ASUS Announces Price Hikes Starting January 5
ASUS has informed its partners that prices on certain products will increase starting January 5, just days before the company is expected to unveil new hardware at CES. In a letter dated December 30 and obtained by Digitimes, the Taiwanese manufacturer pointed to rising costs for memory and storage components as the primary driver behind the adjustment.

The company specifically called … ⌘ Read more

Steam On Linux Ends 2025 With 3.19% Marketshare, AMD Linux CPU Use Approaches 72%
Back in November Steam on Linux use hit an all-time high at 3.2%. With the still increasing popularity around the Steam Deck powered by the Arch Linux based SteamOS, Linux gaming continuing to grow thanks to Steam Play (Proton), and excitement around the upcoming Steam Frame and Steam Machine hardware, the Linux gaming outlook continues to be positive. The Steam Survey results for December 2025 are out tonight and with just a tiny … ⌘ Read more

Valve’s Linux Efforts, Kernel Improvements & KDE Plasma Wayland Advancements Topped 2025
After looking yesterday at the most viewed Linux hardware reviews and benchmarks of 2025, today’s look is at the most popular open-source/Linux news of the past year. There were 3,286 original news articles on Phoronix during 2025 written by your’s truly, here’s a look back at what excited readers the most over these past twelve months… ⌘ Read more

SDL 3.4 Released With Many New APIs, Better Emscripten & Native PNG Support
Kicking off the new year for Linux gaming and cross-platform gaming at large is the release of the SDL 3.4 library. SDL is part of the Steam runtime and continues to be widely-used for abstracting software/hardware for creating more portable games and other applications… ⌘ Read more

AMD Ryzen AI Max, Intel Graphics & Other Linux Benchmarks That Commanded 2025
This looks to be a wrap on 2025, Happy New Year to all the Phoronix readers over the past 21+ years. This year on Phoronix there were 226 original Linux hardware reviews and featured benchmark articles written by your’s truly. Plus another 3,286 original open-source/Linux software and hardware news articles this calendar year. Here were the big topics of 2025 for the featured Linux hardware reviews and benchmark articles… ⌘ Read more

Stewart Cheifet, Computer Chronicles Host, Dies At 87
Pibroch(CiH) writes: According to the obituary linked, Stewart Cheifet of Computer Chronicles fame has died. The obituary states he passed Dec 28, 2025. Cheifet and Digital Research founder Gary Kildall hosted the public television show The Computer Chronicles starting in 1984, and Stewart continued to host the show well into the 1990s. He was well-known for his aff … ⌘ Read more

NYC Inauguration Bans Raspberry Pi, Flipper Zero Devices
Longtime Slashdot reader ptorrone writes: The January 1, 2026, NYC mayoral inauguration prohibits attendees from bringing specific brand-name devices, explicitly banning Raspberry Pi single-board computers and the Flipper Zero, listed alongside weapons, explosives, and drones. Rather than restricting behaviors or capabilities like signal interference or unauth … ⌘ Read more

Israel Deploys World’s First Drone Defense Laser
Israel has operationally deployed Iron Beam, a 100,000-watt laser air-defense system capable of shooting down drones, rockets, and mortars at negligible per-shot cost. According to Tom’s Hardware, it marks the first real-world deployment of a high-energy laser as part of a modern, multi-layered missile defense network. From the report: The Iron Beam is a short-range line-of-sigh … ⌘ Read more

Cheap Solar Is Transforming Lives and Economies Across Africa
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: South Africans … have found a remedy for power cuts that have plagued people in the developing world for years. Thanks to swiftly falling prices of Chinese made solar panels and batteries, they now draw their power from the sun. These aren’t the tiny, old-school solar lanterns that once … ⌘ Read more

Unexpected Surprise: Windows 11 Outperforming Linux On An Intel Arrow Lake H Laptop
Typically when receiving any review hardware preloaded with Microsoft Windows I tend to run some Windows vs. Linux benchmarks just as a sanity test plus it still seems to generate a fair amount of interest even though the outcome is almost always the same: Linux having a hefty performance advantage over Windows especially in the more demanding creator-type workloads. As an unexpected twist and time consuming puzzle the past two … ⌘ Read more

The Open-Source OpenGL & Vulkan Drivers Enjoyed A Rather Remarkable 2025
The open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers making up Mesa had another very successful year. Even with all the years being invested into Mesa largely by Intel, AMD, Valve, Red Hat, and others, the upward trajectory continues for Mesa on expanding the hardware support, punctually adding new Vulkan extensions, and racking up other wins… ⌘ Read more

Researchers Make ‘Neuromorphic’ Artificial Skin For Robots
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The nervous system does an astonishing job of tracking sensory information, and does so using signals that would drive many computer scientists insane: a noisy stream of activity spikes that may be transmitted to hundreds of additional neurons, where they are integrated with similar spike trains coming … ⌘ Read more

Russian Enthusiasts Planning DIY DDR5 Memory Amidst Worldwide Shortage
Amid a global DDR5 shortage and soaring prices, Russian hardware enthusiasts are experimenting with do-it-yourself DDR5 RAM by sourcing empty PCBs and soldering memory chips by hand. Tom’s Hardware reports: The idea comes from Russian YouTuber PRO Hi-Tech’s Telegram channel, where a local enthusiast known as “Vik-on” already perfo … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Debugging this stuff on bare metal hardware (without an underlying OS) is a nightmare. 🤣

Updated Linux Drivers Posted For Legion Go & Legion Go S Configuration
Open-source developer Derek J. Clark continues leading the efforts on improving the Lenovo Legion Go series hardware support under Linux. Posted today was the second iteration of the HID driver work for the Legion Go and Legion Go S for configuration support with the built-in controller HID interfaces… ⌘ Read more

How Will Rising RAM Prices Affect Laptop Companies?
Laptop makers are facing record-setting memory prices next year. The site Notebookcheck catalogs how different companies are responding:

Sources told [Korean business newspaper] Chosun Biz that some manufacturers have signed preliminary contracts with Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix. Even so, it won’t prevent DDR5 RAM prices from soaring 45% higher by the end of 2026 … ⌘ Read more

Researchers Show Some Robots Can Be Hijacked Just Through Spoken Commands
An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this story from Interesting Engineering:

Cybersecurity specialists from the research group DARKNAVY have demonstrated how modern humanoid robots can be compromised and weaponised through weaknesses in their AI-driven control systems.

In a controlled test, the team demonstrated that a comm … ⌘ Read more

Japan Votes to Restart Fukushima Nuclear Plant 15 Years After Its Meltdown
The 2011 meltdown at Fukushima’s nuclear plant “was the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986,” CNN remembers.

But this week Japanese authorities “have approved a decision to restart the world’s biggest nuclear power plant,” reports CNN, “which has sat dormant for more than a decade following the Fukushim … ⌘ Read more

Seeing this run on real hardware is so satisfying, even if it’s just a small example. 😅

https://movq.de/v/ec46b8cf99/netbook.mp4

‘Memory is Running Out, and So Are Excuses For Software Bloat’
The relentless climb in memory prices driven by the AI boom’s insatiable demand for datacenter hardware has renewed an old debate about whether modern software has grown inexcusably fat, a column by the Register argues. The piece points to Windows Task Manager as a case study: the current executable occupies 6MB on disk and demands nearly 70MB of … ⌘ Read more

The Death Of Clear Linux, Other Intel Linux Engineering Setbacks In 2025
When it came to the most viewed AMD Linux/open-source news of 2025 there were a lot of accomplishments for the company this year both on the CPU and graphics side of the house and from consumer to server hardware. Today is a look back at the most popular Intel open-source/Linux news of the year, which unfortunately, their layoffs and other cuts to their software engineering were attracting a lot of interest… ⌘ Read more

Nuclear Developer Proposes Using Navy Reactors For Data Centers
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Post: A Texas power developer is proposing to repurpose nuclear reactors from Navy warships to power the United States grid as the Trump administration pushes to secure massive amounts of energy for the artificial intelligence boom. HGP Intelligent Energy LLC filed an application to the Ene … ⌘ Read more

25.2% of Energy EU Used in 2024 Came From Renewables
An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2024, 25.2% of gross final energy consumption in the EU came from renewable sources, up by 0.7 percentage points compared with 2023. This share is 17.3 pp short of meeting the 2030 target (42.5%), which would require an annual average increase of 2.9 pp from 2025 to 2030.

Among the EU countries, Sweden recorded the highest shar … ⌘ Read more

A Recap Of The Top AMD Linux News Of 2025: Strix Halo, AI, Kernel Improvements
As part of our various “year end” articles, here is a look back at the most popular AMD Linux/open-source news and hardware reviews of 2025… ⌘ Read more

AMD Krackan Point Sub-$500 Laptop Linux Performance Improves By ~8% In Just Six Months
As an end-of-year tradition at Phoronix for running a lot of year-over-year comparison performance benchmarks and other long-term performance evaluations, it’s typically done on the higher-end hardware. That’s done for a matter of time savings with maximum performance when running often 100~200+ benchmarks per article, the highest-end hardware typically being the most interesting in terms of features and capabilities, and more … ⌘ Read more

US Blocks All Offshore Wind Construction, Says Reason Is Classified
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday, the US Department of the Interior announced that it was pausing the leases on all five offshore wind sites currently under construction in the US. The move comes despite the fact that these projects already have installed significant hardware in the water and on land; one of t … ⌘ Read more

Is Xbox Betting on Cross-Platform Gaming?
A “slew of layoffs, price hikes and studio closures” for Microsoft’s Xbox “have led many to declare — not for the first time — that the Xbox is dead,” reports CNBC.

Or is it just changing its business model?

The company’s overall gaming revenue decreased 2% year-over-year, with a 29% dip in Xbox hardware sales, according to Microsoft’s first-quarter earnings for fiscal 2026. The broader co … ⌘ Read more

Intel Releases GenAI Examples v1.5 - While Validating This AI Showcase On Old Xeon CPUs
Intel engineers as part of the OPEA Project today released the Generative AI Examples v1.5 update. This “GenAIExamples” open-source project is a collection of GenAI examples as part of showing the capabilities of the Open Platform for Enterprise AI (OPEA) and also highlighting Intel’s hardware strengths for generative AI… ⌘ Read more

Google Launches CO2 Battery Plants for Long-Duration Storage of Renewable Energy
In July Google promised to scale the CO2 batteries of “Energy Dome” as a long-duration energy storage solution. Now IEEE Spectrum visits its first plant in Sardinia, where 2,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide power a turbine generating 20 MW over 10 hours — storing “large amounts of excess renewable energy until it’s … ⌘ Read more

MPV 0.41 Released With Wayland Improvements, Vulkan Hardware Decoding Preferred
MPV 0.41 is out today as the newest feature release for this MPlayer/mplayer2-derived open-source video player. With MPV 0.41 there is a big focus on improving Wayland support as well as now preferring Vulkan Video acceleration over alternative video decode APIs… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19-rc2 Adding Support For CRKD Guitar Controllers
Most notable with the input subsystem updates sent out today ahead of the Linux 6.19-rc2 release is some new hardware support. New this week is adding support for CRKD Guitars for those into musical gaming/apps… ⌘ Read more

EV Battery-Swapping Startup That Raised $330 Million Files for Bankruptcy
In 2023 Slashdot covered a battery-swapping startup that promised to give EVs a full charge in about the same time it takes to fill a tank of gas.

They just filed for bankruptcy, reports Inc:

Ample was founded in 2014 with a goal of “solving slow charging times and infrastructure incompatibility” for commercial EV fleets su … ⌘ Read more

Riot Games Is Making an Anti-Cheat Change That Could Be Rough On Older PCs
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: At this point, most competitive online multiplayer games on the PC come with some kind of kernel-level anti-cheat software. As we’ve written before, this is software that runs with more elevated privileges than most other apps and games you run on your PC, allowing it … ⌘ Read more

2025 Brought “Transformative Changes” For FreeBSD On Laptops
As we have been covering over the past year, major investments have been made to better the outlook for running FreeBSD on laptop hardware. From WiFi driver improvements to enhancing suspend/resume, power management, graphics drivers, and other features, it’s been a big undertaking to make FreeBSD work better on laptops. The FreeBSD Foundation calls 2025 as having brought “transformative changes” for the FreeBSD laptop experience… ⌘ Read more

North Korean Infiltrator Caught Working In Amazon IT Department Thanks To Lag
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom’s Hardware: A North Korean imposter was uncovered, working as a sysadmin at Amazon U.S., after their keystroke input lag raised suspicions with security specialists at the online retail giant. Normally, a U.S.-based remote worker’s computer would send keystroke data within tens … ⌘ Read more

AI’s Water and Electricity Use Soars In 2025
A new study estimates that AI systems in 2025 consumed as much electricity as New York City emits in carbon pollution and used hundreds of billions of liters of water, driven largely by power-hungry data centers and cooling needs. Researchers say the real impact is likely higher due to poor transparency from tech companies about AI-specific energy and water use. “There’s no way to pu … ⌘ Read more

Intel ISPC 1.29 Drops Gen9 GPU Targets, Add New Optimizations & Experimental RISC-V
Intel ISPC 1.29 released on Wednesday as the newest feature update to this Implicit SPMD Program Compiler as a C variant able to target Intel hardware from their CPUs to GPUs for SIMD programming… ⌘ Read more

AMD Awarding Ryzen AI Max+ “Strix Halo” Laptops To Those Fixing ROCm Bugs
AMD Ryzen AI Max+ “Strix Halo” is beautifully awesome. Probably my favorite hardware of 2025 whether it’s in desktop form with the likes of the Framework Desktop or for very powerful laptops between the Zen 5 CPU cores and very capable Radeon 8060S Graphics within devices like the HP ZBook Ultra G1a. If you are interested by Strix Halo too and looking for a way to obtain one without the high price, AMD is running a holiday special of those … ⌘ Read more

Video Game Hardware Sales Had a Historically Bad November In the US
U.S. video game hardware spending fell 27% year over year in November to $695 million, according to market analyst company Circana. “This is the lowest video game hardware spending total for a November month since the $455 million reached during the November 2005 tracking period,” Circana says. Furthermore, only 1.6 million units of hardwa … ⌘ Read more

Meta ‘Pauses’ Third-Party Headset Program
Meta has paused its third-party Horizon OS headset program, effectively canceling planned VR headsets from Asus and Lenovo as it refocuses on “building the world-class first-party hardware and software needed to advance the VR market.” Road to VR reports: A little over a year and a half ago, Meta made an “industry-altering announcement,” as I called the move in my reporting: the company wa … ⌘ Read more

GitHub Is Going To Start Charging You For Using Your Own Hardware
GitHub will begin charging $0.002 per minute for self-hosted Actions runners used on private repositories starting in March. “At the same time, GitHub noted in a Tuesday blog post that it’s lowering the prices of GitHub-hosted runners beginning January 1, under a scheme it calls ‘simpler pricing and a better experience for GitHub Actions,’” … ⌘ Read more

Intel XPU Manager Updated With BMG-G31 GPU Support
Intel XPU Manager 1.3.5 released today as the newest version of this open-source software for monitoring and managing Intel GPU hardware with a focus on their data center products. Notable with this revision is adding BMG-G31 GPU support… ⌘ Read more

Intel Compute Runtime 25.48.36300.8 Brings More Performance Optimizations & Xe3 Fixes
Intel this week released their last planned feature update to their open-source Compute Runtime for 2025. The Intel Compute Runtime 25.48.36300.8 delivers the latest OpenCL and Level Zero performance optimizations, Xe3 workarounds, and other fixes for those on Intel integrated and discrete graphics hardware… ⌘ Read more

Senators Count the Shady Ways Data Centers Pass Energy Costs On To Americans
U.S. senators are probing whether Big Tech data centers are driving up local electricity bills by socializing grid upgrade costs onto residents. Some of the tactics they’re using include NDAs, shell companies, and lobbying. Ars Technica reports: In letters (PDF) to seven AI firms, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ch … ⌘ Read more

Dual-PCB Linux Computer With 843 Components Designed By AI Boots On First Attempt
Quilter says its AI designed a complex Linux single-board computer in just one week, booting Debian on first power-up. “Holy crap, it’s working,” exclaimed one of the engineers. Tom’s Hardware reports: LA-based startup Quilter has outlined Project Speedrun, which marks a milestone in computer design by AI. The … ⌘ Read more

Linux Exposing Support For Lenovo ThinkPads Being Able To Detect Hardware Damage
Newer Lenovo ThinkPads are adding the ability to detect and report varying degrees of hardware damage. The Lenovo ThinkPad ACPI driver for Linux is being adapted for being able to communicate said hardware damage to user-space Linux software… ⌘ Read more

Utah Leaders Hinder Efforts To Develop Solar Energy Supply
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox signed two bills this year that ended solar development tax credits and imposed a new tax on solar generation despite solar power accounting for two-thirds of the new projects waiting to connect to the state’s power grid. The legislation passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature has already had an impact.

Since May, when the … ⌘ Read more

Ford Ends F-150 Lightning Production, Starts Battery Storage Business
Ford has effectively pulled the plug on the all-electric F-150 Lightning, pivoting away from full-size BEV pickups toward hybrids, range-extended EVs (EREVs), and even data-center battery storage. Ars Technica reports: Ford’s announcements today can’t be said to have come out of the blue. Rumors of the F-150’s demise have been circul … ⌘ Read more

Electricity Is Now Holding Back Growth Across the Global Economy
Grid constraints that were once a hallmark of developing economies are now plaguing the world’s richest nations, and new research from Bloomberg Economics finds that rising electricity system stress is directly hurting investment. The analysis examined all G20 countries and found that a one-standard-deviation increase in grid stress relative … ⌘ Read more

Roomba Maker ‘iRobot’ Files for Bankruptcy After 35 Years
Roomba manufacturer iRobot filed for bankruptcy today, reports Bloomberg.

After 35 years, iRobot reached a “restructuring support agrement that will hand control of the consumer robot maker to Shenzhen PICEA Robotics Co, its main supplier and lender, and Santrum Hong Kong Compny.”

Under the restructuring, vacuum cleaner maker Shenzhen PICEA will receive th … ⌘ Read more