Less than 24 hours after he admitted to having an affair with Alice Huang, a Megaspeed executive suspected of being a Chinese spy, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has been asked to appear before the House Select Committee on China. The Committee issued a letter today, signed by Rep. Brian J. Mast (R-FL), Rep. John Moolenaar (R-MI), and Rep. Eric A. Crawford (R-AK). An X post featuring the letter states that the letter "expresses concerns over NVIDIA’s security protocols against foreign adversary espionage and Mr. Huang’s reported ties to a Chinese intelligence-linked executive of a Singapore-based data center company."

"Dear Mr. Huang: We are writing to request that you appear before our committees for a joint, closed-door briefing on NVIDIA’s security protocols against foreign adversary espionage and your interactions with a publicly reported People’s Republic of China (PRC) intelligence asset: Megaspeed executive Alice Huang," the letter begins.

It goes on to say that recent reports surrounding the affair "raise significant national security concerns regarding the PRC’s access to sensitive U.S. technology and information. "The issue of PRC infiltration and access to cutting-edge U.S. technology is core to the investigative work of our three committees this Congress. It is vital that Congress determines the extent to which U.S. national security has been placed at risk."

The closed-door hearing is set for November 18, 2026; whether Huang will attend remains unclear. The letter also allows for Huang to set an alternative date during while the 119th Congress is still in session.

On Sunday, Huang admitted to having an affair with Alice Huang, a former executive of Singapore-based Megaspeed. It is alleged that the latter was recruited by China's Ministry of State Security to gather information and help China get its hands on Nvidia's AI GPUs, the most powerful of which are banned from export to the country by Washington. Megaspeed has been accused of smuggling $2 billion of AI chips into China.

In a statement to Nvidia employees, Jensen Huang said, "To my colleagues at NVIDIA, I owe my family and all of you an apology. I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry." As Huang's statement noted, Nvidia has opened an independent investigation into its CEO's conduct regarding the national security concerns the story has laid bare. The board of directors stated, "While the Board has no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised, the Board's inquiry will examine all available information."

Nvidia shares dropped by around 5% in early trading, but have since recovered some of their losses. The company has rocketed to a market capitalization of over $4 trillion as the global hardware leader of the AI boom. Its powerful GPUs are in high demand for both the training of AI models and inference.

Processors generating excess heat play a significant part in contemporary data center design, cost, and resource use. However, things could be vastly different if AI chips were more efficient and ran far cooler. South Korean chip startup DEEPX, recently featured by CNBC, thinks its AI chip designs are the answer. DEEPX demonstrated its DX-M1 processor’s cool-running capabilities in a bizarre new dairy-based thermal benchmark. While rival chips caused a knob of butter to sizzle in seconds, atop the DEEPX solution, the butter block remains solid.

Concerns over AI data center proliferation are growing worldwide. These developments are shaping business, the environment, and politics. Some people have very strong feelings about them, and hundreds of people have risked being thrown into jail protesting data centers. The CNBC report linked in the intro looks into why modern data centers are problematic, and indicates that the core issues stem from the use of hot-running processors and the extensive power and cooling apparatus they need.

DEEPX says its simple answer is to “make the AI chips themselves run cooler.” The CNBC video includes a demo of the ultra-low-power DX-M1 processor. In a side-by-side test against unnamed rival AI chips, you can see the DX-M1 NPU is clearly cooler. DEEPX CEO Kim Nok-won claims a temperature difference of 25 to more than 40 degrees Celsius compared with competitors. Kim said the side-by-side chips processed “the same AI workload… and every chip melted the butter except the last chip [DX-M1].”

The dairy-based thermal challenge is certainly eyebrow-raising, but we note some big gaps in the comparison information. Most notable was the question of how fast each processor tackles the test workload. Anyone can run a chip cool if the power and clocks are scaled back. PC enthusiasts undervolt and/or underclock their GPUs all the time for efficiency, better thermals, and reduced fan noise.

DEEPX’s DX-M1 NPU has been produced on Samsung 5nm since August 2025, according to The Elec reports. It has won approximately $13.3M worth of orders thanks to this sliver of silicon. The company is planning to move forward with the next-gen DX-M2 AI chip, which is based on Samsung 2nm, with its mass production aiming for H2 2027.

In conclusion, these NPUs look set for edge computing and robotics applications, so they aren’t really competing in the same space as the racks of power-gulping Nvidia Blackwell and Ruben GPUs featured in the CNBC news feature. Eventually, we might see the hundreds or thousands of hot-running Nvidia GPUs with beefy liquid cooling apparatus get replaced by cooler-running custom accelerators. Such an innovation could cool the backlash against AI data centers. However, DEEPX’s DX-M1 or even DX-M2 chips aren’t going to compete in that space, so this butter test is a bit of a red herring.

The CNBC report also highlights SK hynix’s work on iHBM, a next-gen low-power consumption, and cool-running. The ‘i’ stands for ‘Integrated Cooling Element,’ according to an exec talking to CNBC. CoolIT is also trying a similar approach by bringing water cooling even closer to the heat-generating silicon.

Not everyone wants a hulking gaming laptop. Some prefer something stealthier. Acer’s Predator Helios Neo 16S AI aims for portability but still packs a Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus processor and Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti graphics into a sub-five-pound package. It also includes plenty of ports and a beautiful 240 Hz OLED display. That hardware gives it plenty to work with, but the question remains whether the Helios Neo 16S AI can still deliver solid gaming performance while being portable.

Design of the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16S AI

Acer’s obsidian black chassis maintains the look of the Predator series – angular, dark, and visible in the dark with its illuminated lid logo. At 14.05 x 10.85 x 0.74 inches and 4.85 pounds, it’s respectably trim for a gaming laptop, though the Gigabyte Aero X16 (14 x 9.9 x 0.78 inches, 4.2 pounds) and the HyperX Omen 15 (13.5 x 9.96 x 0.93 inches, 4.89 pounds) both have about an inch less depth since neither use a rear thermal shelf like Acer.

The build quality is decent – both the chassis and lid show little flex. The stamped aluminum panels on the lid bottom and chassis lid aren’t ultra-premium but still beat plastic. One downside is that the metal shows fingerprints easily, which are difficult to clean off.

Acer provides an impressive port variety across three sides: Thunderbolt 4, three USB-A 3.2, USB-C 3.2, HDMI 2.1, 2.5 Gbps Ethernet, a MicroSD card reader, and an audio jack. The rear ports conveniently leave cables out of sight.

Inside, the laptop offers Wi-Fi 6E, which isn’t as modern as it could be, though the Killer AX1675i card and accompanying Killer Ethernet jack offer simultaneous network connections via Killer Doubleshot Pro for gamers that want to ensure network priority for the games over one connection and all other apps over the other. It’s also notable that Acer includes a zippered, padded travel sleeve.

Acer Predator Helios Neo 16S AI Specifications

Gaming and Graphics on the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16S AI

We tested the Predator Helios Neo 16S AI with a Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus processor, Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti graphics card, and 16GB of RAM.

Playing 007 First Light, I saw about 65 to 75 frames per second (FPS) in most scenes, with spikes to over 100 FPS in wide open areas. The game remained all-around playable, though it did require using DLSS to achieve these framerates at native 2560 x 1600 with High settings.

Our comparison systems for this Acer are Gigabyte’s Aero X16 (Ryzen AI 7 350, RTX 5070 85W, $1,899.99 when tested, $1,499.99 as of this writing) and HyperX’s Omen 15 (Core Ultra 9 386H, RTX 5070 85W, $2,099.99 when tested, about $3,159.99 as of this writing).

Comparisons will focus on the 1920 x 1080 results, but we also included numbers at each laptop’s native resolution: 2560 x 1600 for the Acer and Gigabyte while the HP uses 2880 x 1800.

Overall, the Predator Helios Neo 16S AI performed significantly better than both the Gigabyte and HyperX laptops. Much of that has to do with its higher-wattage RTX 5070 Ti, though its Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus processor is also more modern.

In Shadow of the Tomb Raider (Highest detail preset), Acer’s 125 FPS at 1080p was on par with the HyperX (126 FPS), though it dominated at its 1600p native resolution, with 76 FPS against Gigabyte’s 60 FPS and HyperX’s 64 FPS.

Acer’s advantage continued in Far Cry 6 (Ultra), where it produced 122 FPS to Gigabyte’s 85 FPS and HyperX’s 107 FPS at native resolution. The lead narrowed in Red Dead Redemption 2 (Medium) where Acer and Gigabyte practically tied at 1080p and were within a few FPS at native (52 FPS for Acer and 49 FPS for Gigabyte). The HyperX remained behind.

The Acer also demonstrated markedly better performance in Cyberpunk 2077 (Ray Tracing Ultra) particularly at native resolution, where its 21 FPS outran Gigabyte (17 FPS) and HyperX (5 FPS).

In Forza Horizon 6 (Extreme), Acer’s 72 FPS at 1080p was strangely lower than HyperX’s 80 FPS, but the results flipped at native, where Acer’s 60 FPS was considerably ahead of HyperX’s 51 FPS.

While not a powerhouse, the Predator Helios Neo 16S AI demonstrates competent gaming performance at its 2560 x 1600 native resolution. Crucially, the extra depth from Acer’s thermal shelf design lets its GPU draw 115 W, considerably more than its Gigabyte and HyperX competitors

We test the sustained performance of gaming laptops running 15 loops of the Metro: Exodus stress test, simulating half an hour of gaming. During the test, the Predator Helios Neo 16S AI averaged 86.82 FPS across all runs. The variance was less than one FPS between runs, indicating stable thermal performance. The Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus ran at an average of 2.94 GHz on its P-cores, 2.16 GHz on its E-cores, and had an average temperature of 73 degrees Celsius. Meanwhile, the RTX 5070 Ti averaged 1.622 GHz and 74 C.

Productivity Performance on the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16S AI

Our Predator Helios Neo 16S AI features a Core Ultra 9 290HX processor, 16GB of dual-channel DDR5-6400 memory, and a 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD.

The Acer’s Core Ultra 9 290HX produced strong numbers in Geekbench. Its single-core score of 3,349 and multi-core score of 19,313 were well ahead of the Ryzen AI 7 350-powered Gigabyte (2,916 and 14,074) and Core Ultra 9 386H-powered HyperX (2,857 and 15,916). This continued into our 4K-to-1080p Handbrake transcoding testing, which Acer dominated with 2 minutes and 30 seconds. The Gigabyte (3:54) and HyperX (3:39) weren’t even close.

Acer also produced solid numbers in our 25GB file transfer test, averaging 2,034.84 MBps next to Gigabyte’s1,480.57 MBps and HyperX’s far slower 999.57 MBps.

Overall, this Acer is very capable for almost any kind of use. Multitasking will be limited by 16GB of RAM, but Acer sells versions of this laptop with 32GB and it can be upgraded after purchase.

Display on the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16S AI

Once glance at this Acer’s display leaves no doubt it’s a key selling point. Its OLED panel technology creates exceptionally vivid colors matched by excellent brightness, and its glossy surface gives it an almost liquid appearance. The 2560 x 1600 resolution is a good balance between detail and what the system’s RTX 5070 Ti graphics card can drive in today’s games. Gamers will also appreciate the smooth 240 Hz refresh rate and Nvidia G-Sync support. (As we’ll see in the battery life section, the screen only supports 240 Hz, resulting in higher-than-expected power consumption.)

Watching nature documentaries on National Geographic, I noted the vibrant colors of tropical scenes and the pitch blacks of the depths of the sea. Gaming was equally immersive – 007 First Light felt supremely fluid and looked sharp. I could even make out the writing on character’s uniform badges without zooming.

The Acer’s display covered a healthy 82.7% of the DCI-P3 color gamut, matching the Gigabyte, although it wasn’t quite in the same league as the HyperX, which also used an OLED panel. It also didn’t match the HyperX in brightness, but with a peak of 372.4 nits in SDR, the Acer boasts solid brightness for OLED. Our 40% HDR testing revealed up to an impressive 608 nits of brightness.

Keyboard and Touchpad on the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16S AI

Acer’s keyboard offers a satisfying feel, with ample throw and cushioning without feeling rubbery. In MonkeyType, I reached 116 words per minute with 99% accuracy on my first try, a great result for me on any laptop. The Acer Key app lets you customize the user-customizable key above the plus key, which is handy for creating one-press access to a favorite app or site.

Though the keyboard doesn't feature per-key backlighting, its four RGB zones can be set to many patterns and colors in the PredatorSense app. When changing lighting settings, the app initially says they’re controlled by Windows Dynamic Lighting, but that isn’t the case since Dynamic Lighting says no compatible devices are detected. But once dismissing the warning in PredatorSense, the app provides intuitive if limited control over the zones and lid logo. Each zone can be assigned a static lighting effect or the entire keyboard set in a dynamic pattern: breathing, neon, wave, ripple, combo, snake, and disco, with customizable speed, direction, and brightness. Settings can be stored in profiles.

Acer also did well with the large touchpad, which offers predictable clicking and my fingers glided smoothly over the matte surface.

Audio on the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16S AI

Audio performance isn’t a strong point for the Neo 16S AI. Twin speakers embedded in the palm rest barely have enough volume for casual listening, with average clarity and thin bass. In Phil Collins’ “Don’t Lose My Number”, drum hits sounded flat and vocals were somewhat muted.

The speakers are better-suited gaming, offering a decent sense of direction because of their placement on either side of the palm rest, but lack of bass and volume means you'll want a headset. The DTS:X app offers equalizers – without them, the sound is quite tinny. I had the best results leaving the equalizer on Auto.

Upgradeability of the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16S AI

With ten Torx T6 screws securing the bottom cover, Acer doesn’t make it easy to get inside the Predator Helios Neo 16S AI. Removing the screws is the easy part – finding an entry point for my plastic pry tool provided harder. I eventually found one at the front corners of the chassis by using mild force. The fact that the side vents are part of the bottom cover compounds the difficulty – I needed to find an opening for my pry tool above those as well. The clips made cringeworthy snapping sounds as they were released, though surprisingly, none cracked off.

The effort is not for naught – Acer offers solid upgradeability, with two SODIMM slots under the black plastic cover in the middle, plus an M.2 2280 SSD slot and M.2 2230 wireless card slot. The battery is also replaceable.

Battery Life on the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16S AI

Our battery testing consists of web browsing, running OpenGL tests, and streaming videos with the screen at 150 nits while connected to Wi-Fi. The Predator underwhelmed here despite having a large 92 WHr battery – the HyperX laptop outlasted it by almost two hours and the Gigabyte nearly two and a half hours. Most of the blame goes to Acer’s decision to use a screen locked at 240 Hz; more advanced displays would support a variable refresh rate or at least allow it to be lowered to 60 Hz.

Heat on the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16S AI

We measure laptop surface temperatures during 15 loops of the Metro: Exodus stress test. During the test, the Acer’s temperatures peaked at 103 degrees F between the keyboard G and H keys, 81 F on the touchpad, and a toasty 129 F on bottom-center. Fan noise is audible particularly while gaming; hearing softer sounds in games will require using a headset. For daily use, the laptop hardly makes any noise.

Webcam on the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16S AI

Acer’s 1080p webcam offers a decently sharp picture – I could make out details in my facial hair and eyes from a few feet away. Highlights are also handled reasonably well. It lacks a physical privacy shutter or e-shutter, but it does have infrared (IR) for facial recognition.

Software and Warranty on the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16S AI

PredatorSense remains the prominent app on Acer’s Predator gaming laptops. On the Predator Helios Neo 16S AI, it offers power settings, system monitoring, updates, and system settings. Power profiles include quiet, balanced (the default), performance, and turbo. Performance mode indicates it overclocks the CPU and GPU, but doesn’t specify details, while turbo appears to be performance mode but with the fan speeds maxed.

The app’s settings let you disable Nvidia Optimus, set up optimized battery charging, a bluelight shield, and toggle a 30-second keyboard backlighting timeout. Fan control is possible, though the custom option only allows you to set the RPM, not a curve. Most of the settings above plus lighting effects and a sound equalizer can be saved in scenario profiles.

Acer loads many more apps than PredatorSense – too many: Acer Assist, Acer Chroma Tune, Acer Intelligence Space, Acer LiveArt, Acer documents, Acer Jumpstart, Acer Legal Information, Acer My Key, Acer Purified Voice Console, Acer PurifiedView, and Acer QuickPanel create a lengthy list under the Start Menu’s “A” section. Many of them are simply links to the Windows Store.

Some of the apps actually installed are useful, like Acer My Key mentioned earlier. Others could be: Acer Intelligence Space provides many AI-driven features like a meeting assistant, an image generator, a media search tool, and a game assistant that claims to automatically change the color of your crosshair for maximum visibility. I didn’t test all these out – they aren’t specific to the Predator Helios Neo 16S AI – but it seems that they could add value if you’re not already vested in other AI services.

There’s also a decent amount of bloatware, including a McAfee trial, a Dropbox promotion, and Forge of Empires. While easily uninstalled, they simply don’t belong on a laptop this expensive.

Acer Predator Helios Neo 16S AI Configurations

Our Predator Helios Neo 16S AI includes a Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus CPU, Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti graphics card, 16GB of dual-channel RAM, a 1TB PCIe 4.0 solid-state drive, and a 16-inch 2560 x 1600 OLED display with a 240 Hz refresh rate. It retails for $2,774.99 from Best Buy, though I did see it briefly drop to $1,999.99 during my review period.

Best Buy also offers a 32GB version for $3,199.99, but it was discounted to $2,459.99 during our review period, making it less expensive than our model. Pricing is always in flux with the ongoing memory shortages, but Acer’s list prices are in line with market expectations. At Best Buy, many RTX 5070 Ti models hover around the same price as our model and many are pricier.

Acer also lists a $2,099.99 model on its site with 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and an RTX 5060, though I didn’t find this model for sale.

Bottom Line

The Acer Predator Helios Neo 16S AI delivers on most of its thin-and-light gaming promise. Its RTX 5070 Ti provides solid gaming performance on its beautiful 240 Hz OLED display, and it follows up with a comfortable keyboard and touchpad, useful port selection, and solid upgradeability.

The trouble is that its portability is undermined by its below average battery life, an ironic shortcoming for a thin-and-light laptop. Audible gaming fans and lackluster speakers are further compromises, but the limited unplugged runtime is the one that those seeking a more portable package ought to be most concerned about.

But if you’re after a relatively slim gaming laptop to take between places where you can plug in, the Helios Neo 16S AI is an otherwise appealing package.

Reddit user u/Doomslayer606 posted about frayed braided sleeving on both 12V-2x6 cables for their two RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Workstation GPUs the other day, asking whether it’s normal cable degradation or a sign of overheating. The GPUs were running at 500W, below the maximum 600W power draw, but commenters are confident it’s overheated cables, as the poster reports stiff, cracked, and easily peeling sleeves on only some of the wires.

u/Doomslayer606 posted on r/PcBuild with the title “Did I just save my RTX PRO 6000 GPUs from melting?” with photos of the 12V-2x6 cable’s braided sleeving frayed. The poster asked in the description whether this was normal degradation, a manufacturing issue, or overheating. The poster reported that the damaged braided sleeving felt stiff and peeled off easily, which is a strong indication of heat damage, and the comments were sure that it was.

Luckily, the poster’s GPUs were safe, but the 12-2x6 connectors are notorious for melting due to high power draw. One comment asked if they kept the stock power limit, to which the poster responded that they lowered both GPUs to 500W — another user responded asking why the poster wouldn’t use 300W, but the poster said it would reduce performance by up to 50% and they need to keep up with their deadlines.

Theoretically, the cable should be able to handle 500W, as each positive pin would only handle 6.94 A, which isn’t enough current to significantly heat up 16 AWG wire, but one of the main causes of cable overheating is uneven current distribution across the pins. Since only two of the pins melted on both cables, it’s likely those received high-current spikes often, leading to heat buildup.

Users have suggested aftermarket cables like the Corsair ThermalProtect 12V-2x6 cable that detects overheating cables, and the Thermal Grizzly WireView Pro II or Aqua Computing AMPINEL, which have active current balancing to prevent any wire from taking too much current alone. In a recent story, someone even created a power distributor, distributing the 12 pins into two 8-pin cables with a custom-designed PCB, which lowered the cable temperatures significantly — while another modder had a cursed solution, soldering thick cables directly to the RTX 5090’s power pins.

In an ideal world, consumers shouldn’t need another product or mod their GPUs to stop them destroying themselves. GPUs have only gotten more powerful, but instead of using more or thicker wires, we’re getting fewer wires of the same thickness. Understandably, having multiple 8-pin connectors gets messy, but surely there has to be a better solution. Maybe GPUs have outgrown the Mini-Fit Jr. connectors and need to have their own special connector with thicker pins and thicker wires.

Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, has agreed to spend $3.4 billion securing 1.7 gigawatts (GW) of gas-fired generators for its AI data centres, taking over equipment orders originally placed with Caterpillar by Texas-based supplier OnePWR Solutions. According to Reuters, the agreement was reached in late September, and also covers the engineering and construction work needed to install the equipment. Anthropic is not buying OnePWR itself. Instead, it is taking over the supplier's existing generator commitments, which were placed roughly two years ago but required additional financing. By taking over the existing orders, Anthropic avoids having to start from scratch and wait for Caterpillar to find another larger order into its production schedule. That timing matters too, as larger orders for large gas turbines and generators are piling up, and manufacturers are struggling to keep up with demand, especially from AI companies.

Notably, global turbine orders have reportedly exceeded 100GW, while manufacturing capacity stands at an estimated 60GW to 70GW. Average delivery times in the U.S. have reached six years, with some prospective orders extending into 2030 or 2031.

The latest purchase puts Anthropic increasingly in familiar territory. Elon Musk’s AI has already turned to gas-powered generation to bring its large computing facilities online without waiting for conventional grid connections. Recently, xAI installed eight converted General Electric jet turbines at a data center in Mississippi. Each unit can generate up to 50MW, giving the installation a potential combined output of 400MW. The deployment has also attracted environmental scrutiny, with the Southern Environmental Law Center challenging the site's emissions permits.

The environmental implications of relying on gas-fired generators have also attracted criticism. “This is pretty grim—these kinds of generators are terrible for the environment.” Shakeel Hashim, founder of ReadTransformer, tweeted, commenting on Anthropic's purchase. His reaction points to an issue Anthropic will have to contend with as it expands its power infrastructure: securing electricity quickly does not remove the environmental costs of generating it.

Musk's companies have been moving further into the equipment business, too. In August, it emerged that the company was bringing turbine-blade and vine manufacturing in-house, with Musk identifying components production as a major constraint on generator deliveries, with some turbine blades reportedly taking between 60 and 90 weeks to be manufactured. Earlier, in July, SpaceX also acquired APR Energy, a company with a fleet of trailer -mounted gas and diesel generators capable of producing more than 1GW.

The approach is not exclusive to Musk's businesses. OpenAI has followed a similar route for its first Stargate data center in Abilene, Texas. In July, we reported that Crusoe, the company developing the facility, had acquired 29GE Vernova LM2500XPRESS gas turbines, each rated at 34MW. Together, the 29 turbines could generate up to 986 MW. Anthropic is taking a different path, though, by stepping into OnePWR’s existing Caterpillar orders, securing generators that were already in use, rather than buying new equipment.

That said, the power shortage is forcing AI companies to look beyond new generator orders. There has been an upsurge in demand for used and refurbished turbines, including retired jet engines converted to generate electricity. But even those alternatives have limitations, including maintenance requirements, remaining service life and suitability for continuous operations. For Anthropic, however, taking over OnePWR’s Caterpillar orders could provide a way around some of those hurdles. The agreement also provides installation capabilities, meaning the company is securing more than the generators themselves.

The smartphone industry is expected to see a spike in reballed memory adoption. According to a report by global market intelligence and research firm TrendForce, the current penetration rate is estimated at around 3–4%, with reballed memory primarily used in entry-level and budget smartphone models. However, this figure is expected to rise to 7–9% in 2027.

Reballed memory is recycled memory salvaged from older or discarded devices. The term reball comes from the process itself, in which the solder balls on a used memory chip are first melted so the chip can be removed from the old device, then re-soldered to a new device, thus allowing the component to be reused rather than discarded. You can see the process in action in the video below.

This offers manufacturers a cheaper alternative to sourcing new memory chips, potentially helping them keep production costs under control. Currently, reballed 4GB LPDDR4X memory modules make up the majority of such components on the market, and they are used in 4G smartphones priced below CNY 1,299 (approximately $200).

This tactic is becoming increasingly important for smartphone makers, as customers are particularly sensitive to price increases in the budget segment. This leaves limited room to raise retail prices without affecting demand. Using reballed memory can help offset rising bill of materials (BOM) costs while allowing brands to keep entry-level devices affordable.

TrendForce expects DRAM prices to rise even further in the first quarter of 2027, which may put additional pressure on smartphone manufacturers. As a result, the use of recycled memory and other lower-specification components could gradually expand beyond the entry-level segment and into more premium smartphones. What is currently a cost-saving measure for budget devices could eventually become a broader strategy for manufacturers looking to manage expenses amid a prolonged period of high memory prices.

The rising cost of memory is also pushing PC enthusiasts and hardware hobbyists to explore unconventional ways to reuse existing DRAM chips. Recently, an electronics hobbyist converted a relatively inexpensive $120 DDR5 SO-DIMM kit into a desktop memory kit valued at around $1,000. The project involved salvaging an SK hynix 2x 16GB DDR5-5600 SODIMM kit purchased from Facebook Marketplace and reballing the chips onto custom desktop DIMM PCBs, with the resulting modules reportedly capable of reaching DDR5-7800 speeds.

Converting laptop memory into desktop DIMMs is technically demanding and requires considerable expertise and specialized equipment. Similarly, reballing memory for use in smartphones is far from straightforward, particularly given the tiny solder connections in modern BGA (Ball Grid Array) packages. Nevertheless, both developments highlight how manufacturers, repair specialists, and hardware enthusiasts are exploring alternatives to reuse existing memory to offset rising costs and limited availability.

A lawyer posted on Reddit about their private AI server built from eight used 2018-era Nvidia Tesla V100 data center GPUs so case files never have to leave the office. With two 4-card SXM2 NVLink boards, four PEX switches, and SlimSAS cables everywhere — plus one burnt power connector — the builder now runs the open DeepSeek V4.1 Flash model with every expert in GPU memory, at up to 215 tokens per second. The four-GPU boards cost about $2,400 apiece when the builder bought them.

The eight Tesla V100-SXM2-32GB cards, each with 32GB of HBM2 at 900 GB/s, plug into SXM2, Nvidia’s mezzanine socket for data center GPUs, rather than PCIe slots, and are split across two baseboards. Inside each board, all four cards are NVLinked — NVLink is Nvidia’s direct GPU-to-GPU link — for 128GB per board, but the two boards only communicate over PCIe. Each board connects to the host through two PEX (PLX) switch cards over SlimSAS cables, four switches in all, with each switch handling two GPUs at PCIe 3.0 x8 speeds over its own x16 uplink.

The given prices are already in the past, though: used V100 SXM2 32GB cards are now listed on eBay for about $900, more than double the roughly $400 apiece from the post, and listings suggest prices are still climbing. The system also already has some other necessary components: a Gigabyte Threadripper Pro motherboard with a 12-core 3945WX CPU to match, 8x 32GB DDR4 RDIMM, one NUMA node, and two PSUs, 2,800 W in total, are on separate regular office circuits. This is a real-world case for used data center hardware as a cheap route to getting lots of fast VRAM together in one place.

The server is currently in daily use for first-pass work on case files: it reads a folder of records, pulls out facts, dates, and numbers, summarizes them, and takes a first swing at routine drafting. “Nothing goes out the door without a real review,” which is a good human-in-the-loop policy in general. It also helps ensure privacy for cases where client files can’t be sent to a cloud or frontier model. RAG databases and tool calls are wired in; the operator can drive the system through a Discord-style interface over SSH, in this case from a Windows PC. For now, it handles only one request at a time.

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash is compressed to mostly 2 bits here, and its weights still total 248.8GB. The model’s “experts,” the parts that do most of the work for each word, live entirely in GPU memory, while about 110GB of lookup tables, called Engram tables, stay in the system’s regular RAM. Fetching from RAM costs about 0.12 milliseconds per step, which the builder says barely affects the speed numbers.

The first half of the model’s layers (0–19) runs on the first SXM2 board and the second half (20–39) on the second. Each board handles its heavy traffic over its own NVLink, so only one hand-off per step has to cross the slower PCIe link between the boards. In an earlier post, the builder found that splitting every layer across all eight cards made speeds “fall off a cliff” because of that PCIe hop.

Performance is surprisingly good for a model this size. Code comes out fastest, at up to 215 tokens per second, because a small draft model built into DeepSeek guesses five tokens ahead, and code is easy to guess. Legal writing, which is what the server is for, runs at up to 118 tokens per second.

Long documents take longer to get going: the model reads prompts at about 2,200 tokens per second, so at 128K tokens, the first token arrives after about a minute. It can accept up to 524K tokens of context. Three days before the post, the same model on four of these cards managed just 36–38 tokens per second. The jump came with the second board, which could presumably double performance under ideal circumstances, and the builder credits custom kernels and prefill work for the rest. See the table for the full breakdown.

Builder’s measurements, Nov. 5; greedy decoding, 1,024 tokens out, mean of two runs.

It wasn’t as simple as hooking everything up and turning on the power. The host reset itself twice with a fatal PCIe error on the link to one GPU board, both times with a higher power limit and uncapped GPU clocks. In this state, the cards drew 192–232 W, past the 180 W limit. The best guess, although “not proven,” is that a board stops responding during load spikes.

The resets stopped after the builder capped the clocks and removed one board whose power connector had a burn mark; “Check your connectors, people.” Each card is now capped at 150 W, half of its 300 W rating, with the graphics clock capped at 1522 MHz. A 200 W cap brought no appreciable performance gains, according to tests.

The system memory hit uncorrected ECC errors, too, which went away after the builder dropped the RAM from DDR4-3200 to DDR4-2666. One GPU was connected at x4 instead of x8 at last check, and the builder plans to reseat it; one commenter traced the same kind of problem on their own V100 to a bad cable.

The pain was worth the payoff as an estimated 50–60% of the lawyer’s existing LLM workflows can now run on the box instead of frontier models. Helping bridge the gap is a second DeepSeek server on two DGX Sparks, where the two systems hand work off to each other. The setup does appear to save money, at least when compared to API pricing, although the builder says it’s not really faster. However, it will protect client data “once it is self contained, which is the goal.”

The builder added that the V100 box might also get a 240 V circuit. Beyond power, the system is also on borrowed time with the Nvidia R580 driver branch, which is the last to support Volta. For now, the lawyer admits that it’s mostly a hobby, but in the future it may be a business idea. The next step is to handle two or three requests at once, something built and checked on a test system but not yet on the server.

China is building an 800MW AI data center campus in Inner Mongolia that could challenge the economics of America's Stargate project, according to a new report from SemiAnalysis. Envision has built the first 120 MW of Galaxy AI data center campus in less than a year, a cost the researchers put at just one-fifth of comparable US projects, after visiting the site in September.

But getting the buildings up is only half of the battle. AI data centers need enormous amounts of electricity, and Envision is taking an unusual route to secure it— building its own wind farms and battery storage alongside the computing facility.

While US developers are turning to on-site gas turbines to work around grid constraints, Envision is building its data center alongside wind farms, battery storage, and dedicated power infrastructure. Galaxy is located in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia, and is being developed across four phases for two unnamed internet companies. The completed campus is planned to provide up to 800MW of IT capacity by the end of 2027, putting it closer to the approximately 820MW of critical IT capacity at the Stargate campus in Abilene, Texas.

Envision is building its own power supply for Galaxy rather than leaving everything to the local grid. So far, the company has installed more than 100GW of wind turbines and wants its wind farms to provide over 60% of the electricity needed by the campus’s first two phases. Those farms, located about 80 kilometers apart, have a combined capacity of 420MW. That's well above the 240MW load expected from the first two phases, although wind turbines rarely get to run flat out. Ulanqab’s wind capacity factor is between 355 and 40%, so Envision is adding four-hour battery storage to keep the electricity coming when the wind dies down.

Power equipment is proving rather hard to come by for some US data center builders. We have previously reported on turbine shortages that have pushed delivery estimates to 2030, while SpaceX is looking to manufacture its own turbine blades for its gas-powered AI facilities. Envision, meanwhile, is putting wind generation and battery storage right alongside its servers.

The power hardware inside the Galaxy is worth a look, too. Semianalyss visited a 5MW hall where solid-state transformers take 10kV AC electricity and convert it directly into 800V DC for the server racks. That's a fairly substantial departure from conventional data-center power distribution, which typically involves several intermediate conversion stages. “In one 5MW hall, we saw the 800V system at work,” the researchers wrote. They explained that “Solid-state transformers (SSTs) take 10kV AC from the grid and convert it straight to 800V DC for the racks.”

The design removes several intermediate components found in conventional data center power systems, including low voltage transformers, uninterruptible power supplies and rectifiers. Fewer conversion stages can reduce equipment requirements and energy losses, although SemiAnalysis did not provide a measured efficiency improvement for Galaxy’s pilot. The 5MW installation is only a small part of the campus, but it puts the technology into operation at a live facility. Envision, however, plans an even larger deployment in the next construction phases, a move that aligns with Nvidia's push for 800V DC distribution in future high-density AI systems.

Galaxy's campus uses a cooling arrangement in which liquid-cooled and air-cooled servers share a single water loop, eliminating the need for conventional central chiller plants. That matters as AI servers generate more heat and require increasingly sophisticated cooling systems. Removing central chillers can simplify infrastructure, although the design depends on local climate conditions and the facility's ability to reject heat through its water loop. China has previously experimented with other unconventional cooling methods, including a wind-powered underwater datacenter off Shanghai that uses surrounding seawater to help cool its servers.

That said, Galaxy is the first major project in Invision's wider Inner Mongolia datacentre plans, which Semianalysis says add up to 3GW, with the rest of the campus still a busy construction site. The surrounding Chahar High-tech Zone is also expanding rapidly, with nearly 30,000 construction workers spread across 22 data center projects, according to a local report cited by the researchers.

The wider Chinese expansion is also attracting some of the world's largest technology companies. Alibaba, Huawei and ByteDance are among the firms expanding infrastructure in the region, which benefits from relatively cheap electricity, available land and abundant wind resources. However access to electricity and datacenter buildings does not automatically translate to available AI computing power. China's access to advanced accelerators remains a separate constraint, particularly as US export restrictions limit its ability to acquire Nvidia’s most powerful chips.

A new GitHub repository dubbed ram-altman features a script to monitor your PC’s RAM usage and report back to the eponymous OpenAI boss. Sam Altman infamously described people having spare, underutilized DRAM in computers at home as “quite terrible” in a recent podcast. Thus, developer Iain Kay was inspired to write a bash script that emails the OpenAI boss once a day to report on any RAM that is underutilized. Clearly this is not a serious tool, or rather “The memory accounting is. The correspondence isn't,” says Kay.

ram-altman leans on the MemAvailable query, which returns the kernel's own estimate of how much memory programs can claim without swapping, explains the developer of this script. When installed, it checks every five minutes and emails Altman once a day if you are found to be wasting this precious resource.

The emails take the .CSV file logs of your RAM use throughout the day as the data source to compose a summary email. These script-generated messages rotate through eight subject lines, 10 humorous message boilerplates, and six signoffs. Sample emails can be seen on the ram-altman.lol website. Altman’s email address isn’t supplied as part of the script.

If your machine is using 90% or more of its RAM, then you won’t be reported to the OpenAI boss for wasting memory. Also, if you don’t want to disturb Altman, you can run the tests without emailing anyone with the terminal command: bash ram-altman.sh --dry-run

The developer isn’t too scathing of the OpenAI boss. Kay quotes Altman’s explanations that his remarks were taken out of context. Moreover, the dev doffs his cap to the artificial intelligence leader’s humorous display name change to ‘Ram Altman’ on X last week. That’s where the name for this script came from.

ram-altman is a free bash script available on GitHub. It runs natively on Linux. On Windows, you can use WSL to run it, but someone has ported it for PowerShell too. It won’t run on Mac, but Altman and his minions would find it inconvenient, at best, to remove your soldered-down Apple RAM.

Huawei has introduced its first desktop PCs powered by its own 10-core processor as well as proprietary HarmonyOS operating system, reports the Southern China Morning Post. The company claims that the CPU and the OS are built entirely of using 'components manufactured' in China, which matters when it comes national security and domestic supply chains inside the sanctioned country. But whether these machines are truly 'entirely domestic' is an open question.

The Huawei Qinyun HM650 and HM650g desktop PCs come with 16 GB of LPDDR5 memory (probably made by China's CXMT) and either a 256GB or 512GB SSD (probably made by Chinese flash maker YMTC) are powered by the company's Kirin X90 system-on-chip, which originally debuted in Huawei's consumer systems in 2025. The key ingedient of the system it its processor, which features 10 Huawei-designed Armv8-based Taishan CPU cores in a 4+4+2 configuration, with all cores supporting simultaneous multithreading (SMT) to execute up to 20 threads simultameusly. The chip also integrates Huawei's Maleoon graphics processing unit (Arm Mali-based) and a dedicated neural processing unit for AI workloads.

Although Huawei doesn't officially disclose the Kirin X90's manufacturing process, a teardown analysis by TechInsights confirmed that the CPU is manufactured by SMIC using its 7nm-class N+2 process technology. This makes the X90 an example of Huawei's ability to develop PC-class processors using domestically available semiconductor manufacturing capabilities, albeit on a process technology that trails leading-edge nodes from Intel, TSMC, and Samsung.

The most interesting aspect of the Qinyun HM650 series is certainly Huawei's claim that all of its new system's components, including the processor, memory, storage, power supply, and wireless connectivity are manufactured domestically. Such certification itself does not necessarily mean that the entire semiconductor supply chain behind the machine is Chinese. While the CPU, memory, and storage chips are fabricated domestically, they are still made using foreign manufacturing equipment (from the Netherlands, U.S., and Japan), materials (from Japan), intellectual property (from the UK), and electronic design automation (EDA software from the U.S. and partly from China) tools.

Meanwhile, the claim about the operating system developed in China sounds ambitious. The machines run Huawei's HarmonyOS Enterprise Edition, which certainly reduces their dependence on foreign technology suppliers. Unlike conventional PCs that rely on Microsoft's Windows operating system, Huawei's desktops use a software platform developed and maintained by a Chinese company. Furthermore, unlike earlier HarmonyOS versions that incorporated Linux components, the HarmonyOS Enterprise Edition uses Huawei's own kernel and software architecture. This indeed gives Huawei greater control over operating system development, security updates, and integration with its hardware, although compatibility with existing Windows applications could remain a limitation for enterprise customers that rely on software by multinational corporations for Windows.

Keeping all these things in mind, can we say that Huawei's Qinyun HM650 series relies entirely on components developed and made in China? Probably yes. Yet, with major caveats, including a semiconductor supply chain that relies on tools and software designed and produced elsewhere. Furthermore, incompatibility of the OS with software designed for Windows could be a limitation for some customers.

Put simply, AMD dominates the gaming CPU world right now. While the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D isn't the most powerful, it's still the best option for gamers, offering a good performance-to-power ratio. It's simply a powerhouse, and right now, it's down to a new record low price of $399.99 at multiple retailers. Considering the performance you can get with a 9800X3D, you'll want to grab it if you've got an AM5 build.

● Check out this deal on Amazon

● Check out this deal on Newegg

Both Newegg and Amazon have it at this record price, but you'll need to apply some coupons to get the price. At Newegg, that means using the coupon code BFF36 at checkout to knock $70 off its current list price, while at Amazon, you'll need to click or tap to apply the $49.01 coupon, shown below the price.

There aren't many options for gaming that beat the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D. It's a powerhouse that was, until recently, the best CPU for gaming in the world, beating every other chip due to its boosted L3 cache capacity. You're getting an eight-core, 16-thread processor, made using AMD's current-gen Zen 5 architecture, with a boost clock speed of 5.2 GHz, and a 120W TDP.

The 9800X3D is fully unlocked, so it's possible to overclock it, which was a limitation in older 3D V-cache chips from AMD. It's that extra L3 cache that makes this such a special chip, too, stacked beneath the CPU cores closer to the heat spreader on a reconfigured die.

Faster chips do technically exist, like the AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D, which our CPU benchmark data shows is 3% faster at 1080p than the 9800X3D, although with much higher power demands. The 9800X3D offers the best performance per watt of any other gaming CPU, so you can really maximise performance without a huge increase in electrical power. You can see, too, from the Bench charts below that the 9800X3D sits very close to the top as far as CPU performance goes.

Put simply, if you pair this processor with a recent GPU, you won't see many bottlenecks. Pair it with a top-class option like the RTX 5080 or RTX 5090, and you'll be hitting high frame rates in any game you can throw at it. CPU-intensive games like Cyberpunk 2077 won't be let down by that 96MB of L3 cache included in this X3D chip.

Given how good a processor this is, and how little Intel has been able to rival it, we can't see it falling out of date for a long while yet. It's sitting at the top of the food chain and will continue to dominate games for years into the future. AMD's AM5 platform, meanwhile, remains in use, and AMD has promised to support it for at least one more generation.

If you want even better performance, though, then the 9850X3D (which, as we mentioned earlier, does manage to beat the 9800X3D by 3%) is also on sale. You can pick up the 9850X3D for $419 at Newegg right now, thanks to a $65 promo code, a significant discount on its launch price. You'll need to apply the BFF39 code at checkout at Newegg to get the discount, or apply the on-screen code if you buy it at Amazon.

The 9800X3D and 9850X3D are formidable options for gaming, the 1-2 winners that sit above all others. The record-low $399 sale price for the 9800X3D is simply exceptional, while $419 for the 9850X3D is an $80 drop compared to its launch price. Either option would be a serious upgrade for an AM5 gaming PC, or as the center point of a new build.

Your sleep data might be doing double duty. While wearable headbands promise to help users understand their sleeping patterns, some of the companies behind them are also turning the electrical signals collected from their customers' brains into training material for artificial intelligence models. Science recently conducted an investigation alongside Pulitzer Center's AI Accountability Network and found that the customer neurology companies have accumulated tens of millions of hours of electroencephalography (EEG) recordings — a rather technical way of saying brain-wave data. As per the findings, several are using those recordings to develop so-called brain foundation models, despite initially failing to spell out that use in their privacy policies.

Interaxon, the Canadian firm behind the Muse sleep and meditation headband, is one of them. Its devices monitor electrical activity in the brain, alongside other physiological measurements, while users sleep. The recordings are processed into reports that help customers track their rest and identify changes in their sleeping patterns. But there is another use for that information. Interaxon has already trained an AI model using about 50,000 hours of EEG recording and says it removes identifying information, including names, email, and addresses, before using the data. “We aim to use as much of that eligible corpus as possible,” Nadia Kumentas, its Chief Marketing Officer, said.

That was not made particularly clear to customers, though. Prior to talking to Seince, Interaxon's privacy policy did not explicitly disclose that users' brain recordings could be used to train foundation models. The company has, however, updated the same with Kumentas acknowledging, "We agree users should be explicitly informed." For customers whose recordings had already been used, the classification came late, which likely exposes the company to potential lawsuits. Privacy, it seems, remains a major issue. As per Science, more than two-thirds of the companies studied explicitly allowed corporate transfers of data without user consent. That could be significant if a small neurotechnology firm is acquired, potentially putting its accumulated recordings in the hands of a new owner. Colorado and California, however, have amended their consumer privacy laws to cover neural data, although other states lag behind.

Interaxon isn’t the only company pushing this idea. Emotiv, another wearable EEG maker, is training its Large Brain model partly on recordings from customers using its high-end devices. It also updated its privacy policy following questions by Science, disclosing the use of de-identified neural data for model training subject to opt-in consent.

Notably, the idea behind these systems is particularly different from training a large language model. Instead of feeding AI an enormous amount of text, developers supply it with recordings of electrical activity in the brain. The model then learns recurring patterns that can be adapted to recognize different brain states or assist with specific research tasks. And there are already some interesting results. AI startup Piramidal has trained its model on more than 4 million hours of EEG data in partnership with Cleveland Clinic. The company developed a seizure-detection system that correctly identified nine out of 10 seizures in a pilot study after being fine-tuned on the clinic's recordings. That, however, doesn’t mean consumer headbands can suddenly read people's thoughts. Most wearable EEG devices use just one to six electrodes, considerably fewer than 19 to 25 typically found in clinical EEG systems. Also, their recordings are generally less comprehensive.

That said, the privacy implications of wearable brain technology aren't entirely new. In February, an engineer discovered he could access other people's brainwave recordings through a smart sleep mask he had purchased. He reportedly investigated the device after running into connection problems. By examining its Android application, he discovered hardcoded credentials that appeared to be shared across devices, which he later found were EEG readings belonging to other users.

The industry has also been gathering neural recordings on a considerable scale. Last December, we covered Coundit’s effort to collect 10,000 hours of neural data from thousands of patients. The San Francisco startup built its own headset system to capture brain activity alongside speech and text, with the aim of developing AI capable of translating signals into language. Meta has also been working on BrainQwerty, a non-invasive brain-computer interface that translates brain activity into keyboard inputs. Its second-generation system improved average word accuracy to 61% from 40% in the earlier version, although the technology remains a far cry from practical everyday use.

An SSD can spend most of its day doing very little, particularly when a PC is sitting idle. That may not be the case for some AMD Radeon systems, however, with reports suggesting that AMD’s External Events Utility (EEU), which is installed alongside Radeon drivers, may be writing data to the system driver continuously, even when the computer is barely being used. The issue drew attention again on November 8, when Reddit user ‘darklinkpower’ highlighted reports of the unusual drive activity.

One Radeon owner claimed the problem had been quietly eating into their drive's reported health for more than a year, writing: "I just found out that the driver eats up 1% of my SSD health every month for 16 months." Another user reported sustained writes of approximately 5MB/s while their PC was idle. Another one claimed their SSD health had dropped by about 1% every month for 16 months. AMD has acknowledged the problem. In an October 21 response on its community forum, a company representative confirmed that they were investigating. “Yes. We're looking into it with the aim to resolve it in a future driver release." He said. Another representative, AMAD Vik, subsequently offered a more encouraging update on Reddit, apologizing and saying, “This is hopefully fixed in the next one."

Notably, the EEU is not an entirely unfamiliar culprit. Last November, a similar issue involving AMD chipset drivers arose, with a Redditor claiming he had discovered that the software repeatedly updated a log file whenever on-screen elements were moved or resized. That incident also prompted questions about whether stopping the service would affect FreeSync. The latest reports are a different proposition, though, with some users now seeing writes that barely let up, even when their PCs are doing nothing.

The numbers are worth looking at. At 5 MB/s, an SSD would receive about 18GB of host writes per hour. Over a full day, that's 432GB, and a month of uninterrupted activity could push the figures close to 13TB. That, however, does not necessarily mean being written to the NAND flash itself. SSD controllers use caching and wear-leveling, and other techniques, to manage incoming data. How much of that reported activity thus translates into actual flash wear is still unknown. The user's claim of losing 1% of drive health each month also hasn't been independently confirmed.

Moreover, there doesn't appear to be clear patterns across Radeon driver versions. Reports include systems running Adrenalin 26.19.2, as well as older releases, suggesting the problem may not be limited to the latest update. AMD's October 30 release notes for Adrenalin 26.20.2 don't mention the issue either. For now, it's difficult to say which driver versions, hardware combinations, or system configurations are responsible.

That said, there are two reported workarounds. The first involves opening the Windows Services application by pressing Win + R, entering services.msc, and locating AMD EEU. Users can then stop the service or change its startup type to Disabled. That appears to stop excessive writeups, but isn’t necessarily a clean solution. The second workaround involves disabling Resizable Bar (ReBAR), which another user reported had stopped the disk activity without disabling the EEU. This, however, isn’t ideal either, as ReBAR can improve gaming performance by allowing the PC to access the GPU’S memory more efficiently.

For now, checking whether the problem actually exists on your PC is probably the most sensible first step. Open Windows Resource Monitor by pressing Win + R, typing resmon, and selecting the Disk tab. Sort by write activity and look for sustained writes from atieclxx.exe or atiesrxx.exe. AMD has indicated that a fix is in the works, but hasn’t published a confirmed release date. Until then, Radeon owners may want to monitor their storage activity rather than immediately disabling driver services or changing BIOS settings.

Given how expensive PC gaming is becoming, picking up a pre-built PC with a discount is the best way to go. Right now, you can buy an ABS Flux II Aqua gaming PC with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 for $1,999.99 at Newegg, saving you $300 compared to its list price.

● Check out this deal at Newegg

Newegg owns the ABS brand, so this isn't a no-brand option you're buying here. One oddity, though, is that the advertisement suggests this PC comes with an Intel Core Ultra 7 260K. That's not a CPU that actually exists, but given the specs, it probably refers to the Intel Core Ultra 7 265K, although we can't confirm that. If it is, though, that's a 20-core CPU and, now, given its current pricing, is a good option for an Intel pre-built, offering really solid gaming performance, as our 265K vs 285K faceoff shows.

It's the RTX 5070 that's the real star of this show, though. It's a solid mid-tier option for gaming that'll easily push through 1080p on Ultra graphics presets with high frame rates. 1440p will be an easy match here, too, and you've got potential to push up to 4K, especially with Nvidia DLSS and multi-frame generation helping to bridge the gap. There's also 32GB of DDR5 RAM in this build, along with a 1TB SSD.

Our RTX 5070 review makes clear what a good option the RTX 5060 currently is. This is the best all-rounder, with solid 1440p performance, and placing Nvidia DLSS features like multi-frame generation at your disposal to give you the best chance in even the most demanding games. Specs-wise, it has 6,144 CUDA cores and 12GB of GDDR6 VRAM. The Bench charts below show how well it ranks compared to its rivals, too.

Elsewhere, you're getting 32GB of G.Skill Flare X5 RAM, split dual-channel across two 16GB modules, with speeds of 6,000 MT/s. No DDR4 memory here, so you don't have to worry about slower speeds or longevity issues. You're also getting a 1TB MSI M461 SSD here, offering Gen 4 speeds. That'll be enough for a few big game installations alongside Windows, for instance.

All in all, the $1,999.99 sale price for this ABS Flux II Aqua gaming PC makes it a really affordable option for a 4K-capable gaming PC in the current market. You'll struggle to find a rig with a similar spec sheet for less, and with prices continuing to rise, we'd expect a build like this to sell out quickly.

When shopping for an OLED TV, most prospective owners are concerned about burn-in, a problem that's been mostly mitigated, save perhaps for scenarios that involve leaving a TV on 24/7. This has been demonstrated by RTing's famous long-running test, but the site has found a new problem that seemingly pertains to pre-2023 LG WOLED panels: edge rot, where pixels progressively go dark around the edges, similar to a mold pattern.

RTings says that 14 out of the 16 LG televisions in its burn-in test have developed this problem in varying degrees, so 87.5% of a small test sample are affected. Those sets were all made between 2020 and 2022. The site says that several staff members saw the issue pop up on their personal televisions. Some searches indicate similar reports from users everywhere, and coincidentally, I learned about this just last week as a close friend sent photos of his 2019 LG TV.

The site says that the television sets bearing Samsung QDOLED panels in its burn-in test do not exhibit these symptoms, though it notes that it only has three such units in its test run. Additionally, since the test ran between 2022 and 2025, RTings says it can't assess whether LG's newer-generation WOLED panels have this issue, and notes that the manufacturing process for said panels reportedly improved in 2024.

Needless to say, most of the television sets in the study are going to be out of warranty. LG does have five-year panel warranty coverage, but only since 2021, and only covering higher-end units like the G, Z, and M series. It's still worth looking into this, in case you own a set from those lines and within the covered timeframe.

RTings asked for statements on the matter from both LG and Samsung, and interestingly, both firms discussed moisture directly or indirectly. LG stated that the issue "may occur in a very small number of OLED products under prolonged exposure to high-temperature, high-humidity, or other harsh environmental conditions."

It's not likely that RTing's test environment is especially humid, though, and the flurry of user reports with TVs sitting in their own living rooms doesn't lend much credence to LG's argument.

Meanwhile, Samsung is more specific, saying that it's implemented its proprietary Thin Film Encapsulation (TFE), a method for blocking ingress at the panel's edge. The firm says TFE "[eliminates] the root cause of border degradation and [ensures] long-term edge-to-edge uniformity where traditional structures falter."

RTings says that according to conversations with industry experts, "contamination during manufacturing, defects in the encapsulation of some OLED displays, or degradation of that encapsulation over time" may be at the source of the problem. The site's investigation also notes that some of its test units are affected by edge delamination.

The publication also believes the pixel-death problem may be related to power-on hours, while edge delamination could be dependent on the unit's age. It's unlikely that all user reports come in from people leaving their TVs on 24/7 or close to it, though. A sample size of one means little, but the TV is used sparingly at my friend's home, only around 30 hours per week — over nearly seven years, he's only seen the pixel refresh function come up twice.

For whatever it's worth, he notes that his set's dark spots mostly reside on the side closest to a portion of the wall with very minor humidity ingress from outside the building. The set is resting on furniture, not wall-mounted, though, so the relation between humidity and the edge rot is inconclusive at best.

A hobbyist building on open-source driver for DisplayLink hardware received a cease-and-desist from Synaptics, resulting in a lengthy written argument and a threat to sue from the company. According to Phoronix, the Vino driver was “clean-room reverse-engineered” and partly developed using AI and written in Rust. However, even though the person behind the open-source driver, Mike Lothian, did not break the copyright of the code behind the driver, Synaptics argued that his work violates its patent on the DisplayLink technology.

The story began in July 2026, when Lothian reached out to Łukasz Spintzyk, a software engineer working at Synaptics, to help solve a few bugs he’s been encountering. However, Michal Lukaszek, the Strategic Engineering Partnerships Lead at the company, replied a couple of weeks later, saying that the company is concerned that Lothian is attempting to implement the DisplayLink protocol itself, which is a violation of its patents. This resulted in a cease-and-desist letter from Synaptics’ legal department asking him to take down the Vino GitHub repo, among other things.

Synaptics claims that Lothian’s work infringes on two patents: GB2484736 and GB2485613. The former, called Image generation, is about sending screen updates over a general-purpose data network like USB or Ethernet using a specific architecture and compression method, while the latter, called Display control device, details hardware that works with compressed data and only decompresses it as needed. Lothian responded, asking for complete details as to how his work infringes on its patents, but received no response, prompting him to follow up three weeks later.

This was when Synaptics decided to escalate, telling him that it would be billing Lothian “to recoup the cost and effort required to create such documentation of your infringing acts.” Andrew Bateman, the company’s Assistant General Counsel, also added, “By open sourcing our DisplayLink technology for whatever personal reasons you may have as a ‘hobbyist,’ you will be single-handedly eviscerating DisplayLink's competitive advantage in this crowded market by educating our competitors and other third parties as to how we implement our proprietary technology, which we have gone to great lengths and great expense to prevent.”

“If you'd like to notify the media or otherwise publicize our response, I encourage you to do so. We welcome any and all free publicity to let the world (in particular, our competitors and our shareholders) know that Synaptics aggressively defends and protects its DisplayLink IP from all threats of infringement.”

Lothian eventually took the GitHub repo containing the Vino driver offline, but it seems that the fight isn’t over yet. The hobbyist claims that Synaptics’ patents are invalid, saying, “In both cases the independent claims as filed contained no network or transport limitation. The claims were granted only after being amended to add delivery of the display data over a ‘general-purpose data network’ (and, for GB2485613, a ‘transport protocol’ with an ‘unpackaging’ step). That added feature was not new.”

He further argues that even though the company says that DisplayLink isn’t part of the Open Invention Network, Synaptics itself is an OIN licensee. Some say that an OIN license requires that any subsidiary acquired by the original licensee and all its patents would also fall under the company’s OIN license, although Synaptics apparently disagrees with this.

Despite the escalation, Lothian says that he remains open to discussing a sensible resolution. But unless the two parties come to an agreement, it looks like they’re getting ready for a legal face-off. You can see the complete email thread between Lothian and Synaptics in this Linux Kernel Mailing List page and the attached email thread (PDF).

Lothian said that he used a Claude subscription to help out with his cleanroom reverse-engineering efforts, revealing the headache that advanced AI tools pose for tech giants. A user has created a free Adobe Creative Suite clone in Rust using Claude, and was also reportedly working on an open-source office suite and Autodesk tools. Aside from that, we’ve also seen a lot of reverse-engineered games running on platforms they’re not designed for, forcing Anthropic to enforce some limitations on Opus 5.5. There was also concern that the widespread use of AI in chipmaking could result in the inadvertent spread of a copied design or an infringed patent across thousands of chips before anyone catches it.

A security researcher has revealed how they were forced to update the time on their car infotainment system using reverse engineering techniques. Of course, invasive tech surgery shouldn’t be needed for this kind of basic routine daylight saving time tweaking task. However, Rasmus Moorats’ 2014 Renault Latitude wouldn’t allow him to adjust the time because the original navigation map SD card was missing.

Moorats had been warned. When he bought the used car, the previous owner noted that the SD card would be required to change the time on the in-car display. “I didn't really find that believable,” recalls the security researcher. They seem to have believed it was a skill issue of the prior owner and, because the maps it contained were chronically out of date, they decided to confidently decide they didn’t need the SD card...

The time to adjust non-connected clocks to daylight saving time inevitably came, and Moorats decided to adjust the in-car time display, which had become an hour out of sync. Two settings menus were available via the in-dash system. One allowed the adjustment of Bluetooth and Phonebook settings – clearly no use here. But the second settings menu wouldn’t produce any submenu. Instead, an error message "No maps detected!" popped up every time it was prodded.

With a certain set of skills under his belt, Moorats decided to “just RE it,” where RE = reverse engineer. He found out that the head unit ran a customized Linux-based TomTom operating system on a Samsung SoC. In brief, he extracted and analyzed the firmware, built a QEMU environment for the device, reversed the scripting engine, and uncovered a number of vulnerabilities affecting the system.

The breakthrough came in a brainwave, which seems to stem from experience with kernel exploit techniques during his day job. “Instead of trying to get the userland to execute our script, why don't I get the kernel to execute our script instead?” pondered Moorats. The approach worked, rewarding Moorats with root-level access to the infotainment system.

The 2014 Renault Latitude owner subsequently discovered that the date & time settings were in /mnt/flash/settings.dat in a custom binary format. Interestingly, the system “doesn't really have a concept of time zones at all,” observed Moorats in the conclusion of his blog post. “It gets the time from GPS and stores the local offset as a number of minutes. Mine was set to 180. I changed it to 120.”

Current-gen desktop builds are becoming rare due to memory and graphics card pricing, so many enthusiasts have taken to upgrading older machines, using previous-gen platforms, or buying used hardware. For any and all of those scenarios, the G.Skill Ripjaws V DDR4-3200 32 GB kit is just perfect, and it can be yours for $209.99 at Newegg with promo code BNWF83.

• Check out the G.Skill Ripjaws V 32 GB DDR4-3200 kit at Newegg with promo code BNWF83

This dual-channel kit does exactly what it says on the tin, offering a roomy 32 GB that ought to be fine for many years to come, or until Altman finds your location. The rated speed is pretty good at 3200 MT/s, and latency is pretty good at 16 cycles. There's no onboard RGB, but that's a blessing in disguise, proven by the low asking price. The exact model is F4-3200C16D-32GVK, if you're curious.

With this kit in hand, you can conjure up a perfectly potent gaming rig using, say, a Ryzen 5800X3D CPU ($319.99 with promo code BFF43), an Asus TUF B550-Plus Wi-Fi motherboard ($119.99), and a Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 graphics card ($729.99) and still come in under $1,500 for the baseline components.

As befits any quality memory kit, there are onboard XMP 2.0 profiles, and the maker offers a limited lifetime warranty. I've personally used the G.Skill memory for decades now, and have nothing but good things to say about the quality of the gear and the effectiveness of the company's RMA and support.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has admitted to having an affair with a woman who is allegedly a Chinese spy. His apology came in a letter to Nvidia staff, which you can read in full below. Nvidia's board of directors released a statement late on Sunday to address the bombshell report that U.S. intelligence believes Huang had an affair with a Chinese spy. The board says it has no reason to believe sensitive corporate information or U.S. national security was compromised, but the company intends to examine all available information to determine what happened.

The BoD claims it is fully confident in Jensen Huang and his leadership team. Huang, who has been married to his wife, Lori Huang, for 41 years, says he fully supports the investigation.

"A committee of independent directors, assisted by outside independent counsel, will oversee the investigation," a statement by Nvidia's BoD reads. "The Board prioritizes U.S. national and economic security, which is paramount to the interests of Nvidia and its shareholders. […] Jensen fully supports the review and has committed to cooperating with it."

On Friday, the first reporting emerged claiming U.S. intelligence agencies believe Huang had a romantic relationship with Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, a former executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed who was allegedly recruited by China's Ministry of State Security (MSS) to gather information and help Chinese companies obtain restricted AI GPUs. The company has been on the radar for smuggling restricted hardware to China since at least 2025: Megaspeed has been accused of smuggling $2 billion worth of AI chips into China via its subsidiary Speedmatrix.

Nvidia has strenuously rejected suggestions of improper dealings, saying that its CEO regularly meets thousands of customers and that these interactions do not involve sensitive corporate information or national security secrets. Chinese officials have also dismissed the espionage allegations as unfounded.

The suspected Chinese intelligence operation targeting Jensen has not been independently confirmed as a fact. The relationship is alleged to follow the typical "honeypot" strategy, wherein foreign intelligence agencies use operatives to ensnare targets into romantic relationships to steal information and influence their decision-making.

Huang has been an outspoken critic of those opposed to limiting the supply of AI GPUs to China. Huang recently expressed his opinion that the label 'China hawk' is not a badge of honor Americans should wear; it is really 'a badge of shame.' Huang also said it "doesn’t have to be all us or them. It could be us and them," drawing fire from others in the administration and other tech companies, including the CEO of Palantir.

"I owe my family and all of you an apology," Huang wrote. "I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry. Throughout my life, my family has given me love and support. They deserve my honesty and loyalty. Instead, I let them down and damaged the life we built together. I take full responsibility for what I did and the hurt I caused, and I accept the criticism that comes with it. To my wife and family: I love you. I know an apology cannot undo what I have done. I hope our family will heal and that, over time, I can earn back your trust."

In June 2018, Intel chief executive Brian Krzanich resigned after an internal investigation, assisted by external legal counsel, confirmed that he had engaged in a consensual romantic relationship with an Intel employee, which violated the company's non-fraternization policy applicable to all managers. Krzanich, who had led Intel since 2013, also stepped down from the company's board, while then-chief financial officer Robert Swan took over as interim CEO. For now, it remains unclear if Jensen will meet a similar fate and lose control of the company he founded.

Jensen's full letter to staff reads as follows:

To my colleagues at NVIDIA, I owe my family and all of you an apology. I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry.

Throughout my life, my family has given me love and support. They deserve my honesty and loyalty. Instead, I let them down and damaged the life we built together. I take full responsibility for what I did and the hurt I caused, and I accept the criticism that comes with it.

To my wife and family: I love you. I know an apology cannot undo what I have done. I hope our family will heal and that, over time, I can earn back your trust.

To my colleagues at NVIDIA, including those I have worked alongside for decades, and to our board, partners, and shareholders around the world: you deserve better from me. Leading NVIDIA is the privilege of my life. My responsibility is to serve you and be worthy of your trust. I have fallen short of that responsibility. I am fully committed to NVIDIA and will work to earn back your confidence.

Regarding the national security concerns raised in news reports, NVIDIA’s Board of Directors has initiated an independent investigation. I support the investigation and will cooperate fully. I love our country and our company. I am committed to protecting NVIDIA and supporting America’s national security. I am proud and grateful to be an American.

My family bears no responsibility for my choices. I do. Please give them privacy.

Jensen

The whole statement from Nvidia's Board of Directors reads as follows:

The Nvidia Board is initiating an independent investigation in light of recent reporting that founder and CEO Jensen Huang has been the target of a foreign intelligence effort.

A committee of independent directors, assisted by outside independent counsel, will oversee the investigation.

The Board prioritizes U.S. national and economic security, which is paramount to the interests of NVIDIA and its shareholders.

While the Board has no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised, the Board's inquiry will examine all available information.

Jensen fully supports the review and has committed to cooperating with it.

The Board has confidence in Jensen and his leadership team and will provide further updates as appropriate.

Diamonds have exceptional cooling capabilities due to their excellent thermal conductivity, with the material estimated to be at least five times more conductive than copper. Because of this, Diamond Foundry, a firm focusing on lab-grown diamonds, announced the world’s first 200mm single-crystal diamond (SCD) wafer. The 200mm SCD is about the same wafer size that semiconductor fabs use for older processes, with the company boasting on its website that “Single-crystal diamond has entered the wafer-scale era.” This is part of the effort to manufacture SCD at scale so that it can be used for semiconductor cooling, especially now that increasing power of AI chips has also led to enormous thermal problems.

What makes Diamond Foundry’s 200mm SCD wafer different from other lab-grown diamonds is that it’s created as a high-quality single-crystal piece instead of a polycrystalline gem. Although the former is difficult to manufacture, it is what allows diamond to become an extreme efficient thermal conductor while simultaneously retaining its electrical insulating properties — this efficiency should help cut down on hotspots, making SCDs an excellent solution for AI chip cooling.

The company also showed in a graph that it is now thought possible to create a D300 SCD wafer before 2030, matching the size of the wafers used in leading node processes. However, it should be noted that the sample shown by the company remains unpolished, meaning it still needs to go through some processes to make it suitable for chipmakers.

Although the company was founded in 2012, it also acknowledged the work of scientists who have been chipping away at the scale problem of SCDs since the early 2000s. “This is one of those milestones that once seemed almost impossible. Hundreds of DF engineers, scientists, and technicians contributed to us getting here. It is the accumulated result of countless experiments, failures, inventions, rebuilt machines, and insights over more than a decade,” Diamond Foundry CEO Martin Roscheisen said.

“Stefan and Martin pursued this goal for 25 years. There are very few examples in technology of someone sticking to a really hard scientific challenge with that level of perseverance. They kept going when the prevailing view was that single‑crystal diamond simply could not be made at this scale. Today, the perseverance shows as the first-ever D200mm single‑crystal diamond. And best of all, it makes D300mm predictable as well.”

Diamond Foundry isn’t the only company that has identified the potential of lab-grown diamonds for semiconductor cooling. Akash Systems secured $18.2 million in CHIPS Act funding in 2024 to produce Gallium Nitride fused with synthetic diamond, which it claims will reduce temperatures by 20 degrees C. The De Beers Group, which is known for its diamond mines in Africa, is also building a copper-plated diamond composite material aimed at improving cooling efficiency for AI, high-performance computing, and GaN RF devices. Even Frore Systems, which is known for its solid-state cooler, is diving into diamond-infused watercooling cold plates for Nvidia’s next-generation AI GPUs.

Logitech's G502 X Lightspeed has been around for awhile — the mouse was introduced in 2022 alongside the fancier Logitech G502 X Plus (and the wired G502 X), but since it’s receiving a firmware update that upgrades its Hero 25K sensor to a Hero 44K sensor, this seemed like a good time to take a look at it. The G502X Lightspeed is available in black and white colorways and currently retails for $159.99, which is the same price as the G502 X Plus — however, it can (and should) normally be found for less than this.

Design and Comfort of the G502 X Lightspeed

The Logitech G502 X Lightspeed is a right-handed gaming mouse with an ergonomically contoured shape. It's the same size and shape as the G502 X Plus, with large primary mouse buttons, textured rubber side panels for grip, and a smooth matte chassis with glossy accents. It comes in black and white colorways (our review unit was black) and has no lighting aside from a small indicator light at the front of the mouse to indicate connection and battery life.

Like the G502 X Plus, the G502 X Lightspeed is definitely on the larger side. It measures 5.17 inches (131.4mm) long by 3.12 inches (79.2mm) wide, and is 1.62 inches (41.1mm) high at its tallest point. It's larger than the Razer Basilisk V3 Pro and V4 Pro (5.11 x 2.96 x 1.67 inches / 130 x 75.4 x 42.5mm) — not by a lot, but it definitely feels like a much larger mouse. It weighs about 3.6 ounces (102g), which makes it lighter than the Basilisk V3 Pro, but slightly heavier than the Basilisk V4 Pro.

The G502 X Lightspeed has 11 programmable buttons, and 13 programmable controls if you include scroll up/down. There are the left and right primary mouse buttons, as well as two side buttons along the left edge of the left mouse button. On the left side of the mouse there are the two standard thumb buttons, plus a "sniper" button that's magnetically attached and can be flipped so that it's not in your way. The sniper button can also be "deleted," and Logitech includes a delete cover in the box that makes the button unpressable (and also has the same soft, rubbery texture as the rest of the thumb rest).

The scroll wheel is a 4-way tilt wheel, so it has three programmable "buttons" (left click, right click, and center click), as well as scroll up/down. Above the scroll wheel are two buttons: One is a mechanical scroll wheel switch that switches between notched, tactile scroll and free scroll — that’s not programmable, as it's a physical switch — and the other is a profile cycle button that can be remapped.

On the bottom of the mouse you'll find UHMWPE mouse feet — at the top and bottom, around the sensor, and under the thumb rest. There's a power switch, as well as a magnetically-attached dummy puck that can be swapped out for the charging puck included in the Logitech PowerPlay 2. Under the puck is a slot for storing the mouse's wireless dongle.

In the box, the G502 X Lightspeed comes with a 6-foot (1.8m) USB-C-to-USB-A cable, a USB-A dongle, a USB-C converter, and a sniper button delete cover.

Specs

Performance of the G502 X Lightspeed

The Logitech G502 X Lightspeed ships with Logitech's Hero 25K optical sensor, which has a max resolution of 25,600 DPI and a maximum speed of 400 IPS, and can handle up to 40 G's of force. However, both the G502X Lightspeed and the G502 X Plus are receiving a firmware update that will upgrade the Hero 25K optical sensor to a Hero 44K optical sensor, with a maximum resolution of 44,000 DPI and a maximum speed of up to 678 IPS. It's not clear when this upgrade will roll out, however, and I wasn't able to upgrade my review unit in G Hub as of this writing.

Upgrades aside, the G502 X Lightspeed's sensor is very good. It tracks on just about every surface you might possibly use while gaming, and is speedy, sensitive, and very accurate. The mouse supports a polling rate of up to 1,000 Hz, which is still pretty standard for most gamers — however, if you're someone who's convinced that the extra 0.125 milliseconds of lag is the reason for your losses, this is not a mouse with an 8,000 Hz or even a 4,000 Hz polling rate.

The G502 X Lightspeed features Logitech's Lightforce hybrid optical-mechanical switches in its primary mouse buttons, which combine the feel of mechanical switches with the speed and reliability of optical ones. The G502 X Lightspeed's switches do have a nice, tactile click with a crisp sound that's definitely on the louder side. The side buttons also feel and sound good — not quite as tactile as the primary buttons, but with a very crisp click sound.

The mouse features a dual-mode tilt wheel with a mechanical switch that lets you move between a notched, tactile scroll and a smooth, speedy free-scroll. Logitech's implementation of this is different from Razer's — Logitech's is mechanical, while Razer's is software-based. This means the modes are more distinct, but I'm not really sure if that's a good thing. While I liked the free-scroll mode of the G502 X Lightspeed better than I liked the free-scroll mode on Razer's mice (such as the Basilisk V4 Pro and the Naga V3 Pro), the tactile scroll was stiff, clunky, and very loud — with a lot of rattling. The scroll wheel only has two modes, so there's no middle ground — and while I'm fine to use free-scroll for most things, there are definitely games where I need a notched scroll wheel.

Features and Software of the G502 X Lightspeed

The G502 X Lightspeed is configurable via Logitech's universal peripheral software, G Hub. You can use G Hub to change the mouse's DPI settings (DPI steps and DPI shift speed — the DPI switch that occurs when you hit the DPI shift button) and remap keys. You can also use G Hub to update the mouse's firmware, so this is presumably where the Hero 44K sensor upgrade will come through.

Wireless Experience & Battery Life of the G502 X Lightspeed

The G502 X Lightspeed connects to your PC via 2.4GHz wireless; it can also utilize a wired connection, though the included USB-C cable is rubber and won't get you that smooth, drag-free wired mouse movement you can get with flexible paracord-covered mouse cables. The mouse does not include Bluetooth.

Logitech rates the G502 X Lightspeed at 140 hours of battery life, which is about 10 hours longer than the G502 X Plus (with no lighting). This is pretty impressive, even if there are similar wireless mice that last longer (the recently-launched Razer Basilisk V4 Pro gets up to 200 hours, for example). This should give you at least two weeks before you need to recharge, even with intense use. The G502X Lightspeed is also compatible with the PowerPlay 2, Logitech's wireless charging mousepad (sold separately).

Bottom Line

The G502 X Lightspeed is a solid gaming mouse for most gamers — its contoured, ergonomic shape is comfortable, though it does feel bigger than similarly shaped mice, such as the Razer Basilisk V4 Pro. It has enough extra well-placed buttons for the average gamer (though, not enough for the average MMO player), and its 140-hour battery life is higher than average. Plus, assuming it actually gets this firmware update, it will have a competitive sensor — though it's not going to be quite as good as the actual Hero 2 sensor. But this mouse is currently priced at $159.99, which is the same price as the fancier Logitech G502 X Plus — and it's definitely supposed to be the more budget version of the two. Unless you find it at a great sale price, I'd pick up the G502 X Plus or even Razer's Basilisk V3 Pro 35K at a similar price.

The sensory overload typically experienced when visiting video game arcades in Japan was eerily absent from some venues this week, reports ITMedia News [machine translation]. It says that a Sega system outage meant there was “no end in sight” for the rows of silent black screens. However, a recent tweet from arcade network operator ALL.net indicates that both Sega and Bandai Namco machines are affected. Moreover, arcade lovers will be pleased to hear that affected arcades will “gradually resume operation on a trial basis starting today.”

ALL.Net, a contraction of Amusement Linkage Live Network, was launched by Sega in 2004 to allow arcade games to look up to the net for auto updates, data logging, implement online play, and power national leaderboards. Sega titles like Initial D The Arcade, Maimai, and CHUNITHM, rely on this network, as do Bandai Namco games like Aiko no Tatsujin, Mario Kart Arcade GP DX, and Gundam Extreme Vs.

In its official apology blog post, dated November 2, ALL.Net / Sega Fave said that it suspended services a day prior after it became aware of its servers being affected by “unauthorized access by a third party.” It reassured customers that their personal info and billing data were not on the compromised server. However, it asked for more time to investigate, run safety checks, and so on, before restoring service.

This morning ALL.Net told customers that Bandia Namco titles “will gradually resume operation on a trial basis starting today (online play and card use enabled).” Sega products remain under maintenance, and online services are unavailable. There is currently no estimate for issue resolution, but a news bulletin is promised for November 10 (Tuesday).

Classic offline arcade machines weren’t affected by this outage, of course. Moreover, rival arcade gaming legends like Taito and Konami run their own, separate, arcade networks and authentication systems.

Linux developers are preparing to make Intel’s ancient MultiMedia eXtensions an irrelevance. Intel introduced MMX in the Pentium era, but a patch expected to merge into mainline Linux 7.5 will remove the last remaining optimized software from the open-source OS. Expected to be released in 2027, the new kernel will wipe MMX-optimized code from its software RAID XOR code, explains Phoronix.

Admittedly, there wasn’t much left in Linux in terms of MMX optimizations. But few folks will be running the most modern kernels on Pentium MMX and Pentium II chips in 2026. And most other MMX-optimized code disappeared from the OS half a decade ago, when some MMX-optimized memory management code was removed. Note that, if you are a determined late-90s Pentium devotee, you can still use software RAID, but it will lack the MMX fast path.

This is a classic case of Linux code housekeeping. With this change, the kernel will lose over 800 lines of code and replace them with just 12.

Remembering MMX

Intel first introduced MMX Pentium chips in January 1997. Though I vaguely remember these processors being marketed as being enhanced by ‘MultiMedia eXtensions,’ Wikipedia insists that “MMX is officially a meaningless initialism[6] trademarked by Intel.”

In a subsequent trademark battle with longtime foe AMD, a document produced in court indicated that MMX stood for ‘Matrix Math Extensions.’ AMD relied on this to sidestep the trademark, as an initialism cannot be trademarked, according to the encyclopedic source.

Eventually, all rival x86 processors managed to integrate MMX instructions – so as not to be pushed into the shade during the multimedia boom. A surprisingly large number of non-Intel chips ended up offering MMX, too. Along with Pentium MMX chips, AMD, Centaur, Cyrix, Rise, and Transmeta eventually offered MMX CPUs.

After MMX's marketing success, AMD pioneered 3DNow! instructions, and about a year later, Intel fired back with SSE and SSE2.

Ukraine is developing a new class of combat robots designed to operate inside underground gas pipelines, where Russian troops have repeatedly attempted to bypass frontline defenses, United24Media reports. The project, disclosed by Ukraine's 2^nd National Guard Corps, Khartiia, involves modifying unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) to perform reconnaissance and combat missions in spaces too narrow for conventional military machinery. Notably, the work is being carried out by specialists from the corps’ Lava Unmanned Systems Regiment, following Operation Veles — an underground assault that saw Ukrainian soldiers advance more than 15 kilometers through pipeline infrastructure near Kupiansk. Khartiia says the operation killed more than 100 enemy soldiers and resulted in over 30 captured, although those battlefield figures have not been independently verified.

The commander of Lavas ground robotic system battalion, identified by the callsign ‘Matematyk’, said the project addresses a category of warfare that requires a different approach from conventional battlefield robotics. “There is a very long list of tasks that need to be accomplished to fight underground and counter the enemy underground. This is a new class of technologies and challenges that we will have to confront,” he said.

The machines are being adapted from existing groundrobots,rather than developed as conventional surface vehicles. They must be compact enough to navigate narrow pipelines while retaining the ability to carry out military assignments . Most commercially available underground machinery, meanwhile, is designed for construction, drilling, and tunneling — not combat.

As of now, Khartiia is already developing several robotic systems to address those limitations, with the broader objective of sending machines into dangerous underground environments where soldiers would otherwise have to conduct reconnaissance, confront enemy positions, clear positions, or clear out themselves. “War is already underground, and it will expand. The question is how we adapt to this war,” Matematyk said.

The project follows unusual battlefield developments near Kupiansk, where Ukrainian forces used the same underground infrastructure that Russian troops have previously exploited to infiltrate behind Ukrainian defensive positions. During Operation Vels, Ukrainian soldiers moved through a gas pipeline measuring approximately 1.2 meters in diameter, according to a report by Ikrainska Pravda. The confined passage made movement and close-range firefights particularly,with Ukrainian troops having little-to-no room to maneuver.

Russia had previously used the pipeline network beneath the Oskil River to move soldiers toward Ukrainian-held territory. The Ukrainian battlefield monitoring group ‘Deepstate' reported an earlier Russian infiltration attempt in September 2025. Last month, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Ukrainian forces had eliminated more than 100 Russian troops and captured over 30 during the operation. The experience also exposed the limitation of sending soldiers into such environments. Underground operations restrict visibility,complicate communications , and leave little room for maneuvering equipment.

That said, Ukraine has increased its reliance on unmanned military systems as battlefield terrain proves complicated to navigate. In July 2024, we reported on Ukrainian forces deploying AI-controlled drones capable of independently identifying and attaching targets. The country has also been experimenting with unmanned systems that operate beyond conventional aerial platforms. In August, the US Army tested an autonomous Ford F-250 breaching vehicle, which builds on the Lancer unmanned ground vehicle program and uses a counter-drone turret to protect military operations from aerial attacks.

However, autonomous ground systems still face considerable technical challenges. Russia's Shturm uncrewed assault tanks , for instance , repeatedly lost their command connection during the Tsentr-2026 military exercise. The vehicle eventually became stuck in mud, even after organizers switched to manual driving. Russia has also tested an AI powered Shahed variant using Nvidia's Jetson Orin computing platform. The system was reportedly capable of identifying targets without relying on externally supplied coordinates.

On this day in 2006, Nvidia released the legendary GeForce 8800 GTX and 8800 GTS graphics cards. Nvidia has decided to honor the flagship of the pair with its GeForce 8800 GTX - 20 Years of a Legend interactive demo, now free on Steam. However, the recommended specs to ‘play’ with this semi-interactive path-traced unboxing experience include a wallet-worrying RTX 5080. Or you could just watch the video, embedded below for your convenience.

The downloadable demo, which also requires 32GB of RAM and 30GB of free storage, was created by Dylan Browne, a senior special effects artist who frequently works with Unreal Engine, as in this case. This experience is said to deliver era-appropriate graphics, but requires the most advanced graphics tech available two decades after the 8800 GTX first hit the scene to work its graphical magic.

To run GeForce 8800 GTX - 20 Years of a Legend on a 2026 PC, you will need at least an RTX 4070 for acceptable performance, according to the Steam page. This software is stuffed with the latest graphics tech embraced by the green team. “DLSS 4.5 with Dynamic Multi Frame Generation, Ray Reconstruction, path tracing, and Mega Geometry” are all present, says Nvidia.

There’s a bit more to the interactive demo than looking around and poking a box with your mouse and then prodding it to fit the shiny new GPU into your “era-accurate PC tower.” An extra layer of fun is promised by the provision of hidden Easter eggs in this experience.

However, the demo appears to show Windows Vista on the PC in the gaming den, which launched at retail a few months after the 8800 GTX. Admittedly, this legendary GeForce card and Windows Vista OS would roam the Earth at the same time, with many folks buying the GeForce 8800 GTX and 8800 GTS to shove into their Vista PCs from 2007 onwards. Crysis launched on PCs in late 2007, a year after the G80 architecture cards debuted.

Nvidia launched the GeForce 8800 GTX (128 shader units) and 8800 GTS (96 shader units) at $599 and $449, respectively. These legendary Nvidia GPUs spearheaded the DirectX 10 era, accelerating existing PC titles and delivering next-gen visuals with new DX10 software. You can read more in our reviews from the time, like the 12-page review of the GeForce 8800 GTX and GTS from the launch week. Briefly, our reviewer thought these cards were “amazing” for their current performance and DX10 promise. They were also excited about the G80 architecture for bringing CUDA to consumers and the promise of making the GPU “something much more than a frame rendering device.” Some Luddite gamers may wish that had never happened.

Nvidia driver support for the GeForce 8800 GTX and GTS would run out of road about a decade later. By that time, DirectX 11 hardware and games were mainstream, leaving older graphics hardware designs obsolete when it came to playing the latest AAA PC titles.

Microsoft VP Scott Hanselman has revealed a new open-source GitHub project called gputaskman. The name neatly encapsulates the headline role of this tool, a GPU-focused task manager, but its scope might be broader than you expect. This new tool for Windows, Linux, and macOS can show per-process GPU usage, VRAM consumption, active runtimes, and many more stats. It also breaks out AI/LLM task-specific information.

On social media, Hanselman snappily makes clear the technical itch that gputaskman was designed to scratch. “There's a lot going on in my GPU,” wrote the prominent public face of Microsoft's developer ecosystem. “I'm making a GPU Taskman to get insights to where my GPU memory is going.”

There are several example screenshots of GPU Taskman in use by the Microsoft VP. They clearly show the kinds of data that are presented in the terminal-like display that pops up in the tool. Hanselman’s tweet shows that the most VRAM-hungry app on his RTX 4080S system is the desktop windows manager. That is selected in the list, and more details are shown for this task at the bottom of the window. Also, we see AI/LLM apps consuming VRAM, and a few Windows staples.

In a GitHub-embedded image, we see what details are broken out when the llama-server.exe app is selected in the list. The bottom of the window breakdown reveals that Qwen3-0.6B is being used, and there’s a breakdown of its weights, the KV cache, the number of parameters, and more. Very informative.

As the Microsoft developer has made portable Windows downloads of the latest v0.3.0 release of gputaskman, I couldn’t resist giving it a spin. Upon launch, I found that no tasks were using the discrete GPU in my laptop… so I fired up ye olde Unigine Valley GPU benchmark to stir the RTX 4060 from its slumber. I note the live-streaming charts showing GPU load, VRAM use, temperature, and so on are more prominent in my screenshot than in Hanselman’s examples. Perhaps he screen-shotted a previous version of the tool.

There’s a lot more information about gputaskman, its inner workings, and even its source code, on the linked GitHub repository. Hanselman is sharing his “experimental software” tool under the permissive MIT license. Finally, in social media comments, he hints that expanded GPU monitoring capabilities could be coming to Windows as standard.

Amsterdam police have arrested 150 to 200 protesters at a Microsoft data center site on suspicion of trespassing. According to a Facebook post by the authorities [machine translated], tools designed for breaking into the site were seized from the protesters, who were then allowed on their way to protest peacefully. However, it appears that some members of the group decided to enter the construction site “with violence” anyway, forcing the police to intervene and leading to their arrest. There were also some allegedly stolen items from the construction site found among the belongings of some of the protesters, plus damage and vandalism done to the data center site.

This protest is a continuation of the action that started last Friday, where protesters breached the Microsoft data center, which was being owned by Pure Data Centers. It is also the first of many organized by the “Stop Dirty Data Centers” coalition across Europe, with actions planned for Amsterdam, Dublin, Warsaw, Denmark, and several other cities across the continent. The Dutch publication NOS [machine translated] identified the exact group at the site today as Fossielvrij, who are against the use of fossil fuels in data centers such as the jet engines that Elon Musk installed at xAI’s Mississippi data center.

“Gas prices are going through the roof, and new houses are being postponed because of the overcrowded power grid. Yet tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are building energy-guzzling, hideous data centers,” the group said on its website. “We can take back the power of Big Tech by pressing the pause button now. Give us the opportunity to democratically decide what we do and do not use AI for, so that it is not at the expense of our living environment and everything that makes our lives beautiful. Then we look at how many more data centers are needed.”

The protest comes amid the AI data center build-out, which has been facing increased opposition across the United States. A Google data center site in Finland is also in trouble after it cleared out around 1,300 acres worth of forest and trees without an environmental impact assessment, displacing wildlife, and leading to a criminal probe on Tuike Finland Oy, the Google subsidiary in charge of the site.

Fossielvrij’s action was supposed to be peaceful, but it appears that another group joined the demonstration and broke through the fences around the site, leading to the police confrontation. The suspects were arrested for domestic violence and then taken to a cell complex, where it will be decided if they will be detained longer. The police also said that “All suspects will be heard afterward.”

An investigation has found that addresses for two Chinese companies approved to purchase Nvidia H200 chips led to empty offices, and the receptionists at the buildings were unfamiliar with them. According to The New York Times, these companies didn’t just have empty offices; their executives are often linked to other firms sanctioned by the United States for working with and providing advanced technology to the Chinese military.

This news has revealed concerns that the U.S. Department of Commerce is simply rubber-stamping GPU export license applications instead of scrutinizing each one for potential links to Beijing. “I have a ton of concerns that neither the Commerce Department or Nvidia is doing the due diligence needed to ensure that the licensing terms are being followed,” former China director for the White House National Security Council Liza Tobin told the publication.

Many of these approved companies include well-known entities like Baidu, BYD, Tesla Shanghai, as well as ZTE, which has previously been blacklisted from the U.S. market, Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance. However, the outfit’s investigation also revealed approval for two relatively unknown firms: New Matrix and Maginfra. The offices for both companies were empty shells with some office furniture, and people working nearby said they’d never heard of the company or seen anyone go to the deserted spaces.

The New Matrix website also reportedly did not contain any information about its owners or its history, although public company records reveal that it was founded by Li Bin, who, along with two other primary owners, are connected to Wise Road, a Chinese private equity firm sanctioned by the U.S. for helping Beijing acquire sensitive chip technologies. Furthermore, Mr. Li chairs Tsinghua Unigroup, a tech conglomerate partly owned by the Chinese government, and owns New H3C Semiconductor Technologies, which has also been added to the Commerce Department’s Entity List for cooperating with the Chinese military.

Maginfra, on the other hand, is suspected of being linked to Inspur, which Washington has blacklisted since 2023 for supporting the People’s Liberation Army, with both companies sharing personnel, patents, and a similar government ownership structure. These two firms aren’t listed as the final users of Nvidia’s AI chips, though. Instead, they’re supposed to assemble them into AI servers, which would then be forwarded to a final user, although it’s unclear who their customers are.

Aside from these questionable non-entities, another company that received a license to purchase H200 GPUs has some suspicious links. Zhejiang Yindun Cloud Technology’s executives are reportedly related to the founder of Range Intelligent Computing Technology Group, a data center operator that has sold compute capacity to Chinese military contractors. It’s also reportedly partly operating out of a Range data center.

President Donald Trump banned the export of Nvidia AI GPUs in April 2025, even those customized to meet the performance ceiling Washington set for AI processors. The president reversed the decision late last year in exchange for a 25% cut of the sale, but it still took more than eight months for the first H200 shipments to arrive in China. Beijing’s refusal to give Chinese tech companies the green light to buy the chips for the first few months of the year caused the delay. But once China lifted its import ban on Nvidia chips, several Chinese companies applied for licenses to buy them, and The New York Times reported that around two dozen firms have already received approval, including these questionable ones.

The latest CPU-Z hardware survey data shows 32GB and 64GB memory configurations down 2.5% and 18% year on year, respectively. The driving factor is no mystery: High-capacity memory has become a luxury in modern PC builds. The AI rush is still gobbling up the global DRAM supply, so prices for the best RAM options across DDR4 and DDR5 have gone through the roof.

If you are not familiar with CPU-Z, it is a free program that gives you a detailed breakdown of the hardware inside your system. It only tracks systems where it is actually installed and running, so it does not report monthly retail sales figures. Do not take the data as sales figures in any sense. They represent CPU-Z's active user base.

32GB and 16GB are common configurations that have grown over the years. According to the gathered data, 32GB configurations lead CPU-Z's user base with a 37.2% share, with 16GB configurations close behind at 33%. Not a surprise, really, since applications and games have grown more memory-intensive. 16GB has been the baseline for a long time now, and 32GB is now the sweet spot for many people, even gamers.

On the flip side, 8GB configurations have been steadily declining. They make up only 11% of the surveyed systems. 8GB systems are rare nowadays. You may still find them in legacy systems, basic office machines, or extremely budget-limited builds where performance takes a backseat. Meanwhile, higher-end configurations, including 64GB and 24GB, are still in the minority at 7.3% and 2.3%, respectively.

For the first time, the CPU-Z developer recorded a noticeable decline in higher-capacity configurations. Specifically, 32GB configurations fell 2.5% year over year, while 64GB options dropped a significant 18%. This is likely due to the steep rise in memory prices, which has forced consumers to reconsider the cost-benefit of larger capacities.

As the price per gigabyte goes up, buyers are opting for more affordable capacities. Lower-capacity memory kits have seen a somewhat revival. The 16GB configuration, often considered the minimum, has rebounded by 12.9%. Similarly, 8GB configurations, which were previously in sharp decline, grew 5.5%.

Interestingly, 24GB configurations also increased by 19.7% and have become a compromise for consumers who need more than 16GB of memory but do not want to spend a lot of money on a premium 32GB memory kit.

How much money are you willing to spend during the Black Friday sales?

The current distribution between DDR4 and DDR5 memory types reveals that DDR4 remains the dominant memory standard at 54.5%. In contrast, DDR5, despite being the latest memory technology, is still in its early adoption phase at 32.9%. DDR4 has been the de facto standard for almost a decade now, so it will take time for DDR5 to overtake it.

Nonetheless, the noticeable 6% growth in DDR4 and 2.9% decline in DDR5 suggests budget-conscious consumers are sticking with platforms that still embrace DDR4, such as AMD's Zen 3-powered Ryzen 5000 (codenamed Vermeer) or Intel's 13th Generation Raptor Lake processors. CPU-Z's processor charts show a significant increase in Zen 3 chips, including the Ryzen 7 5700X, Ryzen 5 5600, and Ryzen 5 5500, with figures up to 42.8%, 36.1%, and 67.3%, respectively.

Although both DDR4 and DDR5 have increased in price, the former remains slightly more affordable. Companies are supporting the effort too, such as AMD rereleasing the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, vendors restarting DDR4 and DDR4 motherboard production, or Intel preparing rewarmed Raptor Lake Next chips for 2027.

A homelab builder on Reddit has run Moonshot AI’s 2.8-trillion-parameter Kimi K3 AI model on discontinued second-gen Optane PMem 200 memory, using a 40-core 3rd-gen Xeon Scalable CPU and not a GPU for inference. The build runs hot, and the builder’s advice is that you “treat active DIMM cooling as mandatory,” with dual 12W blower fans aimed at the modules to get temperatures under control. The project, a follow-up to a separate user’s first-gen Optane build earlier this year, runs at a sluggish 0.85 tokens per second even with 1-bit quantization.

Kimi K3 is absolutely not built for home use, in our estimation, with Moonshot AI recommending data center inference engines to run it, and even the smallest community quantization needs at least 610GB of RAM. Using secondhand Optane, instead, is one of the few ways to reach that capacity at home. It doesn’t help that DRAM prices have skyrocketed, and the builder says the Optane memory costs “a fraction” of the equivalent.

Intel launched its Optane Persistent Memory 200 Series (PMem 200) in 2020 for its 3rd-gen Xeon Scalable CPUs in 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB capacities. On two-socket Xeon platforms, it runs at a higher effective MT/s rate than the first generation (PMem 100) that was used on the first project, and it can deliver an average of up to 32% more memory bandwidth. Optane can run in either Memory Mode or App Direct Mode; both builds had platforms allowing for each.

Memory Mode has the Optane act as system memory with DRAM as its cache, the method used in the first build, while App Direct exposes Optane as a separate, persistent region that the software maps directly, the mode used in the second. This can give “more control over where the model’s tensors live,” according to the first build’s creator, u/APFrisco, who planned to try it.

Performance does take a hit by going with Optane over DRAM, and with the higher 3-bit quantization, the speed went down even more to 0.75 tokens per second. One commenter points out that this is very slow, with a 50k-token task estimated to take 13 hours at about 1 token per second, but another notes that overnight batches don’t care as much about speed. Both speeds compare to the first build’s roughly 4 tokens per second, although in that case the builder had an RTX 3060 handling part of the model in addition to Memory Mode, a 2-bit quantization, and the smaller, earlier 1-trillion-parameter K2.5 model.

The latest builder also had to deal with heat output, with the Optane DIMMs getting “extremely hot” with sustained inference, creating a situation the builder says can endanger neighboring DRAM. That heat is consistent with Intel’s own specs, as the manufacturer rates the modules with forced airflow of 2.4 to 2.7 meters per second for cooling, which is what you expect to find in data centers. You might not normally have this level of airflow pointed directly at your memory sticks.

The expected operating conditions put each Optane module at 12W or 15W, regardless of capacity. If the build used four sticks, that would mean up to 60W of heat placed right next to the system memory. Throttling on these occurs at 83 degrees Celsius, with a thermal trip shutdown at 85 degrees, compared to the 85 degrees Celsius and up to 95 degrees in an extended range that typical DDR4 server memory is rated for. A lot of heat has to be removed from the system to keep things running.

The performance numbers given are pre-tuning — this means without tuning thread counts or NUMA affinity — so there is room for improvement, and one commenter also asked about using Memory Mode with DRAM caching for the most-used experts. The builder plans to add GPUs and to also load parts of the model into DRAM as a faster tier alongside the Optane, with “more benchmarks to come.”

CODE380, a radio manufacturer based in Kyiv, just built a new software-defined radio (SDR) that intercepts analog video signals that Russian drones transmit to their operators, making it easier for troops to find and intercept them. According to Defense News, the D·Vision SDR can sweep radio frequencies from 500 MHz to 8.7 GHz and convert any intercepted analog radio signal into a video feed. It has a detection range of up to six miles for signals on the 540 MHz to 6 GHz band, and up to two to three miles for higher frequencies.

Although this isn’t the first passive Ukraine-made drone detector, it’s one of the lightest models produced so far, weighing just 10 ounces or 290 grams — by comparison, an iPhone 18 Pro Max weighs about 8.78 ounces or 249 grams. Its competitors include the Vydun 7.5, which weighs around 2 pounds or 900 grams and could intercept signals at up to 7.5 GHz; the 23-ounce (650-gram) Chuyka 3.0, which can detect signals at up to 8.8 GHz; and the SENSE-4, which weighs 21 ounces or 600 grams and could detect drone signals of up to 8.2 GHz.

How much money are you willing to spend during the Black Friday sales?

All these receivers cover the 4.1 to 4.5 GHz band that Russian Molniya strike drones began using in June of this year to transmit video back to their operators, Presidential advisor Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov said. However, he also warned against relying on them for protection alone. “Most detectors don’t see these frequencies, or see them poorly,” he said in a social media post. “I’m warning you so that trust in a detector doesn’t cost you your life.” These receivers are often designed to work in tandem with other sensors, like radar, acoustic sensors, and drone interceptors, as part of an anti-drone defense system.

Most of these units are designed to intercept analog signals, meaning they won't be useful for intercepting video signals once Russia figures out how to use digital signals. Still, the D·Vision SDR is claimed to have digital UAV detection, although it’s only tuned towards DJI drones for now. It’s unclear what types of radios Russian drones use, though, so the company would have to recover downed units to inspect their hardware and build appropriate countermeasures. It will also be ineffective against fiber optic drones, which are both jam- and intercept-proof as they use a physical connection to communicate with their home base.

Blizzard pulled out all the stops to ensure World of Warcraft: Forever survived a chaotic launch night. What was the company's secret weapon? Splurging an absurd amount of money on infrastructure made up of 3,924 virtual machines with 70,480 CPU cores and a whopping 251,136 GB, or 251 TB, of memory.

Praised by media and players as one of the smoothest launches in Blizzard's history, World of Warcraft: Forever requires significant computing firepower. 3,924 virtual machines work out to 18 cores and 64GB of memory per instance. Or, the company could be using a mixture of 16-core and 32-core nodes with slightly less memory.

To put the infrastructure's scale in consumer terms, we are looking at about 8,810 mainstream processors, or 7,848 high-end gaming systems with 32GB of memory each. In any event, the hardware is greatly improved compared to what World of Warcraft used to run on back in 2009.

In 2009, Blizzard said it used 10 data centers worldwide to host World of Warcraft. At the time, the infrastructure included 13,250 server blades, totaling 75,000 CPU cores and 112.5 TB of memory. By comparison, World of Warcraft: Forever leverages 6% fewer CPU cores but rocks 2.2X more memory. Modern processors are leagues faster than chips from 17 years ago. By today's standards, the bottleneck is memory capacity and bandwidth, which is why the infrastructure can run on fewer cores but has more than double the memory to compensate.

Blizzard does not specify the exact hardware that World of Warcraft: Forever runs on. However, if we were to translate the core specifications to, for example, AMD's EPYC 128-core Bergamo or 96-core Genoa chips, it could be anywhere between 275 and 365 2U server nodes, depending on which processor it uses. Therefore, World of Warcraft: Forever could be running on just eight to ten 42U server racks, a noteworthy improvement over 17 years ago.

Blizzard should have no trouble building the infrastructure for World of Warcraft: Forever. A ballpark estimate for about ten 42U server racks with EPYC chips is at least $15 million, even with today's memory pricing. But then again, since Microsoft owns Blizzard now, the company could just be tapping its parent's existing Azure platform. Technically, it is not free compute, but Blizzard would benefit from cost pricing and priority allocation of Azure's capacity.

World of Warcraft: Forever shows that a high-profile launch does not have to be a nightmare when companies are willing to invest in computing infrastructure. In this case, many would agree Blizzard is putting those 251TB to good use, although Sam Altman may say otherwise.

A remote-control electronics and DIY hobbyist was surprised by a model airplane they created, powered by a pair of PC air duster engines. The A10 Warthog-like model with a 21-inch wingspan flew “much faster than I had anticipated,” commented RCMakerLab. The video they shared also shows how to build your own fast, agile RC plane powered by the ‘jets’ salvaged from PC air dusters like the 110,000 RPM brushless Wolfbox MF60, which is currently 36% off on Amazon and priced at $31.99.

RCMakerLab’s informative and entertaining video (above) was inspired by some earlier disassembly and tests using engines pulled from PC air dusters. Viewers asked the maker to go beyond pondering the thrust these mini jet engines could generate and actually put them to the test in an RC plane.

About eight minutes of this 10-minute video focus on building the twin-engine RC plane. I found it interesting to see it crafted with wings formed from a folded-over Styrofoam sheet and hot glue, and to see it all put together. The motorized wing flap control seemed ingenious. However, if you want to skip straight to the main attraction, fast-forward to about 8 mins for the installation of the two air blower motors. Then, at 9 min 20s, you can see the RC plane's rapid takeoff. I thought it sounded great; it looked very fast and extremely agile.

RC air duster jet specs:

• 54cm (~21-inch) wing span
• 42.5cm (~17-inch) length
• 368g (~0.8 pounds) flight weight
• Twin airduster motors
• 20A Brushless ESC
• 5g Micro Servos
• Flysky iA6 Radio Control
• FS2A Micro Receiver
• 1,300mAh battery
• Estimated flight time between 3 and 4 minutes

Rechargeable handheld air dusters reside in a PC DIY enthusiast sweet spot between canned air and workshop compressors. RCMakerLab’s materials list includes no-brand AliExpress 130,000 RPM blowers at $23 each. Here’s a very similar-performing model on Amazon that's even cheaper, if you prefer.

The video ends with a tease that this successful air duster engine-inspired escapade has inspired RCMakerLab to build a “much larger high-wing model.” The maker asks viewers to let him know “Should I go for it?” in the comments – so stay tuned.

It is arguably the worst time to build a gaming PC especially with the ongoing memory crisis inflating the cost of RAM, SSDs, and graphics cards. One way to possibly work around the rising costs is to consider a prebuilt system. For instance, the iBuyPower Slate Gaming Desktop PC, a well-rounded mid-range gaming PC which is selling for a very reasonable price of $899, down from its regular price of $1,399 over at Best Buy.

• Check out the deal on Best Buy

The system is powered by the AMD Ryzen 5 8400F, an entry-level 6-core, 12-thread desktop processor with a relatively low 65W TDP. This makes it fairly power-efficient while still offering decent performance for 1080p gaming. For graphics, the prebuilt comes with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060, a solid GPU for 1080p gaming as well as an entry point to Nvidia's latest Blackwell architecture, with support for multi-frame generation and newly released DLSS 5.

For memory, there's a single 16GB DDR5 stick running at 4,800MT/s. which isn't particularly fast and should ideally be configured in dual-channel, but a 16GB DDR5 memory stick on its own can cost around $300, making the system's $899 asking price a pretty solid deal. It also comes with a 1TB NVMe SSD with additional storage expansion for a secondary M.2 as well as SATA 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch drives. It is also worth noting that this iBuyPower prebuilt is cheaper yet more powerful than the Steam Machine, which currently goes for $1,049 for the base 512GB storage model. With a little bit of tinkering one could even use this system as a dedicated gaming PC for their living room.

In terms of cooling you get a single tower CPU cooler in addition to four ARGB fans, three at the front and one at the rear. The sturdy mid-tower chassis offers additional cooling fan mounting options, a glass side-panel, and a 600W PSU. iBuyPower also offers an entry-level gaming keyboard and mouse combo with the gaming PC. Remember, the discounted price of $899 is a limited-time offer, so you may want to grab it before the deal expires.

This week on Tom's Hardware Premium, we've published in-depth interviews, roadmaps, and features that you won't want to miss. To read any of the articles we feature in this weekly roundup, you'll need to first arm yourself with a subscription.

Headlining our coverage this week is our story from Laptop expert Andrew Freedman, in his exploration of how and why Apple has chosen 2026 as the time to release an OLED — excuse me — PROLED display, with touch. After all, touch is a feature that Windows laptops have sported for well over a decade, along with OLED displays, offering unparalleled contrast ratios when compared to any other panel technology. In this feature, he explores the justifications and the likelihood of Apple slowly trickling the "brand-new" functionality to its suite of devices.

• Apple finally has a touchscreen MacBook. Why now?

Last month, Micron revealed its brand-new product roadmap, featuring new DRAM devices, 3D NAND, the use of high-NA EUV lithography tools, and much more. NAND and DRAM are both incredibly hot topics, due to the ongoing rush to build faster, more capable AI accelerators, with Micron as one of the companies benefiting from the rush in demand. We go into detail about its 1δ DRAM, which is set to be manufactured on American shores. Beyond that, the company has also demonstrated its 11th-Gen NAND, which sports over 400 layers. With the next few years of its technologies explored in unrelenting technical detail, this roadmap details exactly where Micron's upcoming projects are, and where it's going next.

• Micron details ambitious DRAM and NAND roadmap — 3D NAND, High-NA EUV, new materials, and custom silicon makes a comeback

While ASML's EUV lithography machines remain in high demand, the company's latest technology, FDX Fusion, instead relies on tried-and-true DUV. Semiconductor expert Anton Shilov sits down with GlobalFoundries VP Sudipto Bose to detail the new tech, which boasts 7nm-class performance using advanced planar transistors, with broad applications across a range of devices, including within the data center. This unredacted interview transcript explores the hows and whys behind GlobalFoundries' decision to advance its FDX Fusion technologies without going down the EUV route, as many companies are currently doing, and offers an insider look at what the company might be planning in the future.

• GlobalFoundries VP details FDX Fusion technology, sporting 7nm-class performance without the need for EUV tools — company targets 2030 for high-volume manufacturing, with planar transistors in tow

Luckily, it's not all about data centers and the technologies therein, as there are actual, new consumer PC parts that we're expecting to hit the market sometime in 2027. Of course, Intel's Nova Lake platform is abuzz with rumors over its boost clocks and big last-level cache (bLLC), which is touted as the company's answer to AMD's hugely popular X3D chips.

But a new platform means new motherboards and new chipsets to get your head around. For those brave enough to be considering a new PC upgrade in this economy, we explore everything that we currently know about Nova Lake's associated motherboards, which come alongside a brand-new socket and a suite of features up and down all budget ranges.

• Intel’s next-gen Nova Lake needs new motherboards — what we expect from Nova Point and Z990, Z970, and B960 chipsets

Marvell has signed an agreement to acquire optics company Lumentum, at a value of $115 billion. The move would combine two of the biggest players in the optical market into a single company. However, the deal would significantly impact Marvell's overall optical infrastructure portfolio, especially in the realm of in-house laser manufacturing. As companies rush to build both scale-up and scale-out domains, optics remains a huge part of the AI connectivity puzzle, as copper hits its natural limits. We explore all aspects of the proposed merger in our detailed analysis.

• Marvell to buy Lumentum in $115 billion all-stock deal — combined company to supply scale-up and scale-in optics for AI data centersv

We've previously covered how much AI is disrupting cybersecurity, and the recent PHP vulnerability is merely the latest in a string of critical issues found in commonplace pieces of software, much of which forms the foundation of the modern internet. We tear apart and examine The PHP Foundation's post-mortem of the issue, their response, and more.

• PHP vulnerability post-mortem reveals bug was known two years ago — Small team of maintainers knew of the issue before it was made public, as new PHP2Shell chained exploit ravages servers

Google's Gemini 4 Carbon AI model recently topped charts as being one of the most capable frontier AI models out there. Google has historically been a laggardly competitor in the overall AI frontier race, with much more irregular releases than the likes of Anthropic or OpenAI. We explore how Gemini 4 Carbon fares in the grand AI thunderdome, and where it might have some advantages, such as being the model least likely to hallucinate.

• Google reveals new Gemini 4 Carbon AI model, narrowly beating Claude Opus 5.5 — frontier AI model is also the least likely to hallucinate, benchmarks claim

A Pat Gelsinger-backed company, Nagare Labs, has recently showcased a new type of memory named Z2RAM. It can achieve rapid, SRAM-like speeds, with the same density benefits as DRAM. The product is still in early testing, with the latest published figures and roadmap pointing toward the device potentially becoming an alternative to High Bandwidth Flash (HBF). We explore all elements of the published design documents in our technical analysis.

• Gelsinger-backed Nagare Labs’ capacitorless Z2RAM promises SRAM speed with DRAM density — latest published cell retains data for over 300 seconds at 85°C, but further figures are projected

To read any of the articles we mention above, as well as unlock Bench, you'll need to purchase a Tom's Hardware Premium subscription. Your support goes a long way in helping us to publish deeper, more insightful articles that might not otherwise be covered.

Update 11/8/2026 1:31 PM PT: Jensen Huang has now admitted to having an affair with the alleged Chinese spy and has issued a letter of apology to his family and staff, which you can read here.

Nvidia chief Jensen Huang is the center of a new controversy as the U.S. intelligence community believes that he had a romantic relationship with a suspected Chinese spy. According to the Financial Times, Alice Huang, sometimes referred to as Huang Le, was a top executive at Singaporean firm Megaspeed and was reportedly romantically involved with the CEO of the world's largest AI chip manufacturer. Notably, Jensen is currently married to his wife of 41 years, Lori Huang. It’s unclear whether Alice Huang was recruited by the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) before she joined Megaspeed or after she had already established a business relationship with Jensen, but it’s been reported that the suspected agent was apparently targeting the Nvidia head to help Chinese companies gain access to banned AI chips.

Megaspeed has been accused of smuggling $2 billion worth of AI chips into China via its subsidiary Speedmatrix, although Nvidia insists the company has no ties to China. Megaspeed sits at the center of a web of companies linked to China, and it was previously connected to a Chinese gaming company called 7Road International. It was founded in 2023 and reportedly owned by Huang Le Limited, led by Ms. Huang Le, or Alice Huang, before it was sold to Swiftdata that same year. The following year, Megaspeed used Speedmatrix to incorporate, with the subsidiary having two offices in Johor, Malaysia. The subsidiary is at the center of the smuggling allegations.

Research into Huang Le, or Alice Huang, has revealed inconsistencies. There were reports that she started her career as a TV journalist working for Hunan TV and Chinese state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV), but an executive at the former claims to have never heard of her, while she does not have a profile under the latter. After her supposed stint in media, she moved into banking and finance as assistant to the president of HSBC’s private banking division before becoming vice president at CITIC Securities, a Chinese financial services company. It’s unclear how she became involved with Megaspeed after that, but it seems Ms. Huang built a network of companies and investors around Shanghai and Zhejiang that aggressively pushed mobile gaming companies toward AI data centers.

Questions arose about how a small company like Megaspeed could commit so much to buying Nvidia AI GPUs seemingly out of nowhere, but it certainly caught Jensen Huang's attention. After the company made its massive order, Alice Huang was spotted in a LinkedIn post hanging out for drinks with Jensen Huang and other industry executives from Gigabyte and NetThunder. She was once again seen standing behind the Nvidia chief, alongside other people, one year later as he exited a Taiwan restaurant.

Nvidia has denied the allegations, saying Jensen Huang meets with thousands of customer executives annually and that they exchange ordinary business information — not sensitive Nvidia trade secrets or national security information. China has also said that these accusations of espionage on Jensen Huang by the MSS are just “groundless smears and slanders” against Beijing.

However, foreign intelligence agencies also routinely conduct “honeypot” operations, using operatives to ensnare targets into relationships to extract data and gain insight into industry secrets. While these operations traditionally targeted politicians, members of the military, and their staff, the Lansing Institute suggests that “China is employing ‘attractive women’ posing as investors, business professionals, academics, or romantic partners to gain access to U.S. tech talent, networks, and research infrastructure.”

It's November, which means we're officially in the season for deals on tech. While it's a few weeks before the big sales event starts, 3D printer manufacturers are already slashing their prices. If you fancied investing in a new 3D printer ahead of the holidays, Elegoo's big sale has started, and it's slashing prices by as much as 54%, according to its website.

The combo deals are where you're going to save cash. Not only has the company cut the cost of a new resin or filament 3D printer, but it's also coupling the consumables you'll need to print with them. For instance, you can pick up an Elegoo Centauri Carbon 2 bundle with 1KG of filament for $270, with the filament only costing you $1. The same applies to its resin printers, too, with a similar deal on the Elegoo Saturn 4 Ultra 16K for $400.

● Check out Elegoo's 3D printer deals

Elegoo is a big name in the 3D printing world, with some of its models sitting in our best 3D printer guide. These discounts make it a brilliant time to invest in a new printer, whether you're a beginner starting out or a seasoned pro looking to expand their setup further.

Yes, this is officially Elegoo's Black Friday sales event, and it'll be running until December 1, but there's no guarantee that the printers themselves will still be around by then. We've seen stock dry up in previous events from the big brands before the sales are over, so if you want a printer to arrive before the holidays, you'll need to make sure you get your order in sooner, rather than later.

To help you pick, we've put together a list of some of the best Elegoo 3D printers currently on sale below.

Best Elegoo 3D Printer Deals

Best Elegoo 3D Printer Filament and Resin Deals

Every once in a while we get a drive that comes across our desk that stands out, for good or for bad. The TeamGroup GA Pro falls into the latter category, enough so that we re-checked our results and contacted the company. We’ve managed to mostly sort out what’s going on and, while this is not the worst drive around, it has enough problems that we would generally not recommend it except if it's on steep sale.

TeamGroup’s array of storage offerings knows no bounds: if there’s a niche to cover, it makes an attempt. The GA Pro feels like such a try, although we’re not completely sure where it fits into the mix. The company is still working to iron out the bugs, if it can, but the technology is old enough that we wouldn’t hold our breath. On paper, it’s a PCIe 5.0 drive with DRAM that should beat any PCIe 4.0 SSD, but we found it struggles to live up to its own class of drive. Bright points are few and far between, but at least we can say it’s not the worst drive we’ve seen. The edges are just rougher than usual.

TeamGroup GA Pro Specifications

The TeamGroup GA Pro is available in 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, and 8TB capacities, although we only have the 2TB showing up at $331.99 at retail right now. The 8TB will probably be hard to find at this point. The drive is rated for up to 10,000 / 8,500 MB/s for sequential reads and writes, with no IOPS rating, although a drive like this can achieve 1 million or more. It has the standard five-year warranty with up to 600 TB of writes per TB of capacity.

TeamGroup GA Pro Software and Accessories

TeamGroup has a number of downloads available for this range of drives, which is better than nothing. They do maintain firmware for their drives, and we made sure our test sample had the newest revision, 050g05E7. Also available is the SSD S.M.A.R.T. TOOL, which is their SSD toolbox with basic functions, such as health monitoring. For backup and cloning on Windows, we continue to recommend MultiDrive, which continues to be updated based on user feedback.

TeamGroup GA Pro: A Closer Look

The good news is, the GA Pro has a graphene heat-spreading label. The bad news is, it’s insufficient to cool this drive. In most cases, you will want a heatsink on this. You can use a heatsink with the label in place, but you will have better luck if it’s removed. We are fond of graphene labels as they can be surprisingly effective, but it’s just not enough here.

Then we have the label which, with the 3.3V / 2.5A rating, puts the drive at a very optimistic 8.25W. We measured over 12.5W peak in our testing below. We can’t go by reported power states, as these top off at 3.50 W. Since we can’t rely on that, we can’t say for sure what even the expected enter/exit latencies are, relevant given TeamGroup’s claims about the drive, which we’ll get to later. The drive is otherwise double-sided with a controller, two DRAM packages, and four NAND flash packages.

The SSD controller is InnoGrit’s IG5666, the company’s answer to the Phison E26 high-end PCIe 5.0 champion. We have better controllers in that segment now, like the E28 and SMI’s SM2508, but even at the time of release, the IG5666 was not very popular. Both the E26 and IG5666 run very hot due to using an older process node, and newer flash wasn’t available yet to more easily reach the bus speeds needed. The GA Pro is not running full-out but, to be honest, that doesn’t help much. Phison put a lot of work into getting the E26 up to full speed in steps, and even the base 10 GB/s ones run toasty.

The drive does have the right amount of DDR4, 2GB, for this amount of flash. No problems there. The flash also looks to be YMTC’s 232-layer TLC, which is also perfectly fine. The controller is the weak spot here and, as we’ll find out, its firmware really keeps the GA Pro from reaching its full potential, even with its bandwidth cap.

MORE: Best SSDs

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Comparison Products

We’re throwing a mix of drives today at the GA Pro, in the interest of finding out why it performs the way it does. Direct competitors include the Crucial T700 and Corsair MP700, two Phison E26-based drives. The MP700 is rated at around the same speeds as the GA Pro, while the T700 is a step up, about halfway from there to the E26’s 14 GB/s effective ceiling. We also have the TeamGroup GE Pro sibling as a drive with similar hardware to the GA Pro but rated for the InnoGrit IG5666 controller’s full speed. The Addlink G55, PNY CS2150, and Crucial P510 also hover around the same specs but are later-arriving, DRAM-less drives. We also have the Lexar NM1090 Pro (4TB) in the mix as it’s a high-end PCIe 5.0 drive, but considered slightly more budget-leaning. Finally, the TeamGroup G70 Pro is our PCIe 4.0 stand-in for a last-gen comparison, from the same company and also with an InnoGrit controller.

Trace Testing — 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams. Future gaming benchmarks will be DirectStorage-inclusive and an evaluation for future-proofing is included where applicable.

There’s no doubt about it; the GA Pro’s response here is quite poor. The drive’s score of 1,428 puts it pretty close to the SATA SSD range of around 1,000 to 1,400, and second to last of the 242 NVMe drives in our database. Now, this is plenty fast for gaming and much better than using an HDD, but it’s also terrible for an NVMe SSD, and we would not recommend it for this.

Right out of the gate, we began to question this drive’s results. We switched up our comparison drives, re-ran the tests, and ultimately contacted TeamGroup. In theory, this score is what we would expect given their explanation, which was that the drive was designed for CDM, ATTO, and sustained writes to get the most out of its bandwidth potential. The firmware being used drops the drive into a lower power state when the host is idle, and this can add unwanted command latency. That matches the 3DMark latency result.

Optimizing for certain workloads makes sense, but we don’t think this result is defensible. The likeliest reason for any such design, beyond the stated one, would be to handle heat. This controller runs hotter than any other PCIe 5.0 one we’ve tested. So, this is almost OEM-drive-like behavior, in the sense that it’s really trying to keep the drive within a certain envelope. We think the firmware is not operating as intended, but we at least accept the theory.

Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is an industry standard trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices. The results are particularly useful when analyzing drives for their use as primary/boot storage devices and in work environments.

We see the same issue in PCMark. Terrible latency leads to terrible overall results. The drive may not be slow intrinsically, but it might as well be considered as such.

Our hypothesis here, since the problem is consistent, is that the drive is unintentionally throttling. Usually this happens due to heat, but saying “heat” is not fully addressing the problem. That is, it’s not necessarily the heat causing the issue but how the drive and firmware detect and handle it. We remember the days of prototype PCIe 5.0 controllers, mainly from Phison, where flash temperatures were not properly calibrated and caused unintentional throttling. It’s possible something similar is happening here, given how hot the controller runs (see our power and temperature section), but the early takeaway for now is that this is a “solved” problem that InnoGrit is struggling with on this drive for one reason or another.

Console Testing — PlayStation 5 Transfers

The PlayStation 5 is capable of taking one additional PCIe 4.0 or faster SSD for extra game storage. While any 4.0 drive will technically work, Sony recommends drives that can deliver at least 5,500 MB/s of sequential read bandwidth for optimal performance. Based on our extensive testing, PCIe 5.0 SSDs don’t bring much to the table and generally shouldn’t be used in the PS5, especially as they may require additional cooling. Check our Best PS5 SSDs article for more information.

Our testing utilizes the PS5’s internal storage test and manual read/write tests with over 192GB of data both from and to the internal storage. Throttling is prevented where possible to see how each drive operates under ideal conditions. While game load times should not deviate much from drive to drive, our results can indicate which drives may be more responsive in long-term use.

We usually don’t worry about the PS5 with PCIe 5.0 drives, as even the slowest ones are plenty for the console, but we wanted to be sure with this one. The drive works but does not perform that well. Given how brief this testing can be, and because it’s limited to PCIe 4.0 speeds, we don’t believe the drive is throttling. It’s more likely the same latency issue we saw in the trace tests, or a larger firmware issue.

Transfer Rates — DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom 50GB dataset. We write 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to the test drive, then make a copy of that data to a new folder, and follow up with a reading test of a newly written 6.5GB zip file. This is a real-world type workload that fits into the cache of most drives.

The GA Pro also ends up dead last in DiskBench, which also requires explanation. The drive has a very small cache for its size and generation, something that is also OEM- or NAS-like rather than what we’d expect from a normal retail drive, but it’s large enough to fit this test. Either the cache was not fully emptied in testing, which generally would also be linked to firmware, or we’re having more issues here from the previously mentioned flaw. The drive is also slower with reads because the reads in this test are at a queue depth of 1, where the drive is known to have issues; this was affirmed by TeamGroup when we asked.

Synthetic Testing — ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes and at different queue depths for both sequential and random workloads.

The GA Pro isn’t actually all bad here, with reasonable ATTO curves and even some okay marks in CDM. 4KB latency is still higher than expected, and that hurts this drive for everyday use. On the other hand, it can mete out some decent sequential performance, especially at QD8. TeamGroup told us that this is what the drive was designed for, so that lines up. Keep in mind, this drive isn’t going to keep up with PCIe 5.0 drives rated for higher speeds. Instead, to keep it on the positive side, at QD8 it does very well against drives with similar specs.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of pseudo-SLC (single-bit) programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC (three-bit) or QLC (four-bit) flash. Performance can suffer even more if the drive is forced to fold, the process of migrating data out of the cache in order to free up space for further incoming data.

We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds. This process shows the performance of the drive in various states including the steady state write performance.

The GA Pro’s fastest mode, pSLC, or what’s called the cache, writes at around 9.2 GB/s. This is respectable for the drive’s speed class and beats any PCIe 4.0 drive, but also doesn’t set records. It only writes at this speed for approximately 7 seconds, which is incredibly short, and means the cache is only about 69 GB in size. This is small in general, small for a 2TB drive, and very small for a modern, PCIe 5.0 drive. It’s not unheard of, as we’ve seen caches around this size on some drives to improve “quality of service,” which basically means keeping the drive performing consistently even when the cache runs out.

We don’t see that, per se, after the cache runs out here. The drive initially acts in an erratic manner, although eventually it does hit a steady speed around 2.5 GB/s. This isn’t too bad, but the drive should be able to muster a little bit more: the G70 Pro, with the same YMTC flash and an even smaller cache, manages about 2.75 GB/s. Still, it’s fast enough to be useful for some applications. TeamGroup suggested this is one area the drive was designed to be good at, and while we can’t agree with that 100%, we do think its current arrangement is, on paper, good for something like write caching. It would be better if things were smoothed out, maybe through firmware, and we would absolutely recommend a good heatsink for that type of workload on this drive.

Power Consumption and Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade, as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre stock storage in terms of capacity and performance. Desktops are often more performance-oriented with less support for power-saving features, so we show the worst-case for idle.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt, or efficiency, is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

For temperature recording, we currently poll the drive’s primary composite sensor during testing with a ~22°C ambient. Our testing is rigorous enough to heat the drive to a realistic ceiling temperature, but real-world temperatures will vary due to the environment and workload factors.

At this point in the review, you’re probably thinking to yourself: I bet the GA Pro isn’t very power-efficient, either. You’d be correct; it finishes last in our lineup. That comes down to its slow DiskBench copy speed, which our efficiency metric is based on, paired with high power draw: the GA Pro averages 6.32W, fourth-highest in our lineup, and peaks at 12.53W, the highest. Also, its hardware is already known to be inefficient even compared to comparables like a Phison E26 and Micron TLC on the MP700; see the GE Pro. We also don’t really expect great power efficiency out of a drive like this. That said, yeah, don’t get this drive if you care about that. One thing we’ll add is that TeamGroup’s claim about latency fits the results here: the GA Pro’s idle power consumption is significantly better than the GE Pro’s.

Temperature-wise, well, what can we say? The three sensors reported maximum temperatures of 61, 72, and 92 degrees Celsius. The 92-degree reading is most likely the controller, which held at 88 degrees or higher for over 90% of our sustained write test. The drive’s 90-degree warning threshold applies to the composite sensor, which peaked at 72 degrees, and it stayed below that threshold. But the controller holding steady at around 89 degrees in some cases suggests the firmware may be working around that temperature instead. Either way, yes, this drive runs hot. Mind, this is with cooling, so you would definitely want to be prepared to handle this one.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, Windows updates, and antivirus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

TeamGroup GA Pro Bottom Line

We test many, many drives and only rarely, exceptionally, do we consider giving out a perfect score. That’s because the perfect drive is essentially a unicorn. The same goes the other way, too: to get our very worst rating, a drive would have to be truly awful. Now, the TeamGroup GA Pro is among the worst drives I’ve handled in my tenure, but I’ve heard of many worse. Drives that fail at the drop of a hat, ones plagued with firmware issues, ones with low-grade flash, ones with PCIe 3.0 or worse performance. They exist, and the GA Pro is not one of these. We also reviewed tons of drives from TeamGroup; this is a known brand that also communicated to us the need for a firmware revision, which makes us feel like the InnoGrit controller choice is the biggest issue here.

The GA Pro is an odd drive, anyway, because it’s not fast for a PCIe 5.0 drive. It’s at first-gen speeds for the high-end drives in this class, with the next two steps being 12 and 14 GB/s or so, and it ends up competing with later-arriving 10 GB/s drives that are DRAM-less and far more efficient. If you’re looking at a chart of drive generations like it was showing an evolution, this drive is halfway to being a dinosaur at this point. If we look at the problems Phison had early with the E26, we can see some misstep overlaps here. Our feeling is that TeamGroup had a rough idea of what they wanted this drive to be, and there are many hints at that, like the small cache size, and the vision never panned out. Not surprising given the controller has never done well and the consumer SSD industry at this point is exceptionally bad.

No excuses here, though. Performance is very bad for this class in many areas, especially with low QD reads, presumably due to a latency issue, which hits the drive hard. Power efficiency is also pretty bad, not unexpected, though, and the drive runs hot. That’s also expected from this hardware.

On the other hand, sustained write performance is not terrible once it steadies out, and in some high-QD situations the drive even outperforms its spec. We think TeamGroup could have slotted this into a NAS-like category or even HEDT like other early PCIe 5.0 SSDs. The cache speaks to that, although we’ve seen some Phison-based drives use a smaller cache to smooth out write performance. Which means that TeamGroup may have been targeting a similar milieu, but of course putting the GA Pro up against an E31T drive, like the P510, makes little sense to us.

We cannot recommend the drive in its current form; it needs a firmware update. With that update, and if pricing is respectable, the drive has some niche applications. It could tank some higher QD sequential workloads and let you induce less wear on your better or more important drives. Certainly, most drives in this class have massive caches, and that’s not always a good thing. The problem is we would still probably go with those over a GA Pro even where they may be slower. This drive feels more like one you find $100 off on a sale that seems like a misprice some random Sunday, in which case, well, you could do worse.

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is a man who likely attends numerous meetings, and today one more was added to his busy schedule. The U.S. Congress wants to have a closed-door chat with Huang over mounting concerns about national security. The congressmen bidding for his time say last week's report spurred the move that he may be the target of espionage by a reported Chinese asset: Megaspeed exec Alice Huang (family unrelated).

The meeting was set up by Republican House representatives John Moolenaar, Brian Mast, and Rick Crawford, respective Chairs of the House committees on China, Foreign Affairs, and Intelligence. In the House's letter on the matter, the lawmakers say the aforementioned reports "raise significant national security concerns" about China gaining access to U.S. technology and information.

The previously reported claim is that Alice Huang is a Chinese plant in Singaporean data center outfit Megaspeed, siphoning information to Beijing. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) further claims that she was recruited by Chinese authorities due to her existing relationship with Jensen Huang.

Megaspeed reportedly bought and continues to buy billions' worth of Nvidia's chips, according to The New York Times (NYT), and stands accused by the Department of Commerce since 2024 of smuggling $2 billion worth of advanced silicon to China.

The backdrop for the situation is that the U.S. has long-standing export controls blocking Nvidia and AMD's most advanced AI accelerator chips from reaching China, among a number of other nations. The allegations were first published last week in the NYT, and are reportedly sourced from unnamed U.S. intelligence officials.

The House says the purpose of the briefing with Jensen Huang is to discuss "Nvidia's security protocols against foreign adversary espionage and [his] interactions with [...] Alice Huang." According to the NYT, the CEO never got a "defensive briefing," essentially a warning for potential targets of foreign espionage, to acquaint them with signs of such activities.

The publication notes that intelligence officials often hesitate to inform potential targets of espionage, as doing so may make the spy aware they're being investigated. The NYT adds that President Trump was briefed on the situation surrounding Megaspeed and Alice Huang a year ago, but chose not to act on it.

According to the WSJ, Singaporean authorities opened their own probe into Megaspeed, and even reportedly questioned Alice Huang directly. However, an official response from the country told the WSJ that it "does not implement unilateral export controls imposed by foreign jurisdictions," adding that while it's investigating Megaspeed, it's not targeting Alice Huang herself or inspecting her claimed ties with Jensen Huang or China.

The Singaporean does note that the country has "a zero-tolerance stance" on commercial fraud, pointing out that it's charged four companies and four individuals over such wrongdoings, and that they may face up to 20 years in prison.

Meanwhile, Taiwan is also seemingly keeping a close eye on Alice Huang, by inspecting her visits to the nation. The WSJ says that the country's authorities are probing her involvement with China and have her under physical surveillance.

As for Nvidia, the company seemingly reposted today the same comments it offered us last week, stating that "meetings with customers are part of a CEO's job; Jensen talks with thousands of customer executives every year." The firm adds that "[its] regional cloud customers receive ordinary business information — not sensitive NVIDIA trade secrets — and zero information relevant to national security."

A recent report from The Information suggested that TSMC is exploring 3D DRAM production at Nvidia's request as surging demand for AI hardware strains global DRAM supplies and drives up prices. If the proposal were to come to fruition, it could mean a new, albeit prone to cyclical risks, business for TSMC and could dramatically expand its role in the AI supply chain. For its part, TSMC states that it is a pure-play logic foundry and plans to remain a logic foundry, which essentially means a denial of the report.

"Please note that TSMC focuses on our core business at all times, which is dedicated IC foundry," a TSMC spokesperson told Tom's Hardware. "Our mission is to be the trusted technology and capacity provider of the global logic IC industry for years to come."

Despite the denial, according to two people familiar with the initiative cited by The Information, TSMC has begun preparing plans for 3D DRAM manufacturing following a request from Nvidia, its largest customer. The initiative is reportedly overseen by Hsu Kuo-chin, TSMC’s vice president responsible for advanced packaging and former head of Micron’s Taiwanese operations. The effort comes amid widespread memory shortages that turned memory from a commodity into a strategic asset that could determine whether a company can ship its products to customers or not.

Although TSMC works closely with DRAM producers as it packages memory into system-in-packages (SiPs) for its customers, the company lacks the expertise and production capacity to make DRAM, let alone 3D DRAM. Meanwhile, given that 3D DRAM is years away even for major memory makers, pursuing a 3D DRAM strategy cannot solve memory shortages for at least five years.

Unlike conventional DRAM, which arranges memory cells in a single plane, 3D DRAM places multiple levels of memory cells vertically to increase capacity per wafer. All three leading DRAM makers — Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix — are working on their 3D DRAM projects. However, Micron's DRAM strategy includes at least four more planar DRAM process technologies before 3D DRAM becomes a reality.

While TSMC has arguably the industry's best logic process technologies, DRAM production requires entirely different manufacturing processes, which TSMC would have to develop, should it pursue making memory for its customers. Meanwhile, producing 3D DRAM requires completely different fabrication techniques to construct multiple memory-cell layers while controlling defects and maintaining acceptable yields. It is hardly possible to develop a 3D DRAM manufacturing process without having a competitive planar DRAM process technology, and TSMC does not have one.

One of the options for TSMC to enter the DRAM business would be to acquire a small specialty memory producer that has its own fabrication capability. This would give TSMC a credible route into advanced DRAM manufacturing without having to develop the underlying memory technology and IPs from scratch. However, small makers do not have leading-edge commodity DRAM nodes, so TSMC would still need to invest billions of dollars and years of R&D into development of a leading-edge process technology for DRAM.

However, entering DRAM manufacturing would expose TSMC to substantial market risks. Memory shortages frequently encourage capacity expansions that eventually create oversupply, depressing prices and profitability. Such uncertainty could surely make TSMC think twice before going down the DRAM route. Furthermore, entering the DRAM business could also complicate TSMC's relationship with large DRAM makers in general, and SK Hynix, which partnered with the foundry in 2024 to manufacture logic base dies for next-generation HBM products, in particular.

TSMC’s potential entry into DRAM manufacturing could also raise antitrust questions, particularly if the company combines its dominant position in leading-edge logic manufacturing, leading position in advanced chip packaging, and ramping memory production. Regulators could examine whether such vertical integration would enable TSMC to favor its own memory products or disadvantage competitors that lack such a vertical integration. Then again, in-house DRAM development by TSMC could also strengthen competition by introducing another supplier into a market dominated by just three manufacturers.

Yet, TSMC does not necessarily need to manufacture DRAM to capitalize on growing demand for advanced memory. Instead, it could capture a larger share of the value generated by DRAM by producing sophisticated logic base dies for HBM, integrating memory with processors using its SoIC hybrid bonding technology, and developing customized memory solutions with partners such as GUC and established DRAM manufacturers. This approach would allow TSMC to expand its presence in the advanced memory market without investing billions of dollars in developing competitive DRAM process technologies from scratch and/or building additional fabs for tens of billions of dollars.

Running your own email server is one thing. Keeping it alive for nearly three decades is quite another. One homelab enthusiast has finally decided to call time on his Microsoft Exchange installation after maintaining it since 1999, replacing the last remaining server with Postfix on Ubuntu Server LTS. The user, posting as Meta4X on Reddit’s r/homelab on November 5, said they had already moved their mailboxes and email delivery to Microsoft 365 a couple of years ago. Exchange was still hanging around, however, serving as a relay for alerts generated by hardware and software on their local network. With that final job now being handed to Postfix, the 27-year run is coming to an end.

Meta4X’s installation began with Exchange 5.5 running on Windows NT 4. Since then, they have upgraded through Exchange 2000, 2003, 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016 and finally Exchange 2019. They said access to Microsoft’s software through MSDN, TechNet and the Microsoft Action Pack had allowed them to keep the setup running over the years. The end of support for Exchange 2019 last year was one reason to consider keeping the server around. Microsoft has since moved its on-premises Exchange platform to Exchange Server Subscription Edition (SE), which comes with ongoing licensing requirements. That said, the transition is not quite as straightforward as the original post suggests.

In the post, the Redditor shared a photo from 2003, when they upgraded from Exchange 2000 to Exchange 2003. The server did not have a conventional PC case, and its motherboard was strapped to the cardboard box it came with using zip ties.

One commenter pointed out that existing Exchange 2019 licenses can be used with Exchange SE under qualifying licensing arrangements. Meta4X admitted that they did not know that, adding that they were probably better off not knowing. “I did not know that, thank you! In hindsight, I'm glad I wasn't aware because I probably would have put off killing Exchange,” they wrote. In other words, the server was not necessarily being retired because there was no way to keep it licensed. The move gave its owner an opportunity to finally get rid of a system that had outlived its original purpose.

For context, the replacement is Postfix, an open-source mail transfer agent that will run on Ubuntu Server LTS. The enthusiast is also using the migration to address several pieces of technical debt that have accumulated during the server’s long life. “Moving to Postfix is a good opportunity to implement STARTTLS, move to Let's Encrypt certificates, implement boot encryption, and eliminate a bunch of other technical debt that has accumulated over the past 20+ years,” Meta4X explained.

STARTTLS upgrades an ordinary SMTP connection to an encrypted TLS connection, while Let’s Encrypt provides publicly trusted certificates that can be renewed automatically. Boot encryption adds another layer of protection by securing data on the system drive. These are planned improvements, though — the Reddit post does not establish that the new configuration is already fully deployed. Meanwhile, Postfix is hardly the only destination for Exchange refugees. Several commentators said they had moved Mailcow, while another recommended Grommunio as an alternative for people who still want to keep their mail infrastructure on-premises. Others were more than happy to leave email hosting to Microsoft and other cloud providers.

That said, the move to Postfix does not necessarily make email security a solved problem. Postfix’s own documentation explains that enabling TLS can encrypt SMTP sessions, but administrators still need to configure certificate handling and decide how connections should behave when a remote server does not support encryption. We have previously reported on a vulnerability in Exim that exposed millions of email servers, showing how flaws in mail transfers can put systems at risk. Ransomware has particularly been a headache, exploiting vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange. A more recent report highlights how Outlook silently falls back to unencrypted email connections

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) just announced the new Bluetooth High Data Throughput (HDT) feature on November 4, allowing a maximum bandwidth of 7.5 Mbps, almost 4x that of the previous Bluetooth LE 2M (2 Mbps). The new bandwidth is intended for high-bandwidth interactions between devices, such as AI, spatial computing, and even lossless audio transmission; the latter of which may finally satisfy audiophiles and their enjoyment of uncompressed audio.

Bluetooth HDT is Bluetooth’s new feature allowing for up to 7.5 Mbps of bandwidth. This new feature is needed by sophisticated modern devices that use a lot of data in their communication. It could be smartwatches, AI, or even extended reality (XR); less sophisticated but high-bandwidth, however, is lossless audio, which Bluetooth has never had enough bandwidth for, until HDT, that is.

Purists have long since criticized Bluetooth, but HDT may finally be the feature that satisfies them. Audiophiles have always preferred wired over Bluetooth, especially those who prefer lossless audio over compressed formats. Bluetooth LE 2M, even with its 2 Mbps bandwidth, cannot reliably transmit CD-quality 1.4 Mbps lossless audio, so it gets compressed through various means: SBC, AAC, aptX, LDAC, LC3, etc., and for audiophiles who want to listen to their lossless audio, compression is a downgrade to their experience, even if they likely can’t tell the difference between lossless and a high-quality 320kbps MP3 file.

However, HDT not only offers higher bandwidth but also improved reliability for consistent communication and uses even less power, as stated on Bluetooth’s feature enhancements page, which adds that HDT provides the capacity, efficiency, and wireless performance needed for high-resolution and lossless audio. As mentioned, CD lossless quality hovers around 0.8-1.4Mbps, while 24-bit 48 kHz is around 2.3 Mbps, and 24-bit 96 kHz is 4.6 Mbps, well under the maximum 7.5 Mbps bandwidth; only 24-bit 192 kHz exceeds it at 9.2 Mbps — but who is really able to tell the difference at that sampling rate?

It is worth noting that just because a device complies with the Bluetooth Core Specification 7.0, it doesn't mean that it automatically has the HDT feature, much less the maximum 7.5 Mbps feature. On page 2795 of the Core_v7.0 document (yes, I dug that far), it says that HDT2, HDT3, and HDT4 are required if HDT is featured, but HDT6 and HDT7.5 are optional. And it should be further noted that just because an audio device supports even the highest HDT7.5, it won’t immediately equate to a good experience, as tuning is also a big factor. With that said, HDT might make it possible for high-end wired audiophile favorites to get a wireless version.

Jim Vessella, a Senior Producer at the EA Partner teams at Electronic Arts, stumbled upon EA’s secret physical media vault at the company’s Redwood Shores campus. This wasn't just any storage room containing copies of old games; instead, it held nearly 20,000 archival media assets stored in various media, including Betacam, VHS, D1, Film Reels, CD-ROMs, and more. Vessella discovered it in 2022 and spent the next six months outside of his working hours unpacking the room. He was eventually joined by Greg Roensch, who worked with the EA Story initiative, which is the company’s own preservation project, and reorganized the room chronologically. From there, EA shared how this effort turned from an archival project into a remaster of several classic titles.

Vessella, who also worked on the Command & Conquer Remastered Collection in 2019, built a proposal to digitize the room once it was organized, with efforts starting in 2024. Two years later, the team working on the project had digitized 6,000 media assets and 2,500 hours of historical footage, including the Master Source tapes for the Wing Commander and Road Rash franchises. This has allowed the team to build Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger: 30th Anniversary Edition using those original master tapes. But more than just putting in new footage in the game, Vessella reached out to the Wing Commander community to help make the game playable on modern systems. This included Matt Wells (Mash), who built an Enhancement Patch for the Kilrathi Saga version of the game released in 1996, Owen “ODVS” Davies, who advised the EA team on full-motion video (FMV) restoration for some damaged tapes, and Ben “LOAF” Lesnick, who tweaked the game to fix the infamous insta-kill missile spam in Wing Commander IV.

EA also released Privateer 2: The Darkening: 30th Anniversary Edition with the help of Steve Hilliker, the original Cinematics Director of the game. It was actually a community member who said that they saw a video of Hilliker saying that he still has some of the master footage for the game stored on Digi 8. The team then reached out to the director, who found the entire collection in his attic. The team then commissioned Hilliker to digitize the tapes and create a “Director’s Cut” of the game’s cinematics. Matt once again stepped in and created an Enhancement Patch for Privateer 2, delivering a lot of quality-of-life improvements to the original game.

There was also a ton of work done on the original Wing Commander and the Wing Commander II sequel, plus the Road Rash retro titles. While purists might decry the “improvements” made to these titles that allowed them to be played on modern systems, the combined efforts of Electronic Arts, its passionate employees, GOG, and the community at large have allowed these games to be brought back to life. You could now get the entire Wing Commander collection and Road Rash: 30th Anniversary Edition on Steam, allowing you to reminisce about your favorite titles from the ‘90s and even allow your kids to see what gaming was like 30 years ago.

The recent release of these retro titles and the effort behind preserving them is a refreshing move after Sony announced that it will ditch physical games by 2028. While online game libraries like Steam are often more convenient for gamers, it has also raised the issue of ownership, with GOG taking a jab at Steam after the latter added a banner clarifying that you don’t own the games you buy on the platform. Despite Sony’s move away from physical media, other game companies have iterated their support for it. Nintendo says that fans like physical games, while Microsoft introduced the Xbox Disc to Digital feature that gave gamers the best of both worlds. GOG is even considering reviving physical game releases, although it admits that it still has to figure things out before it can start printing out physical game media.

The US federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is finally moving to retire floppy disks from its air traffic control infrastructure, with plans to replace four decades-old information systems across 435 facilities by the end of 2028. The agency announced the rollout on November 5, introducing a centralized platform that will give controllers faster access to weather reports, flight alerts and other operational information. “We’re moving away from outdated, manual processes and replacing technology that once relied on floppy disks with a modern system that allows controllers to instantly share critical flight alerts, restricted airspace schedules and pilot reports,” FAA administrator Bryan Bedford said, adding the agency wants to make critical information available more quickly across its networks.

Notably, the new Enterprise Information Display System (E-IDS) is designed to replace four legacy systems dating back to the 1980s. Rather than relying on separate information displays and manual processes, controllers will get a centralized view of operational updates, equipment problems, weather disruptions, and aviation advisories. The first five locations receiving E-IDS include Atlantic City International Airport, Nashville International Airport, Greater Rochester International Airport, and FAA data processing hubs in Atlanta and Salt Lake City, although the system could be extended to 453 sites by the end of 2028.

The upgrade comes amid mounting pressure on the FAA to modernize infrastructure that has become increasingly difficult to maintain. Last year, Congress approved $12.5 billion for air traffic control improvements, while Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is seeking another $30 billion for additional upgrades. The agency problems extend well beyond removable storage. The FAA still relies on decades-old Company computers and replacement parts sourced from eBay. Its facilities also operate with separate systems that make information sharing more difficult, with Bedford previously saying “every facility is a silo.”

Communication failures have also exposed weaknesses in the infrastructure. Last month, the FAA sent a memo to airports warning about several recent outages caused by fiber optic cable cuts, which can trigger flight delays, diversions and, in worst cases, cancellations. One incident occurred in mid-October when a construction-related cable cut outside George Bush Intercontinental Airport disrupted data services between FAA facilities, forcing a ground stop. September also saw thousands of flights delayed or canceled across the Northeast after a circuit failure at a Philadelphia air traffic facility and in New Jersey.

That said, mission-critical infrastructure struggling to abandon obsolete systems is not entirely new. In June 2025, we covered the FAA's earlier modernization plans, which also targeted paper flight trips and computers reportedly running Windows 95. The agency has been gradually introducing electronic flight trips since the Biden era, with the transition expected to reach 49 major airports by at least 2028. So far, only 27 have made the switch. San Francisco has faced a similar challenge with its Muni Metro light rail network, with the city awarding Hitachi Rail a $212 million contract to replace its floppy-disk-based control system in 2024.

The German Navy has also been looking to replace 8-inch floppy drives used aboard its Brandenburg-class frigates. These disks are part of a data acquisition system connected to basic ship functions, including propulsion and power generation. Japan, meanwhile, finally moved the remaining government regulations requiring floppy disk submissions in June 2024, eliminating 1,034 such rules.

The M1 Ultra is Elegoo’s first entry into the 3D scanner market. It is a feature-rich scanner with five scanning modes, four blue light laser modes, and a NIR binocular structured light mode. Most importantly, the scanner has a 3-in color touch screen and long battery life. It even includes a spare rechargeable battery, so you’re always prepared.

The scanner can’t run without a fairly high end PC or Mac for processing power. It will need to be tethered to the laptop with a UBS-C cable or connected via Wi-Fi. I was able to get about five feet away from my subject in a harsh RF environment. I didn’t test it further than that, so it may go farther. The cable connection provides the fastest connectivity, making tethered scanning worth the hassle.

The scanner’s output rivals any of the scanners I’ve tested, but it did require a little extra work to get there. At a current price of $1,599 at Elegoo, the M1 Ultra has features not found in other scanners at this price point.

Specifications: Elegoo M1 Ultra

Included in the Box: Elegoo M1 Ultra

The Elegoo M1 Ultra comes with a nice hard case for travel, with a padded interior to protect the scanner, glass calibration board, spare battery, NIR filters, and a USB-C cable. Also included are a lens cleaning cloth and a packet of marker dots. Noticeably absent is a turntable for scanning smaller objects. (We borrowed a turntable from another scanner during this test.)

Design of the Elegoo M1 Ultra

The Elegoo M1 Ultra weighs 511g (1.12lbs) with its battery installed. It has a rubber grip below the screen and is nicely balanced. Users with large hands may find their thumbs blocking the screen.

The onboard screen can be used to set the scanning parameters, start and stop scans, and monitor the scans as they progress. The 3-inch screen is small, but the UI is laid out perfectly. When setting parameters for a scan, the touch screen takes precedence over the tethered computer if you’re starting the scan from the scanner itself.

The business end of the scanner has a series of blue, white, and infrared LEDs, blue lasers, and cameras. The included NIR filters are needed when scanning outdoors or in harsh light conditions. The battery and the spare can be charged using a USB-C cable when unmounted, and can be charged from the computer when operating the scanner in USB mode. The battery life is excellent. Almost all of our testing was done with one charge of the battery and its spare.

Getting Started and Calibrating the Elegoo M1 Ultra

Calibrating the Elegoo M1 Ultra is fairly easy given its light weight and the easy-to-follow software. Using the glass calibration board, the scanner is aimed at various angles and heights, following the directions on screen. The software shows an image of where the scanner should be and an image of the scanner as you move it. You have to match the two before moving on to the next spot. Scanner calibration can be a chore, but calibrating the M1 Ultra was simple.

Installing the Software for Elegoo M1 Ultra

Elegoo Scan can be downloaded from Elegoo’s website for Windows and Mac. The software works and looks like CrealityScan, which is a good thing since both make cleaning up individual scans and stitching multiple scans together fairly easy. The software does require a bunch of memory, with the more, the merrier. I tried running the software on an older PC laptop which met the minimum requirements, except it had only 8 GB of RAM, and it was not enough.

Elegoo recommends a PC with Windows 10/11 (64-bit), an Intel Core i7 (13th Gen) or higher, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 or higher (8 GB VRAM), and 32 GB or more of RAM. For Mac, they recommend macOS 14 or later, with an Apple M4 or later, and 32 GB or more of RAM. Minimum specs for both are 16gb of RAM, with Windows 10/11 (64-bit), Intel Core i7 (7th Gen), and an Nvidia GPU (6 GB VRAM) for PC, and macOS 14 or later, with an Apple M2 CPU.

Blue Laser Line 3D Scanning with the Elegoo M1 Ultra

The Elegoo M1 Ultra has 4 blue laser scanning modes: 34 crossed laser lines for quick scanning, 7 parallel lines for finer details, 1 line for scanning deeper, more difficult-to-capture holes, and markerless. The fewer the lines, the more time the scans take. I should point out that the turntable in the photo was borrowed from the Creality Pika Scanner, which we reviewed previously.

One of my favorite use cases is scanning an item for import into a 3D printing project I am working on. I scanned a cheap 895 brushed motor commonly found in drills. The motor required several scans, and the M1 Ultra seemed to have trouble capturing the shinier parts of the object. Ultimately, I captured two scans that had enough data to be useful. The software has an automatic alignment tool which does a good job in most cases. In this case, it was baffled by the geometry. The manual alignment worked perfectly.

Manual alignment requires adding markers matching points on both images. You do not have to be super exact with the placement. The software will smooth out any overlaps.

Part of the mesh processing is hole filling. This also has an automatic and manual mode. Since the automatic mode was going to fill in the screw holes and cooling holes, I had to fill in the holes manually by clicking on them. This is a little tedious, but it worked well.

After hole filling, smoothing, and simplifying, I was able to export the file as an STL and open it in Tinkercad.

The size, and hole alignment were perfect for integrating the motor into a project.

This bust of Michelangelo’s David came with an early Creality scanner and has become my main test file. It took three scans for me to get a good model, which was a recurring theme with the Elegoo M1 Ultra.

Fortunately in this case, the auto alignment function worked perfectly.

Even with multiple scans, there were still a few holes to fill. One of these can be seen in the finished model in the smooth, flat area above David’s left ear.

Overall, the model generated is one of the best I’ve seen, and it printed extremely well once exported. The flaw at the bottom of the print was a bed adhesion issue rather than a problem with the model.

NIR 3D Scanning with the Elegoo M1 Ultra

Since I could not find a willing human victim…I mean, subject…to scan, I tried using the NIR mode to scan Clyde, our family’s favorite stuffed Clydesdale. This is a cautionary tale because 3D scanners in general have a tough time scanning black objects, as they absorb light rather than reflecting it.

The scans weren’t bad, but they did leave big holes where the mane and tail were too dark to read.

I was able to do a much better scan of Ali the Alligator. In NIR mode, the scanner is capable of 30fps. Even with the slower frame rate, the scanner was able to quickly capture Ali in two scans, without a ton of multiple passes. Each time you go over the same spot on an object, it’s possible to generate garbage data that has to be removed in the meshing process. The two scans align together automatically, and the finished model is pretty darn good.

The scanner does feature color texture mapping. Other than the mouth, where a large hole needed to be filled, the color mapping was spot on.

Bottom Line

The Elegoo M1 Ultra is a good scanner that has a good feature set for the price. The light weight, onboard screen, long battery life, and stable Wi-Fi connection make it a joy to use.

The ElegooScan software is fairly intuitive. It makes calibrating the scanner and turning the raw scans into usable models fairly easy. The Elegoo M1 Ultra did require multiple scans to get good coverage of objects, while other scanners I’ve tested could do it in one pass. The added complexity takes up a good deal of time and requires a fair amount of computer power, especially when cleaning up and aligning multiple scans. ElegooScan has the tools to make it work. Even with a pretty good model, you’ll likely also need a CAD program or other design tools to make the best use of the scans.

If you’d like to save a few bucks and get a still excellent scanner, check out the Creality Pika, which is currently $699. If you want a scanner with a little more horsepower, check out the Creality Sermoon S1, which retails for $2,069. Creality also makes the Sermoon P1, which can run completely untethered and retails for $3,299.

Eight years after GlobalFoundries abandoned the development of its 7nm FinFET technology, the company is preparing to return to 7nm-class performance, this time by going via a different route. Its FDX Fusion process, built on FD-SOI (fully depleted silicon-on-insulator) technology, promises 7nm-class performance using advanced planar transistors, with no EUV lithography necessary.

In an interview with Tom's Hardware Premium, GlobalFoundries' Sudipto Bose, vice president of the FD-SOI business unit, shared new details about its FDX Fusion technology, including its 8nm-class logic density, advanced planar transistors, manufacturing costs, and plans to begin commercial production in 2028. The company also explained how it intends to compete with conventional FinFET technologies and why it believes FD-SOI has a future beyond the 22nm-class generation. Some elements of this interview transcript have been edited for flow and clarity.

Sudipto Bose: I have been at GlobalFoundries (GF) for a little bit over six years, and I have been in the industry for 25+ years. I spent the rest of my career at Texas Instruments (TI), so it's really two jobs that I have done: TI and GF. Half and half engineering and business. I spent a lot of my business days in the automotive segment. This was what I was doing at GF when I joined, and now I have the FDX product line role.

Sudipto Bose: A little bit on the history of FDX at GF. GF has been investing in FD-SOI for a long time. It started [these efforts] before I joined. So I would say almost eight years now. And a lot of the investment thesis that drove us towards FDX Fusion is based on the traction that we have in the market today, right? We have quite a few customers who are ramping up. And I say quite a few; this is like high double-digit customers in the nineties that are ramping up right now.

Applications for FDX Fusion

Anton Shilov: What specific types of chips and devices is FDX Fusion designed for? Which application will benefit most from its capabilities?

Sudipto Bose: FDX Fusion will try to enhance the applications in which we play today. What do I mean by that? If you look at our current customers, they are designing chips, everything to do with connectivity. When I say connectivity, think of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cellular, satcom, all of that. So that is one class of customers.

There's another class of customers who are designing processors at the edge, so these are MCUs (microcontroller units) with some level of inference sitting inside. Think of customers like Alif Semiconductors. So that is another class: MCUs at the edge.

Then in automotive, we have a disproportionate exposure to radar, and this is because of the eighty-one gigahertz performance that FDX brings to the table. So we will engage with them as they try to enhance their portfolio. We also have an automotive MCU, but radar is where you will see a lot of press releases that we have done.

Last but not least, we also have exposure in the data center segment. This also goes back to the fT/fmax, the high-performance RF that we have, which is a good candidate for designing TIAs and clock recovery circuits.

Anton Shilov: By applications inside data centers, what exactly do you mean? CPUs?

Sudipto Bose: Not CPUs. It is in the connectivity space. So, if you think about GF's focus, we are very focused on two things in data centers: power and connectivity. So in the connectivity space, we have silicon photonics, or turning electrons into photons. But then when you receive them, you have the optical diode, again, a GF silicon photonics technology. After that, you need circuits that will amplify those weak electrical signals and drive them to the compute chip. This circuit, which amplifies the weak electrical signals, is right now being done by GF silicon-germanium, but once FDX Fusion is there, we'll offer them both [as] options. And so, to be very specific to your answer, these are data/signal paths inside the data center that feed into CPUs.

7nm-class FD-SOI node

GlobalFoundries' FDX Fusion is a new manufacturing technology that promises 8nm-class logic density and 7nm-class power and performance without EUV lithography or FinFET transistors, which greatly reduces design costs and manufacturing costs at the cost of significantly lower transistor density compared to 7nm-class nodes.

Instead, the process relies on advanced planar fully depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI) transistors, strained silicon substrates, and aggressive optical patterning techniques to achieve transistor dimensions comparable to those of conventional 8nm-class FinFET nodes.

FDX Fusion also retains support for adaptive body biasing and combines high-density digital logic with RF, analog, and embedded memory capabilities. The technology will be manufactured using deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography, although its tighter gate and metal pitches will likely require extensive multipatterning for the most critical layers.

Anton Shilov: What are the key innovations of FDX Fusion compared to predecessors and other nodes that are currently used?

Sudipto Bose: The key things that we're improving from the current-generation FDX, the first one is fT/fmax, this is 500 GHz, or 0.5 THz fT/fmax. This helps the first segment that I talked about, which is connectivity. This helps automotive radar, and this definitely helps the data center segment as they try to improve data speeds. So this is not really competing with silicon germanium. Think of it as silicon germanium at the very high end, and FDX in the 100 – 200 Gb per lambda space. That is one. The second one is the inference at the edge. So we can call it physical AI, and we look at physical AI as sense, think, act, and connect. But the kind of feature set we are putting in starts with improving the digital gate density. This is 2.2 times more dense than the current generation FDX (22FDX and 22FDX+).

Sudipto Bose: We are putting in a lot of flavors of eNVM, a lot of flavors of SRAM, because in edge AI, and in fact for any AI, the real game is how much memory you can pack without increasing the cost. So we are adding a lot of flavors of those. The way we architected FDX Fusion is that we set a goal of how much performance we can deliver to our customer base without increasing their operating expenses.

If you look at classic 7nm, 6nm, they require EUV tools. The mask set is costly; the tool chain is costly. The FDX Fusion platform that we've built isn't going to use EUV tools. It is also based on planar technology. So there are two advantages to this. One is that we can support a much more competitive mask set price compared to 6nm. We can also offer [customers] a lot more flexibility in terms of cycle time and in how many places we manufacture, because FDX Fusion does not need EUV tools.

So, to summarize the answer? We are trying to improve RF and analog performance, digital gate density, and the classes of memory that we offer. What applications are we trying to target? It is connectivity, edge AI, high-frequency mmWave, automotive radar, and definitely applications inside data centers.

Anton Shilov: You just mentioned transistor density. The press release says that it has more than twice the transistor density of the original 22FDX process, but you never actually published a transistor density number for this. Could you share any numbers?

Sudipto Bose: I will share a number with you. But I will also give you a little bit of context on how our customers look at our technology portfolio. If you look at the current generation, the one that we are manufacturing today, the one where I said we have 90+ customers ramping. Not designing, ramping. This basically comes from the flexibility of FD-SOI. You have the box, the depleted channel, and you can use body bias. So we have customers who are able to achieve 16nm-class power and performance with 22FDX. What do I mean by 16nm-class power and performance?

It essentially means that although our gate density is not as close to 16mm, when you look at the system-level requirements like CPU clock, but think of it as TOPS per watt, we are matching 16nm; in some cases, we are matching 12nm-class.

[...] If I were sitting in a time machine and went back seven years, instead of calling it 22FDX, we could have called it 16FDX, right? Or we could have called it 16nm-class FDX. So with that analogy, if you come to FDX Fusion, our gate density of FDX Fusion will be exactly the same as the industry's 8nm standard today.

It is 14 million gates per square millimeter; that is the density.

Note: Assuming he uses a two-input NAND gate as its reference, each gate contains four transistors, which translates to 56 MTr/mm², which is comparable to what Samsung's 8nm-class nodes use.

Sudipto Bose: Now, why do we call it 7nm-class? Or we actually thought of calling it 6nm-class, but then we said, let's wait for some silicon before we go too far ahead. It is because digital gate density is one aspect of a solution. It defines your physical size, the die size, and that is great. But then you need power and performance. And with the adaptive body bias (ABB) capability that FD-SOI has, and with the standard cell metallization innovations that we have brought in FDX Fusion, once a device is done and you again look at TOPS per watt, it should be equivalent, if not better, than what 7nm can achieve. That is our product target. So for a customer, the value it brings [customers] is: 'I do not have to use an EUV tool line. I do not have to use a mask set that costs many millions of dollars.'

I have something which costs a few millions of dollars, has great cycle time, but at the same time, I am getting TOPS per watt, which is similar to or better than 7nm. The die size might be bigger, but again, it should not be no bigger than what 8nm is today. And that is the messaging to the industry; that is why we say 7nm-class instead of saying, 'Hey, this is 7nm density.' We are trying to reflect what our customers have told us. That in the edge world, in the physical AI world, the size of the die is one aspect, but if the die does not meet the power requirement of the application, then the whole system will not function. So that is the push.

Anton Shilov: That is perhaps why you actually called the technology FDX Fusion instead of using some fancy number.

Sudipto Bose: Yes, because the moment we put a number [out], people put us in a box. And we want to give customers the optionality of, 'Listen, you want to design a transimpedance amplifier using the fT/fmax that we have? That's an analog circuit. No one cares about digital gate density. Go build it.'

'You want to build a simple MCU, which is just SRAM and IOs? We have 14 million gates per square millimeter. Go build it.' 'You want to build a mixed-signal design like a single-chip radar, Wi-Fi, a satcom digital beamformer? Here are the few other knobs that you can turn to get the best PPA or the best system performance that you need.'

That is why we chose the name Fusion; we are trying to imply [that] we give you many options. It is the combination of all the good things the world needs to design the physical AI dream that we have put in front of ourselves, like the whole stack concept of 'sense, think, act, and connect'. Let us see if it sticks. I think it is a bold move for us to go against the grain of the way the foundry industry typically names its platforms, but we feel pretty strong about it.

Anton Shilov: So, you shared the gate density number, but could you maybe also share things like contacted gate pitch, metal pitch as well?

Sudipto Bose: In time. The reason I mention that is there is a little bit of IP involved. We want to get the first silicon out, engage with a few customers before we publish the CPP and the M(etal) layers. […] We are pushing the limits of patterning and coloring as well as gate oxide engineering to get the best CPP and metal pitches, which will enable this level of density of gates. That is, I would say in terms of R&D dollars just at a very high level, 50% of R&D dollars is on the transistor itself because we are doing strained substrates. There are multiple techniques we are using to improve the PFET and NFET performance. The other 50% is all on CPP and metal pitches.

Anton Shilov: So, are those contacted gate pitches and metal pitches comparable to conventional 7nm class FinFET process technologies?

Sudipto Bose: Comparable to 8nm.

Anton Shilov: When we talk about 8nm, basically speaking, there is only one company that actually produces chips using an 8nm-class technology. That is Samsung Foundry. TSMC and Intel Foundry do not have 8nm-class technologies. So I suppose that we should compare it to Samsung's 8nm node, right?

Sudipto Bose: That's a fair guess.

Anton Shilov: When it comes to power consumption improvements versus 22FDX and 22FDX+, how much lower power can we get using the new FDX Fusion node?

Sudipto Bose: It depends on the application, but I understand your question. So if you just normalize with [iso performance and iso power], I am giving you an answer with adaptive body bias included. If you consider current-generation FDX as the base point, the goal of FDX Fusion is to get 30% higher performance and 40% lower power. Again, it is really application-driven [in] how low you can go. But if you take the standard core, our goal is to get at least a 20% improvement.

Anton Shilov: What types of chips do you expect to benefit most from the FDX Fusion technology? You mentioned connectivity, edge AI, high RF, automotive radar, and connectivity applications inside data centers. What about application-specific AI accelerators, because you mentioned edge inference?

Sudipto Bose: From the STAC — sense, think, act, and connect — framework point of view, let me give you an example. Think of a humanoid, or a car — major applications that need to see. It needs to see and then infer what the environment is like. So the class of chips that do this vision processing at the edge to infer the surroundings will definitely be supported with FDX Fusion. The class of chips that will hear, do voice recognition, and, from voice recognition, draw conclusions, we definitely want to support [them]. Now, at the data center right now, as I said, our play is connectivity. Just translating optical to electrical signals.

If a customer wants to use a chiplet, which has a lot of memory, think of analog in-memory compute along with an inference engine, by all means we will support [such applications]. We will work with customers to see how we can play in that compute ecosystem in the data center. But in terms of pure focus, the first 10 customers that we are engaged with are either at the edge, or they are in the connectivity piece inside the data center.

Note: For those of our readers who are not familiar with ABB, this is a technique that dynamically adjusts a transistor's threshold voltage by changing the voltage applied to the transistor body. Forward body bias reduces threshold voltage to improve performance, while reverse body bias increases it to reduce power leakage. This enables chips to optimize performance and power consumption according to workload requirements. ABB is one of the key advantages of the FD-SOI technology.

Anton Shilov: Since you mentioned this, does FDX Fusion retain the active body biasing capabilities of its predecessors?

Sudipto Bose: It is an inseparable part of the platform, yes. We will launch this platform in a way that customers can use it.

New tools required

Anton Shilov: You also mentioned makers of wafer fab equipment. Will FDX Fusion use existing manufacturing equipment at the Dresden facility, or will it require substantial investments in new lithography, deposition, etching, and metrology tools?

Sudipto Bose: It will require new tools. Substantial is a relative term. If you see the amount of money being invested in semiconductors, the term 'substantial' has changed. We are going to get new tools, which is why we combined the FDX Fusion announcement event with the topping off of the Sprint expansion project. That's why we had all the luminaries from the German and the European government. There will be tool investment; we will be buying tools from the vendors. How much of it is going to be litho versus etching? Time will tell, but for sure we need new tools compared to what we have today.

Anton Shilov: But will you essentially need to completely re-equip the Dresden facility to use FDX Fusion? What percentage of the tools you have can be reused for FDX Fusion?

Sudipto Bose: We can get back to you on that exact answer because I do want to give you a proper answer, rather than a high-level answer. But I will tell you where the targets are. With the front end, the transistor fabrication tool chain, my target is to reuse as much as we can.

Anton Shilov: You also mentioned that you plan to begin manufacturing FDX Fusion in 2028. But does this refer to risk production, initial customer production, or high volume manufacturing?

Sudipto Bose: Initial customer production.

Anton Shilov: When do you expect the technology to reach mature yields and meaningful production volumes?

Sudipto Bose: I will give you my target, and then the industry will define it because we are a part of a bigger ecosystem. 2030 is when we want to get to high-volume manufacturing with FDX Fusion. But again, it depends on the first applications and the first few customers.

Readiness

Anton Shilov: Speaking of customers, you probably already have customers who are committed to production, haven't you?

Sudipto Bose: We have customers who are committed to building a chip. Of course, we have to deliver to their specs before they go to production.

Anton Shilov: I suppose the customers that you mentioned in the press release like BMW, Bosch NXP, Siemens, and Tesla, they are all plan to build chips on this technology.

Sudipto Bose: […] They have been pushing us for the last few years to do something like this, and they have given us requirements. Now we are doing it, and we have to show them what we can [deliver]. So there is a lot of push that we have received from the industry, from these companies. When I say these companies, the supply chain that leads into these companies to deliver something which will work at the edge. So we are racing against time to show them something that will meet the specs.

Anton Shilov: GlobalFoundries plans to release the initial FDX Fusion PDK in mid-2027. But when do you expect complete digital, analog, and RF design flows to become available from the three major EDA vendors?

Sudipto Bose: Yeah. I wish I could tell you… Right now we are in discussion with all the major primes, so we are in the request for information/request for quotation (RFI/RFQ) phase, but we have started discussions with the major EDA vendors. It has been almost six to nine months now.

Anton Shilov: But you do expect all the leading EDA vendors to support FDX Fusion in eight to nine months?

Sudipto Bose: Of course. We are going to engage with the whole ecosystem that we have, and once [the PDK is out], we have to support a proper flow not just for chip design, but also IPs that are required and everything else around it.

Anton Shilov: So how extensive will the initial FDX Fusion IP ecosystem be? Will customers have access to silicon-proven standard cell libraries, SRAM compilers, embedded non-volatile memory, interface IPs, maybe analog and radio frequency building blocks before 2028?

Sudipto Bose: Yes. In the first two years, we are going to engage with pilot customers. Think of these as early adopters. We have early adopters listed, and we will design standard cell, I/Os, and SRAM [...] needed for everything, so we will have those. But then the complex IPs, like PCIe Gen 4/5 or LPDDR6 or a DisplayPort, will be dictated by the first few applications that will ramp. FDX Fusion for us is the beginning of a journey. We have been on the journey of 22FDX for almost eight years. I envision FDX Fusion to be more than that. Even on our current platforms, we keep enhancing our IP portfolio. So I expect us to be adding IPs to FDX Fusion over the next ten years.

ARC, MIPS, and Fusion FDX

Anton Shilov: GlobalFoundries also highlighted its ARC and MIPS processor IP portfolios and RISC-V expertise as part of the FDX Fusion offering. Do you plan to develop processor cores and AI accelerators specifically optimized for FDX Fusion? IPs specifically optimized for FDX Fusion? Or will you primarily port existing IP to the new process?

Sudipto Bose: MIPS is an internal customer and a partner, and we will engage with them, and they will launch a platform for physical AI that is fine-tuned, in a combination of what they have and what FDX Fusion has. ARC and MIPS are key pieces of the strategy. Having an internal customer like that just enhances our development cycle by 5X because now they can start developing fast turns of test chips and give us feedback. We did not have this capability in the past. Now we do. Once they are ready, they will start announcing stuff.

Anton Shilov: So essentially, you will both port the existing IPs to the new node, but also MIPS will likely develop something brand new specifically for FDX Fusion.

Sudipto Bose: Yes.

Costs

Anton Shilov: How will the manufacturing complexity and cost per transistor of FDX Fusion compare to 22FDX+, your 12nm FinFET technology, and conventional 8nm FinFET technology?

Sudipto Bose: This would be the most advanced planar transistor that the world has seen, the most advanced non-EUV-based manufacturing line that the world has seen. So, I would say significantly more complex than our current 22nm-class FD-SOI line. More complex than what we have on the 12nm FinFET line. We are working with every tool vendor that you can think of as part of this program, and we have given them the challenges. It goes back to your question about our contacted gate pitch and metal pitch. So, we have had multiple workshops with them over the last few quarters, and each one of them is proposing a tool recipe that they think will get this to a nice and solid yield.

Sudipto Bose: So, I guess the answer to your question is: firstly, it is definitely complex, and secondly, we are really using the entire ecosystem available to us to come up with tool configurations that will deliver this. All of this is going to happen in Dresden. We have to be competitive, so price is always dictated by the market. Our goal is to have a running cost that is significantly better than a 7nm or a 6nm class of design (due to planar transistors and due to lack of EUV masks). After that, we will work with our customers to figure out what makes sense. But you are right, the value that we want to bring in is, 'dear customers, you do not have the same operating expenses load, meaning the cost of tape-out is less than 6nm.'

And you can do multiple tape-outs because this class of devices is not something where you can design one part and use it for 15 applications. You really need 15 devices for 15 applications. So, we definitely enable that. Then, when it comes to manufacturing cost, it is a discussion with our customers. We have various business models, but the goal is to make sure it is a win-win. At the end of the day, the lower the cost we are, the more flexibility we can provide to our customers. The non-EUV path is one of the things that was dictated by our decision that we must keep this a cost-competitive platform.

Anton Shilov: So, cost-wise you want to be competitive, but it's likely comparable to 8nm.

Sudipto Bose: I will have a better feel once we are complete with what we call our M-cycles inside the fab. But I would say my internal target is that we have to be better than that.

The future of FDX

Anton Shilov: GlobalFoundries describes upcoming technology as its 1st Generation of FDX Fusion. Does this mean that you envision subsequent generations with high transistor density and performance? Maybe you can share some preliminary targets or timelines for the next node?

Sudipto Bose: We have listed quite a few innovation steps that we want to enable on this platform. The FDX Fusion definition is based on the ones we believe we are more confident that we will be able to deliver in the timeframe that we have said. We have kept a few things in the innovation lab, and they are pushing the boundaries of a few things like eNVM, EDA routing, chip folding, 2.5D integration, which, once they mature, will define what the next version of FDX Fusion will look like. I do not have a timeline for the next version of FDX Fusion, though.

As we proceed through the development phase, I would say early 2028 to mid-2028 is when I expect to have a better view of when the next version will be launched. And this is also based on feedback we will get from customers. Because what we have right now is our first silicon, which is running in the lab, which we will show to customers. They will give us a lot of feedback. I am sure we will get a few things right, and at the same time, we will get a few things not so right. And that feedback, along with a few of the innovation topics I mentioned, will dictate what the next generation is going to look like. Stay tuned!

Anton Shilov: One of the reasons why I aksed about next-generation nodes is partly because TSMC typically shares its process technology roadmaps with new nodes well before it releases early PDKs for these nodes. Given that FDX Fusion is now GF's most advanced logic process, with capabilities comparable to 8nm-class technologies (i.e., more advanced than 22FDX or bulk 12nm FinFET), how frequently does GlobalFoundries plan to introduce new process technologies, and how far in advance will it disclose its roadmap?

Sudipto Bose: I would say, we are doing advanced development across the board. If you look at the work we are doing on silicon photonics, on packaging, on power transistors like GaN, RF GaN, Power GaN, these are all pretty advanced. But yes, you are right: in what the world understands as a classic, let's say, high-density process, FDX Fusion is the most advanced. We typically announce or update the industry about our roadmap every year at the GlobalFoundries Technology Symposium. Like this year at GTS, we announced FDX Fusion. So, I would say stay tuned for the GTS sessions that we have, and typically every year we do it in September or October.

CEA-Leti involvement

Anton Shilov: CEA-Leti describes FDX Fusion as a single-digit FD-SOI node. How closely is this new technology related to CEA-Leti's own research in 10nm and 7nm with their SOI nodes?

Sudipto Bose: The platform that we have right now is the outside of the substrate engineering work that we are doing with Soitec and CEA-Leti; the rest of it is GF inherent IP at this point in time. So we are bringing in the knowledge that we have from current-generation FDX, the knowledge that we have from the work that we did in 7nm before we stopped it, the work that we have done on 12nm. So it is bringing in all the innovations across all the GF fabs to figure out what is the best that we can offer. Does it mean that we will not look at what CEA-Leti has in the future? I do not have an answer right now. But for now, FDX Fusion is a very GF innovation-driven effort.

Anton Shilov: So you did not use pre-competitive IP from CEA-Leti to develop FDX Fusion? Is it a completely internally developed node?

Sudipto Bose: Correct.

Anton Shilov: The press release mentions innovations in substrate engineering along with endorsements from CEA-Leti and Soitec. What exactly does that involve, and how does it improve transistor performance? What role do Soitec and CEA-Leti play in developing FDX's strained silicon substrates, and how close is this technology to mass production?

Sudipto Bose: GlobalFoundries is working with CEA-Leti and Soitec under the FAMES program to develop strained silicon substrates for FDX Fusion. The goal is to improve charge carrier mobility and, consequently, transistor performance. Since FD-SOI technology relies on specialized silicon-on-insulator wafers supplied by Soitec, the three organizations are developing ways to introduce strain into these substrates and make the technology suitable for high-volume manufacturing. The approach has already demonstrated its viability in the laboratory, and the partners are now refining the manufacturing process to prepare it for commercial production.

[Session ends]

A Microsoft data center under construction in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, has been overrun by about a hundred protesters, with some carrying placards saying, “Screw your data center.” According to Reuters, the “Stop Dirty Data Centers” coalition is planning actions across 16 countries on November 6 and 7, 2026, including Amsterdam, Dublin, Warsaw, and another Microsoft site in Denmark.

Pure Data Centers, which owns the Amsterdam data center, said, “We respectfully ask those on site to leave safely and engage with us in dialogue about the development and any concerns they may have.” The report also quoted Microsoft saying that it understood the strong feeling that people have and respected their right to peaceful expression but says that it does not condone any unlawful action.

"On 6-7 November 2026 we are taking action across Europe to say Stop Dirty Data Centres," the group's website reads. "Local communities are rising up to stop dirty data centres where they live. We will unite and exercise our democratic rights to speak out, assemble, and protest to hold elected officials to account. We’re calling for an immediate moratorium on large data centres in Europe!" A map on the site shows actions planned at 85 locations across Europe over the coming days.

The group cited a list of concerns about "the explosion of AI data centres across our towns and cities," and claims to be joining to prevent "the irreparable harms data centres pose to the wellbeing of people and planet." They cite local communities, jobs, housing shortages and rising energy bills, the climate crisis, heatwaves and water shortages, big tech undermining democracies, the mental health crisis, increased surveillance and the erosion of privacy, securitization and militarization, and a toxic supply chain as motivations.

Data center opposition is one of the issues that has taken center stage in the U.S. midterm elections, with Americans overwhelmingly voting against them. It seems that resistance isn’t limited to the United States, though, as European countries take measures to limit their unlimited development. For example, Google has been hit with a criminal probe after its Finnish subsidiary, Tuike Finland Oy, allegedly destroyed 816 acres of forest without a permit. Denmark has also hit the brakes on data center grid connection requests as total applications exceed 60GW, more than eight times the country’s current peak power consumption. One Italian council also a 200% tax on data center development in agricultural land to encourage developers to reuse old industrial areas instead.

The Stop Data Center coalition claims that it isn’t against progress or that it wants to close down existing projects. Instead, it wants AI data center construction to be held until governments have established clearer rules on their development so that they do not have leave a negative impact on the environment and the people living around them. “AI, of course, is a super important ​technology and we ⁠need to have our own capacity,” EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen told the publication. But she also added that “it's very important for citizens that they can trust that their energy bills are not skyrocketing and there are not electricity blackouts because of ⁠data centers, ​or they are not destroying the environment with these projects.”

Southeast Asia computing providers are now reportedly required to register with Nvidia's Fleet Intelligence tracking system if they want to become official Nvidia Cloud Partners (NCPs). The move, according to Bloomberg, is aimed at giving the chipmaker another way to monitor where its AI accelerators are deployed, as Washington grows increasingly frustrated with restricted hardware finding its way into China through regional smuggling networks. Nvidia was not immediately available for comment.

The NCP designation is worth pursuing as it gives cloud providers Nvidia's public endorsement and preferred access to its sought-after AI chips, putting the company in a position to use those benefits as leverage. Customers seeking the status must now enroll in Fleet Intelligence, according to people familiar with the new requirements. Fleet Management was introduced last December primarily as a data centre management tool. It gathers information about NVIDIA hardware deployed across participating companies' infrastructure, including the locations of individual accelerators. That information could give Nvidia a better picture of whether its chips are operating after they leave the supply chain.

The system is, however, a universal tracking mandate. Participation has remained voluntary outside the NCP requirement, and Nvidia does not automatically receive location data from every customer using the software. The company has also not clarified whether existing Cloud Partners will have to enroll to retain their designation or whether the requirement will eventually extend beyond Southeast Asia.

Notably, Nvidia has been developing a way to locate AI for some time now. Last December, we reported that the company had developed software-based GPU tracking, using GPU telemetry and network latency measurements to estimate where processors are operating. Nvidia described the software as a customer-installed agent for monitoring hardware health, integrity and inventory.

The technology has an obvious use beyond data maintenance. The U.S. restricts Chinese companies from purchasing advanced AI accelerators without a license, yet authorities believe billions of dollars worth of the hardware have reached Chinese buyers through third-party networks, with Southeast Asia becoming an important transit point for those transactions.

A C4ADS investigation has previously identified several routes used to move restricted processors into China, including purchases through research initiatives, shell companies and shipments routed through other Southeast Asian countries. The nonprofit examined transactions between 2022 and 2025 and identified $13.4 million worth of Nvidia A100, H100, and AD102-series GPUs moving through regional trade routes. Its report also linked $4.6 billion in hardware purchases to Singapore-based Megaspeed International.

Megaspeed has become a particularly awkward case for Nvidia, with the company being under U.S. and Singaporean investigation for more than a year over suspected chip diversion. Last week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang defended his dealings with the firm, describing them as “completely normal,” adding, “we’ve studied all their deployments of our GPUs and counted every one.” Megaspeed denied any wrongdoing. In April, Megaspeed’s Malysisan data centre landlord terminated its contract, reallocating 68.4 megawatts of capacity to another cloud provider

Moreover, Megaspeed is not the only example of how difficult it can be to police the movement of AI hardware. Earlier this year, U.S. prosecutors accused people associated with Super Micro of helping divert around $2.5 billion worth of Nvidia-powered servers to China through Southeast Asian intermediaries. The alleged scheme involved falsified paperwork and dummy server shells, with genuine hardware shipped onward after inspections. More recently, the company has faced additional scrutiny over its export compliance after inspections. Nvidia has also reportedly removed half of the Asian companies on its pre-approved buyer list and told cloud providers to keep at least 51% of their computing services with customers outside China.

As high-end PC hardware continues to surge in demand and price, GPU theft has become a highly profitable target for criminals. According to a report by ABC7 News, authorities are investigating a major cargo heist involving the disappearance of an $11.4 million shipment of Nvidia hardware. The shipment reportedly consisted of six pallets of Nvidia hardware that left Oakland for Texas on August 29 and was picked up by a truck posing as a food transport company. Investigators eventually lost track of the vehicle in San Bernardino County, with the Oakland Police Department receiving a report of the theft on September 13.

"These chips command about double the price that they command inside the United States. So, if a chip costs about $550,000, then they go for about 1 million or more abroad," said Olaf Groth, a professor at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business.

While there has been no announcement regarding any arrests, the authorities are said to be investigating the matter. The incident has also raised concerns among experts about the security of high-value technology shipments and the potential national security risks posed by advanced computing hardware making its way into black-market channels.

In a similar incident from Brazil back in September, two pallets containing Nvidia's top-of-the-line GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards, valued at approximately $470,000 (R$2.5 million), disappeared at Guarulhos International Airport in São Paulo. The shipment, imported from the US, had reportedly arrived at the airport on September 20 and cleared customs on September 24, but the two pallets went missing the following day after being authorized for release.

The investigation eventually uncovered a possible inside job, with Brazilian police identifying three airport employees suspected of helping carry out the heist. According to reports, two outsourced forklift operators allegedly removed the pallets from a warehouse, an incident that was reportedly captured on CCTV, while a third employee responsible for checking and releasing merchandise allegedly helped bypass the airport's electronic controls.

Things took an interesting turn when one of the stolen Zotac RTX 5090 graphics cards appeared for sale on the Brazilian online marketplace OLX for more than $6,000. The listing included clear pictures of the card's serial number, allowing it to be linked to the missing shipment. The listing has since been taken down, while the whereabouts of the remaining graphics cards remain unclear.

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