost Recon franchise next month on the series' 25th anniversary. This comes the same day that leaks reportedly revealed some of what Ubisoft will share.
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The Hot Take: Lollipops and colors!
It's definitely not that Pixel 11 model you might be thinking of.
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The Hot Take: Bitch and moan, better than paying the tariffs sir.
TSMC's CFO Wendell Huang shared last week that the firm is seeing strong demand from US customers. The executive's comments came after the Taiwanese firm's latest earnings report, which also saw it announce an additional $100 billion investment in the US. Huang outlined that TSMC's 3-nanometer facilities in the US should come online by the second half of next year and added that the costs of building facilities in the US were higher than in Taiwan. TSMC CFO Says US Fabs Cost Four To Five Times More To Build Than In Taiwan TSMC's latest $100 billion announcement will expand the […]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/tsmcs-cfo-admits-us-fabs-cost-four-to-five-times-more-than-taiwan-yet-doubles-down-with-100b-bet/
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The Hot Take: There was a YouTuber that made what he called plastaline. Given that plastics are mainly petroleum based makes sense.
A new path to cleaning up the world’s plastic waste might start on the runway. Researchers from Nanjing Forestry University and Tsinghua University have developed a tandem reactor system capable of converting discarded plastics directly into aviation-grade fuel, potentially providing a double solution for the global waste crisis and the aviation
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The Hot Take: ARM isn't the answer, sorry.
The decision to employ older Cortex-X925 and Cortex-A725 cores on the RTX Spark to form a 20-core CPU configuration will probably haunt NVIDIA because a new Cinebench 2026 leak reveals that the chipset produces subpar multi-core results, despite Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Ultra housing the SoC set to the ‘High Performance’ profile. Fortunately, the RTX Spark manages to retain some dignity in the single-core benchmark. High Performance mode on Surface Laptop Ultra isn’t enabled by default, but hidden configuration allows RTX Spark’s Cortex cores to pull nearly 50W in new test We’ve previously reported that the altered Cortex-X925 cores running RTX Spark were […]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/rtx-spark-cinebench-2026-disappointing-multi-core-results/
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The Hot Take: Well now, lets see if they get back into a competitive place where they better compete and pull more people.
Firefox releases will soon get even closer together – but not ESR ones, which remain annual, with the next one due out soon. The change was announced last week on the dev-platform@mozilla.org mailing list by Mozilla’s director of engineering Sylvestre Ledru: “We are planning to move Firefox Desktop and Android from a 4-week release cadence to a 2-week release cadence starting in September 2026. “This will be an experiment… This does not mean that all work needs to ship twice as fast. Work that is not ready should not be rushed, and features can still take the time they need to bake. “The current target is to release Firefox 155 on September 1, 2026, instead of September 15 … “We will closely monitor how this change works in practice and adjust if needed.” The change is already visible in the upcoming Firefox Release Calendar. At the time of writing, it shows the current four-week cadence for Firefox 153 and 154, with Firefox 155 brought forward to September 1. From then on, it lists releases at roughly two-week intervals. This isn’t unprecedented. The last time Mozilla did it was over a decade ago. Google announced a very similar change for Chrome back in March, and The Register reported on it going to six-weekly releases in 2010 and then four-weekly ones in 2021. Brace for the impact of the next ESR In the meantime, Firefox 153 is nearly here: at the time of writing, it’s scheduled for Tuesday, July 21. Right now, the release notes are blank, but the beta release notes are more forthcoming. You can look forward to further improvements to PDF editing. Version 153 will be able to merge multiple PDF documents into one by a simple drag-and-drop in the PDF sidebar, and insert images into PDFs as new pages. It will also improve highlighting text in PDFs. The new version can generate QR codes for sharing web pages offline, such as in printed documents. It can verify and display the EU’s new Qualified Website Authentication Certificates, or QWACs for short. These are part of the new eIDAS legislation, which is a slightly convoluted acronym for “electronic IDentification, Authentication and trust Services”. Sounds cumbersome, but if it helps make the Wild West of the Web a bit safer, we’re all for it. Another security tweak is that extensions will lose local-file access by default. As we use one that relies on it - the excellent Multithreaded Download Manager - that's slightly concerning, although users will be able to grant the permission separately, so we'll see. If a tab is using your location, Firefox 153 will highlight this with a map-pin icon in the address bar. The last release could recognize a few keywords in the address bar to mute all sound: this function will get extended, with typed commands for picking colors from pages, and accessing experimental “Labs” features. Come back, Ubuntu Unity and your HUD, all is forgiven. There’s also experimental JPEG XL support. Pop-up video player controls will work better, and if you use Windows and have a compatible GPU and drivers, 153 will play HDR video. On macOS, Firefox supports the Fn+F keystroke for switching to full-screen mode – which means KeyboardControls.com has to update its description of the function. Firefox 153 will also be a significant release, because it will be the next ESR version: it will get security updates for at least 15 months, meaning until late 2027. (And maybe longer: Firefox 115 is still getting updates, and now will until March 2027.) In turn, that means that Firefox 153 is also the basis of the latest beta of the AI-free Waterfox fork, which recently integrated built-in ad blocking. ®
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By ckasprzak | TkOut
| July 18, 2026 |
Gaming
The Hot Take: I'm ok with it as long it isn't cartoons or rainbow unicorns.
Top Gun is coming to a battlefield near you. Battlefield 6 and the second-highest-grossing film of 2022 are staging a crossover event, one that coincides with the upcoming season of Battlefield 6 and Battlefield REDSEC (the standalone battle royale mode), which EA described as “the franchise’s largest seasonal update to date.” This is like the Super Bowl for mostly well-made blockbuster entertainment with concerning ties to the military-industrial complex.
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The Hot Take: Long wait for the next build I guess.... LOVIN' the Antec Flux Nocua edition until then I guess.
Intel was expected to unveil its next-generation desktop processors later this year. The upcoming Nova Lake lineup has been making the rounds online, and a new report from VideoCardz suggests that Intel could introduce it under the Core Ultra Series 400 branding. For context, the current Arrow Lake and Arrow Lake Refresh desktop CPUs follow the Core Ultra Series 200 naming scheme, while Intel's latest Panther Lake mobile processors carry the Core Ultra Series 300 branding.Go deeper with TH Premium: CPU(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)CPU scaling with DLSSRyzen to the top: How AMD innovated in the gaming CPU marketHow ARM is working its way into PCsAMD CES 2026 gaming trends press Q&A roundtable transcriptThe report also claims to reveal the review embargo windows and launch timeline for several Nova Lake models. According to the report, Intel will initially introduce a 28-core DS package, which is expected to launch between January and March 2027. The new DS suffix is said to be an internal package designation for processors featuring dual-compute tiles. This will reportedly be followed by 28-core K-series (unlocked) models between March and April 2027, while 16-core and 8-core variants are expected to arrive between late March and May 2027. The flagship 52-core DS model is reportedly scheduled for a much later launch, potentially between late May and September 2027.Rumored Nova Lake launch timelineProcessorP-coresE-coresLPE-coresExpected launch52-core DS16324Late May to September 202728-core DS8164January to March 202728-core K-series8164March to April 202716-core484Late March to May 20278-core440Late March to May 2027While Intel is yet to officially confirm a launch date for Nova Lake, various leaks have suggested that the lineup could be one of the company's biggest generational leaps in recent years. The flagship desktop SKU, featuring a 52-core configuration, is expected to combine 16 Coyote Cove Performance (P) cores, 32 Arctic Wolf Efficiency (E) cores, and four Low Power Efficiency (LPE) cores. This would be a notable jump over the current Core Ultra 9 285K, which features a total of 24-cores. The introduction of Coyote Cove and Arctic Wolf also points to an entirely new CPU architecture, replacing the Lion Cove and Skymont cores found in Arrow Lake.Nova Lake is also rumored to bring new platform upgrades including support for DDR5-8000 memory, up to 24 PCIe 5.0 lanes for expansion, Thunderbolt 5, and Intel's next-generation Xe3 Celestial integrated graphics. The processors are also expected to feature an upgraded NPU5 for AI workloads along with a 150W Processor Base Power (PBP) and 253W Maximum Turbo Power (MTP) on the flagship model, despite the substantial increase in core count. Earlier reports have also indicated that Nova Lake will transition to a new LGA1954 socket, meaning users will likely need a new motherboard to upgrade from the existing Arrow Lake platform.
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