How Bad Will RAM and Memory Shortages Get?
Digital Trends reports:
A wave of shortages now threatens to ripple across RAM, SSDs, and even hard drives, affecting not only performance-hungry rigs but also everyday systems.
— CyberPowerPC has publicly confirmed it will raise prices on all systems starting December 7th due to RAM costs spiking by 500% and SSD prices doubling since October.
— Memory suppliers warn of a global DRAM … ⌘ Read more
Linux 6.18 Features From Apple M2 To Sheaves, DM-PCACHE & More Intel + AMD Hardware
With the Linux 6.18 stable kernel release expected to take place tomorrow on 30 November, here is a reminder about some of the new hardware support and other interesting features coming in this next stable version of the Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more
Framework Computer Now Sponsoring LVFS / Fwupd Development
With the Linux Vendor Firmware Service serving more than 135 million downloads for Linux users updating their system and device firmware, LVFS has been working to get more hardware vendors to contribute either engineering resources or directly contributing annual dues as sponsors. Framework Computer is now the first one to have executed an agreement under these new sponsorship efforts… ⌘ Read more
Robots and AI Are Already Remaking the Chinese Economy
China installed 295,000 industrial robots last year – nearly nine times as many as the United States and more than the rest of the world combined – as the country races to automate its manufacturing base amid rising labor costs at home and tariff threats from abroad.
The nation’s stock of operational robots surpassed 2 million in 2024, according to the Intern … ⌘ Read more
Black Friday Reminder For Those Hating Ads But Loving Linux Hardware/Software
As the one and last friendly reminder, if you enjoy the daily and original content found on Phoronix.com but not liking ads and wanting to view multi-page articles on a single page, native dark mode, and more: the 2025 Black Friday / Cyber Week deal is ending Monday to help support the site while enjoying a discounted rate… ⌘ Read more
Black Friday Reminder For Those Hating Ads But Loving Linux Hardware/Software
As the one and last friendly reminder, if you enjoy the daily and original content found on Phoronix.com but not liking ads and wanting to view multi-page articles on a single page, native dark mode, and more: the 2025 Black Friday / Cyber Week deal is ending Monday to help support the site while enjoying a discounted rate… ⌘ Read more
Mexico Unveils Plans To Build Most Powerful Supercomputer In Latin America
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Mexico unveiled plans Wednesday to build what it claims will be Latin America’s most powerful supercomputer – a project the government says will help the country capitalize on the rapidly evolving uses of artificial intelligence and exponentially expand the co … ⌘ Read more
https://fokus.cool/2025/11/25/i-dont-care-how-well-your-ai-works.html
AI systems being egregiously resource intensive is not a side effect — it’s the point.
And someone commented on that with:
I’m fascinated by the take about the resource usage being an advantage to the AI bros.
They’ve created software that cannot (practically) be replicated as open source software / free software, because there is no community of people with sufficient hardware / data sets. It will inherently always be a centralized technology.
Fascinating and scary.
Urgent ACPI Revert For Linux 6.18 To Deal With Some Hardware Crashing
The Linux 6.18 kernel is anticipated for release this coming Sunday while this week a last-minute crisis was averted following reports of a kernel crash from recent ACPI code changes… ⌘ Read more
AMDGPU Driver Lacks HDMI 2.1 While AMD-Xilinx Driver Has Some HDMI 2.1 Support
Those following Phoronix and the open-source AMD Linux kernel graphics driver know that the HDMI Forum has prevented AMD from implementing HDMI 2.1 support in their open-source “AMDGPU” driver as due the driver implementation would run afoul to the organization’s licensing requirements. It’s been pointed out online this week that the AMD-Xilinx DRM driver though does have some HDMI 2.1 support albeit different hardware… ⌘ Read more
Mumbai Families Suffer As Data Centers Keep the City Hooked on Coal
Two coal plants in Mumbai (in India) that were scheduled to close last year continue operating after the state government of Maharashtra reversed shutdown decisions in late 2023 and extended the life of at least one facility by five years. The largest single factor the Indian conglomerate Tata cited in its petition for an extension was i … ⌘ Read more
Unpowered SSDs in Your Drawer Are Slowly Losing Data
An anonymous reader shares a report: Solid-state drives sitting unpowered in drawers or storage can lose data over time because voltage gradually leaks from their NAND flash cells, and consumer-grade drives using QLC NAND retain data for about a year while TLC NAND lasts up to three years without power. More expensive MLC and SLC NAND can hold data for five and ten … ⌘ Read more
Lenovo Stockpiling PC Memory Due To ‘Unprecedented’ AI Squeeze
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Lenovo is stockpiling memory and other critical components to navigate a supply crunch brought on by the boom in artificial intelligence. The world’s biggest PC maker is holding on to component inventories that are roughly 50% higher than usual, Chief Financial Officer Winston Cheng told Bloomberg … ⌘ Read more
Jony Ive and Sam Altman Say They Finally Have an AI Hardware Prototype
Sam Altman and Jony Ive say they’ve settled on a prototype for OpenAI’s first hardware device that could ship in “less than” two years. The Verge reports: In an interview with Laurene Powell Jobs at Emerson Collective’s 2025 Demo Day, they said they are currently prototyping the device, and when asked about a timeframe, Ive said it … ⌘ Read more
Arduino’s New Terms of Service Worries Hobbyists Ahead of Qualcomm Acquisition
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Some members of the maker community are distraught about Arduino’s new terms of service (ToS), saying that the added rules put the company’s open source DNA at risk. Arduino updated its ToS and privacy policy this month, which is about a month after Qualcomm ann … ⌘ Read more
Dell Pro Max with GB10 Arrives For Linux Performance Benchmarking
The most exciting hardware to arrive this month in the Phoronix lab is Dell having sent over two of their new Dell Pro Max with GB10 systems. The Dell Pro Max with GB10 is their build-out around NVIDIA’s GB10 superchip with ten Cortex-X925 CPU cores and ten Cortex-A725 cores plus the GB10 Blackwell GPU. With 128GB of LPDDR5X memory and 2TB or 4TB SSD by default all within the small chassis, this is an interesting workstation for AI developers. ⌘ Read more
Phoronix Premium Cyber Week “Black Friday” Deal To Help Enable Linux Hardware Reviews
The end of 2025 is quickly approaching and while there are the various end of year holidays, you can still expect to find new and original content on Phoronix each and every single day of the year just as it’s been for more than a decade of the now 21-year-old Phoronix.com. The last day without any new content on Phoronix was all the way back in May of 2012. That’s due to my passion for Linux hardware and open-source, paired in … ⌘ Read more
Phoronix Premium Cyber Week “Black Friday” Deal To Help Enable Linux Hardware Reviews
The end of 2025 is quickly approaching and while there are the various end of year holidays, you can still expect to find new and original content on Phoronix each and every single day of the year just as it’s been for more than a decade of the now 21-year-old Phoronix.com. The last day without any new content on Phoronix was all the way back in May of 2012. That’s due to my passion for Linux hardware and open-source, paired in … ⌘ Read more
Linux 6.18-rc7 Released With Late Hardware Improvements
Linux 6.18-rc7 just arrived in the Git tree as the newest weekly test build leading up to Linux 6.18 stable hopefully debuting next Sunday, 30 November… ⌘ Read more
One Company’s Plan to Sink Nuclear Reactors Deep Underground
Long-time Slashdot reader jenningsthecat shared this article from IEEE Spectrum:
By dropping a nuclear reactor 1.6 kilometers (1 mile) underground, Deep Fission aims to use the weight of a billion tons of rock and water as a natural containment system comparable to concrete domes and cooling towers. With the fission reaction occurring far below the s … ⌘ Read more
NVIDIA Preps 1.6Tb/s Networking For Linux 6.19
NVIDIA has a number of Linux kernel patches on the way to the Linux 6.19 kernel in preparing for 1.6 Tb/s networking on NVIDIA-Mellanox hardware… ⌘ Read more
Engineers are Building the Hottest Geothermal Power Plant on Earth - Next to a US Volcano
“On the slopes of an Oregon volcano, engineers are building the hottest geothermal power plant on Earth,” reports the Washington Post:
The plant will tap into the infernal energy of Newberry Volcano, “one of the largest and most hazardous active volcanoes in the United States,” according to t … ⌘ Read more
Glibc Math Code Sees 4x Improvement On AMD Zen By Changing FMA Implementation
Merged this week to the GNU C Library “glibc” code is dropping the ldbl-96 FMA implementation from this library as in doing so they found a 4x improvement to throughput and latency on AMD Zen 3 hardware… ⌘ Read more
Meta Enters Power Trading To Support Its AI Energy Needs
Meta is venturing into the complex world of electricity trading, betting it can accelerate the construction of new US power plants that are vital to its AI ambitions. From a report: The foray into power trading comes after Meta heard from investors and plant developers that too few power buyers were willing to make the early, long-term commitments required t … ⌘ Read more
HP and Dell Disable HEVC Support Built Into Their Laptops’ CPUs
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Some Dell and HP laptop owners have been befuddled by their machines’ inability to play HEVC/H.265 content in web browsers, despite their machines’ processors having integrated decoding support. Laptops with sixth-generation Intel Core and later processors have built-in hardware support for … ⌘ Read more
Intel Compute Runtime 25.44.36015.5 Brings More Performance Optimizations & Features
Released tonight was the Intel Compute Runtime 25.44.36015.5 as their roughly monthly update to this open-source GPU compute stack providing Level Zero and OpenCL support for Intel’s integrated and discrete graphics hardware… ⌘ Read more
Linux 6.18 Sees Late Improvements For Xbox Ally, Lenovo Legion Go, & Alienware Laptops
We’re closing in on the Linux 6.18 stable kernel release likely in little more than one week (30 November barring any delays) and today’s batch of x86 platform driver updates is bringing some new hardware support as well as some notable consumer device fixes/improvements… ⌘ Read more
Rust-Based Arm GPU Kernel Driver “Tyr” Begins Running GNOME & Basic Games
Initially upstreamed into the Linux 6.18 kernel is Tyr as a Rust-based GPU kernel driver for Arm Mali hardware. This is in effect a Rust alternative to the Panthor DRM kernel driver for newer Arm Mali GPUs with the Command Stream Firmware (CSF). With the latest development code for Tyr, it’s moved onto running the GNOME desktop and basic games like SuperTuxKart… ⌘ Read more
Apple N1 Wi-Fi Chip Improves On Older Broadcom Chips In Every Way
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: This year’s newest iPhones included one momentous change that marked a new phase in the evolution of Apple Silicon: the Apple N1, Apple’s first in-house chip made to handle local wireless connections. The N1 supports Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and the Thread smart home communication protocol … ⌘ Read more
More Than 60 US and Canadian Police Units Now Use Boston Dynamics’ Robot Dog
Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot is now deployed by more than 60 bomb squads and SWAT teams across the US and Canada. The 75-pound four-legged machine starts at around $100,000 and has been used in armed standoffs, hostage rescues and hazardous materials incidents since its commercial debut five years ago. The Massachusetts … ⌘ Read more
AMD Begins Posting Open-Source Linux Patches For Their Next-Gen GPU IP
Beginning yesterday and continuing today are several patch series beginning to lay the foundation in the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver for enabling some next-generation graphics IP. Due to the AMD graphics driver block by block enablement strategy and IP-based discovery adopted by their driver over the past few years, it’s not clear what this new hardware enablement is for whether it’s RDNA5 / UDNA or some RDNA4 refresh. In any event, the … ⌘ Read more
Linux 6.18 Receives Fixes For ELECOM M-XT3URBK & SONiX AK870 PRO Devices
Sent out today was likely the last batch of HID subsystem fixes ahead of the Linux 6.18 kernel releasing as stable around the end of the month. With it are some new device-specific quirks for fixing hardware support for a mouse and keyboard… ⌘ Read more
US Backs Three Mile Island Nuclear Restart With $1 Billion Loan To Constellation
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: The Trump administration will provide Constellation Energy with a $1 billion loan to restart the Crane Clean Energy Center nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, Department of Energy officials said Tuesday. Previously known as Three Mile Island Unit 1, the plant is expected … ⌘ Read more
Uniwill Laptop Driver Set To Premiere In Linux 6.19 Kernel
For the past several months a Uniwill laptop driver for the Linux kernel has been in development to expose extra platform capabilities for laptops manufactured by this Taiwanese OEM/ODM manufacturer. Assuming no last minute issues, this driver is now set to premiere in Linux 6.19 for helping Uniwill laptops and hardware from other brands relying on Uniwill as the device manufacturer… ⌘ Read more
Blender 5.0 Released
Blender 5.0 has been released with major upgrades including HDR and wide-gamut color support on Linux via Wayland/Vulkan, significant theme and UI improvements, new color-space tools, revamped curve and geometry features, and expanded hardware requirements. 9to5Linux reports: Blender 5.0 also introduces a working color space for Blend files, a new AgX HDR view, a new Convert to Display compositor node, new Rec.2100-PQ and Rec.2100-HL … ⌘ Read more
Report Claims That Apple Has Yet Again Put the Mac Pro ‘On the Back Burner’
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple’s Power Mac and Mac Pro towers used to be the company’s primary workstations, but it has been years since they were updated with the same regularity as the MacBook Air or MacBook Pro. The Mac Pro has seen just four hardware updates in the last 15 years, and that’ … ⌘ Read more
Valar Atomics Says It’s the First Nuclear Startup To Achieve Criticality
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Startup Valar Atomics said on Monday that it achieved criticality – an essential nuclear milestone – with the help of one of the country’s top nuclear laboratories. The El Segundo, California-based startup, which last week announced it had secured a $130 million funding round wi … ⌘ Read more
Solar and Wind are Covering ALl New Power Demand in 2025
An anonymous reader shared this report from Electrek:
Solar and wind are growing fast enough to meet all new electricity demand worldwide for the first three quarters of 2025, according to new data from energy think tank Ember.
The group now expects fossil power to stay flat for the full year, marking the first time since the pandemic that fossil generatio … ⌘ Read more
Linux 6.19 Landing Initial Display Support For Xe3P_LPD / Nova Lake
The upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel cycle is set to introduce initial Xe3P_LPD GPU support for Nova Lake as well as beginning to build out support for the Crescent Island graphics card. Now joining DRM-Next with that initial Intel Xe3P_LPD code for Linux 6.19 is being able to drive displays with that Xe3 hardware… ⌘ Read more
PureAudio Lotus DAC5 & Other PureAudio Hardware Supported For Linux 6.18
As part of this week’s sound subsystem fixes ahead of today’s Linux 6.18-rc6 kernel release is adding some quirks for supporting the PureAudio Lotus DAC5 and other PureAudio audio hardware… ⌘ Read more
Banana Pi Previews Its First SOPHGO BM1688-Based Compute Module
Banana Pi has previewed the BPI-SM9 16-ENC-A3, a compact deep learning compute module built around the SOPHGO BM1688 processor. The module is described as targeting low-power AI workloads, hardware video acceleration, and mixed-precision neural inference across microservers, edge systems, industrial platforms, and AIoT devices. The BM1688 datasheet does not appear to be available on the […] ⌘ Read more
EV Sales Are Still Rising. They Have Not Slumped
“Media headlines suggesting some slowdown in EV sales are simply incorrect,” writes the site Electrek, “and leave out the bigger picture that gas car sales actually are dropping…”
Over the course of
the last two years or so, sales of battery electric vehicles, while
continuing to grow, have posted lower year-over-year percentage
growth rates than they had in years prior. … ⌘ Read more
The hardware store by my house has a new employee ⌘ Read more
A ‘Peak Oil’ Prediction Surprise From the International Energy Agency
“The International Energy Agency’s latest outlook signals that oil demand could keep growing through to the middle of the century,” reports CNBC, “reflecting a sharp tonal shift from the world’s energy watchdog and raising further questions about the future of fossil fuels.”
In its flagship World Energy Outlook, the Paris-based agenc … ⌘ Read more
Top Stories: Apple Silicon Turns 5, iPhone Pocket, and More
It’s hard to believe we’re halfway through November already, as 2025 rapidly draws to a close with no firm signs of several smaller hardware updates we’ve been hoping to see before the end of the year, although we did get one surprising new iPhone accessory this week.
This week also saw the fifth anniversary of the very successful Apple silicon effort on t … ⌘ Read more
AMD GAIA 0.13 Released With New AI Coding & Docker Agents
AMD’s GAIA open-source project as a reminder is their “Generrative AI Is Awesome” quick-setup solution for demonstrating generative AI use on AMD hardware platforms with Ryzen CPUs, Radeon GPUs, and/or Ryzen AI NPUs. GAIA is predominantly Microsoft Windows focused but recently they did introduce limited support for Linux that is currently bound to Vulkan-accelerated GPU support. Out today is AMD GAIA 0.13 as another step forward for this AI demonstrator… ⌘ Read more
Possible Setback For Linux x86_64 Laptops: Prominent Developer Joins Qualcomm
Back in early September we reported on a Linux hardware enablement leader planning to leave Red Hat. Hans de Goede has been a longtime contributor to improving Intel/AMD Linux desktop/laptop hardware support and in fact an x86 platform drivers subsystem maintainer. We now found out where this lead Linux x86 driver developer ended up: Qualcomm… ⌘ Read more
Russia’s AI Robot Falls Seconds After Being Unveiled
Russia’s first AI humanoid robot, Aldol, fell just seconds after its debut at a technology event in Moscow on Tuesday. “The robot was being led on stage to the soundtrack from the film ‘Rocky,’ before it suddenly lost its balance and fell,” reports the BBC. “Assistants could then be seen scrambling to cover it with a cloth – which ended up tangling in the process.” … ⌘ Read more
Valve Rejoins the VR Hardware Wars With Standalone Steam Frame
Valve is ready to rejoin the VR hardware race with the Steam Frame, a lightweight standalone SteamOS headset that can run games locally or stream wirelessly from a PC using new “foveated streaming” tech. It’s set to launch in early 2026. Ars Technica reports: Powered by a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor with 16 GB of RAM, the Steam Frame sports a 216 … ⌘ Read more
Valve Already Upstreams Support For The New Steam Controller To SDL3
Just hours ago Valve announced the new Steam Controller along with the Steam Frame VR headset and new Steam Machine. While these new Steam hardware products won’t be available until early 2026, Valve has just-now upstreamed support for the new Steam Controller to the SDL3 library… ⌘ Read more