AmpereOne M Finally Appears - In The Oracle Cloud With A4
Back in July 2024, Ampere Computing announced AmpereOne M on their road-map for Q4’2024 to provide AmpereOne with 12 channel DDR5 memory compared to eight memory channels with the original AmpereOne processors. Then this past May the AmpereOne M SKUs were announced while Ampere Computing stated these “M” processors had been shipping since Q4 of last year. Since then we haven’t seen or heard anything more about AmpereOne M nor the AmpereOne MX processors … ⌘ Read more
Purdue University Approves New AI Requirement For All Undergrads
Nonprofit Code.org released its 2025 State of AI & Computer Science Education report this week with a state-by-state analysis of school policies complaining that “0 out of 50 states require AI+CS for graduation.”
But meanwhile, at the college level, “Purdue University will begin requiring that all of its undergraduate students demonstrate basic … ⌘ Read more
Exciting Laptop & Gaming Handheld Device Improvements Merged For Linux 6.19
Merged during this second week of the Linux 6.19 feature merge window were the many x86 platform driver changes. As usual, much of the x86 platform driver activity surrounds bettering Linux hardware laptop support but also a growing number of handheld computers / gaming devices… ⌘ Read more
Framework Raises DDR5 Memory Prices By 50% For DIY Laptops
Framework Computer raised DDR5 memory prices for its Laptop DIY Editions by 50% due to industry-wide memory shortages. Phoronix reports: Framework Computer is keeping the prior prices for existing pre-orders and also is foregoing any price changes for their pre-built laptops or the Framework Desktop. Framework Computer also lets you order DIY laptops with … ⌘ Read more
Qubits break quantum limit to encode information for longer
Controlling qubits with quantum superpositions allows them to dramatically violate a fundamental limit and encode information for about five times longer during quantum computations ⌘ Read more
VMware Kills vSphere Foundation In Parts of EMEA
Broadcom has quietly pulled VMware vSphere Foundation from parts of EMEA, pushing smaller customers toward far more expensive bundles and prompting some to consider jumping to Hyper-V or Nutanix. The Register reports: VVF is a bundle that offers compute, storage, and networking virtualization, and a platform to run containers. It’s most useful in hyperconverged infrastructure and hy … ⌘ Read more
UC Berkeley Professor Uses Secret Camera To Catch PhD Candidate Sabotaging Rival
A UC Berkeley professor, suspecting years of targeted computer damage against one Ph.D. student, secretly installed a hidden camera that allegedly caught another doctoral candidate sabotaging the student’s laptop. The student now faces felony vandalism charges and is due for his first court appearance on Dec. 15. The … ⌘ Read more
Are We Creating New Life With Computers? ⌘ Read more
Microsoft Excel Turns 40, Remains Stubbornly Unkillable
Microsoft Excel, the 40-year-old spreadsheet application that helped establish personal computers as essential workplace tools and contributed to Microsoft’s current valuation of nearly $4 trillion, has weathered both the rise of cloud computing and the current AI boom largely unscathed. In its most recent quarter, commercial revenue for Microsoft 365 – the bundle i … ⌘ Read more
Intel Arc B580 vs. AMD Radeon RX 9000 vs. NVIDIA RTX 50 Series For Llama.cpp Vulkan Performance
Recently there were Phoronix benchmarks looking at the Intel Battlemage GPU compute performance since last year when the Arc B580 graphics card launched as well as the OpenGL and Vulkan graphics performance for the B580 on Linux since launch. There was much progress on the open-source Intel Linux graphics drivers at large this year but especially for Battlemage. Following that a Phoronix Premium reader asked about se … ⌘ Read more
Was the Airbus A320 Recall Caused By Cosmic Rays?
What triggered that Airbus emergency software recall? The BBC reports that Airbus’s initial investigation into an aircraft’s sudden drop in altitude linked it “to a malfunction in one of the aircraft’s computers that controls moving parts on the aircraft’s wings and tail.” But that malfunction “seems to have been triggered by cosmic radiation bombarding the Earth on the day of … ⌘ Read more
College Students Flock To A New Major: AI
AI is the second-largest major at M.I.T. after computer science, reports the New York Times. (Alternate URL here.) Though that includes students interested in applying AI in biology and health care — it’s just the beginning:
This semester, more than 3,000 students enrolled in a new college of artificial intelligence and cybersecurity at the University of South Florida in Tampa.
At the Unive … ⌘ Read more
Why is AI making computers and games consoles more expensive?
The AI industry consumes vast amounts of energy, fresh water and investor cash. Now it also needs memory chips - the same ones used in laptops, smartphones and games consoles ⌘ Read more
Intel’s Open-Source Linux Graphics Driver Delivered Significant Improvements In 2025
Last week I provided a look at how Intel’s GPU compute performance on Battlemage evolved in 2025. In today’s article is a similar Intel Arc A-Series “Alchemist” and B-Series “Battlemage” look at how the OpenGL and Vulkan graphics performance has evolved over the past year. Simply put, the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver stack has evolved immensely this year… Not just for Vulkan but even the OpenGL support cont … ⌘ Read more
Fwupd 2.0.18 Enables Linux Firmware Updating For More Hardware
Fresh off Framework Computer becoming a new corporate sponsor of the LVFS / Fwupd, there is a new Fwpd 2.0.18 update for this solution that enables convenient and easy system and device/peripheral firmware updating under Linux… ⌘ Read more
Raspberry Pi Announces Price Hikes Due To RAM Demand, 1GB Raspberry Pi 5 Launched
Due to the ongoing RAM shortages in the industry amid ongoing massive demand for AI servers,Raspberry Pi announced today they are having to raise prices on the Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 single board computers. They have also launched a 1GB Raspberry Pi 5 version too for those not needing much memory and wanting to keep pricing to a minimum… ⌘ 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
Why Google’s custom AI chips are shaking up the tech industry
Google is reportedly in talks to sell its tensor processing units – a type of computer chip specially designed for AI – to other tech companies, a move that could unsettle the dominant chip-maker Nvidia ⌘ Read more
Open-Source Nouveau+NVK vs. NVIDIA 580 Linux Gaming/Graphics & Compute Driver Performance
This Black Friday is an in-depth look at the current performance of the open-source NVIDIA Linux driver stack with the Nouveau kernel driver (the Nova driver not yet being ready for end-users) paired with the latest Mesa NVK driver for open-source Vulkan API support. With that NVK Vulkan driver is also looking at the OpenGL performance using the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver used now for OpenGL on modern NVIDIA GPUs rat … ⌘ Read more
Vulkan 1.4.335 Released With The Very Notable VK_EXT_present_timing
Vulkan 1.4.335 released a few hours ago as the latest iteration of this high performance graphics and compute API. With being just a week since the prior update and given the US Thanksgiving week, it’s on the lighter side in terms of issues addressed. There is one new extension though and it’s a big one: VK_EXT_present_timing is finally merged… ⌘ Read more
US Patent Office Issues New Guidelines For AI-Assisted Inventions
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued new guidelines outlining when inventions created with the help of AI can be patented. From a report: USPTO Director John Squires said on Wednesday in a notice set to be published Friday, that the office considers generative AI systems to be “analogous to laboratory equipment, computer software, res … ⌘ Read more
Intel Battlemage Graphics Enjoyed Nice GPU Compute Performance Gains In 2025
In addition to Intel Arrow Lake desktop performance evolving nicely on Linux over the course of 2025, the Intel Arc B-Series graphics that launched last December with the Arc B580 have evolved quite nicely too with their open-source driver stack. With it coming up on one year since the Arc B580 launch, here is a look at how the GPU compute performance has evolved since that point. Similar Intel Arc B580 Linux graphics comparisons ar … ⌘ Read more
OpenAI Needs At Least $207 Billion By 2030 Just To Keep Losing Money, HSBC Estimates
OpenAI will need to raise at least $207 billion in new funding by 2030 to sustain operations while continuing to lose money, according to a new analysis from HSBC that models the company’s cloud computing commitments against projected revenue. The bank’s US software team updated its forecasts after OpenAI ann … ⌘ Read more
Giga Computing R284-A92-AAL1: A Reliable 2U Rack Server For Intel Xeon 6900 Series
Over the past two months I have been publishing a number of fresh benchmarks of the Intel Xeon 6980P “Granite Rapids” flagship processor performance under Linux. All of those new Xeon 6900 series benchmarks on Phoronix have been from the Giga Computing R284-A92-AAL1 2U rack server that has proven to be a very robust and reliable server platform. ⌘ Read more
Nvidia Claims ‘Generation Ahead’ Advantage After $200 Billion Sell-off on Google Fears
Nvidia pushed back against investor concerns about Google’s competitive positioning in AI on Tuesday after the chipmaker’s shares tumbled 4.4% and erased nearly $200 billion in market cap on fears that Alphabet’s tensor processing units were gaining ground against its dominance in AI computing. The company said … ⌘ Read more
Evidence from the One Laptop per Child Program in Rural Peru
The abstract of a paper on NBER: This paper examines a large-scale randomized evaluation of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program in 531 Peruvian rural primary schools. We use administrative data on academic performance and grade progression over 10 years to estimate the long-run effects of increased computer access on (i) school performance over time … ⌘ Read more
Improved Upstream Kernel Support For TUXEDO Laptops Being Worked On
While TUXEDO Computers recently ended their efforts for a Snapdragon X Elite Linux laptop, their Linux Intel/AMD laptop efforts continue going well and recently they have been posting patches working to enhance the upstream kernel support for those x86_64 devices… ⌘ Read more
Amazon Pledges Up To $50 Billion To Expand AI, Supercomputing For US Government
Amazon is committing up to $50 billion to massively expand AI and supercomputing capacity for U.S. government cloud regions, adding 1.3 gigawatts of high-performance compute and giving federal agencies access to its full suite of AI tools. Reuters reports: The project, expected to break ground in 2026, will add nearly 1 … ⌘ Read more
780,000 Windows Users Downloaded Linux Distro Zorin OS in the Last 5 Weeks
In October Zorin OS claimed it had 100,000 downloads in a little over two days in the days following Microsoft’s end of support for Windows 10.
And one month later, Zorin OS developers now claim that 780,000 people downloaded it from a Windows computer in the space of a month, according to the tech news site XDA Developers.
… ⌘ Read more
Linux Device Trees For Cancelled Products? Don’t “Waste Time”
Yesterday TUXEDO Computers cancelled their Snapdragon X Elite Linux laptop plans. In their announcement discontinuing work on this X1E Linux laptop, they said they would still upstream the Device Tree support to the mainline Linux kernel. Indeed they posted a new revision of their DT patches on Friday for the Linux kernel, but there is diminishing outlook that they will be accepted upstream for this cancelled product… ⌘ Read more
Google Must Double AI Serving Capacity Every 6 Months To Meet Demand
Google’s AI infrastructure chief told employees the company must double its AI serving capacity every six months in order to meet demand. In a presentation earlier this month, Amin Vahdat, a vice president at Google Cloud, gave a presentation titled “AI Infrastructure.” It included a slide on “AI compute demand” that said: “Now we must dou … ⌘ Read more
British Army Will Use Call of Duty To Train Soldiers
British soldiers are using computer games such as Call of Duty to sharpen their “war-fighting readiness,” an Army chief has said. From a report: General Sir Tom Copinger-Symes, the deputy commander of Cyber and Specialist Operations Command, said the war in Ukraine, where remote-operated drones have become crucial on the battlefield, proved the worth of having soldiers s … ⌘ Read more
TUXEDO Computers Drops Snapdragon X1 Elite Linux Laptop Plans
Back in mid-2024, the Bavarian Linux PC vendor TUXEDO Computers teased plans for developing a Snapdragon X Elite Linux laptop. Initially they hoped to have it out by Christmas 2024. That didn’t happen and now approaching Christmas 2025 they confirmed they have stopped their plans for shipping a Snapdragon X1 Elite laptop for Linux customers… ⌘ Read more
Amazon Cut Thousands of Engineers in Its Record Layoffs, Despite Saying It Needs To Innovate Faster
Amazon’s 14,000-plus layoffs announced last month touched almost every piece of the company’s sprawling business, from cloud computing and devices to advertising, retail and grocery stores. But one job category bore the brunt of cuts more than others: engineers. CNBC: Documents filed … ⌘ Read more
Quantum computers need classical computing to be truly useful
Conventional computing devices will play a crucial role in turning quantum computers into tools with real-world application ⌘ Read more
Intel Continues Working On Dynamic PAMT To Reduce Memory Overhead For TDX
One of the improvements that Intel software engineers have been working on for the Linux kernel around their Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) functionality for confidential computing VMs is reducing the memory use. That work is under the Dynamic PAMT umbrella and this week brought the latest iteration of patches to help lower RAM use when engaging TDX for confidential VMs… ⌘ 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
IBM, Cisco Outline Plans For Networks of Quantum Computers By Early 2030s
IBM and Cisco plan to link quantum computers over long distances by the early 2030s, “with the goal of demonstrating the concept is workable by the end of 2030,” reports Reuters. “The move could pave the way for a quantum internet, though executives at the two companies cautioned that the networks would require technologies that … ⌘ Read more
Linus Torvalds Says Vibe Coding is Fine For Getting Started, ‘Horrible Idea’ For Maintenance
Linus Torvalds is “fairly positive” about vibe coding as a way for people to get computers to do things they otherwise could not. The Linux kernel maintainer made the comments during an interview at the Linux Foundation Open Source Summit in Seoul earlier this month. But he cautioned that … ⌘ Read more
Quantum computers that recycle their qubits can limit errors
To make quantum computers more efficient and reliable, some of their basic components must be constantly reused – several quantum computer designs can now do just that ⌘ Read more
Cloud-Native Computing Is Poised To Explode
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: At KubeCon North America 2025 in Atlanta, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)’s leaders predicted an enormous surge in cloud-native computing, driven by the explosive growth of AI inference workloads. How much growth? They’re predicting hundreds of billions of dollars in spending over the next 18 months. […] Where cloud-native compu … ⌘ Read more
‘Talking To Windows’ Copilot AI Makes a Computer Feel Incompetent’
Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant in Windows 11 fails to replicate the capabilities shown in the company’s TV advertisements. The Verge tested Copilot Vision over a week using the same prompts featured in ads airing during NFL games. When asked to identify a HyperX QuadCast 2S microphone visible in a YouTube video – a task successfully completed i … ⌘ Read more
AMD ROCm 7.1 vs. RADV Vulkan For Llama.cpp With The Radeon AI PRO R9700
In the past we have seen Llama.cpp with Vulkan outperforming AMD’s ROCm compute stack in some of the large language model (LLM) AI benchmarks. Curious if anything has changed given the recent ROCm 7.1 release, I ran some benchmarks of an up-to-date Llama.cpp using the AMD ROCm back-end compared to the Vulkan back-end with the latest RADV driver. For this round of testing the Radeon AI PRO R9700 graphics card was used. ⌘ Read more
Microsoft, Nvidia Commit Up To $15 Billion Investment in Anthropic as Claude Scales on Azure
Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAI-rival Anthropic announced strategic partnerships today that will scale Claude on Microsoft Azure and bring up to $15 billion in new investment to the AI startup. Anthropic committed to purchase $30 billion of Azure compute capacity and contract additional capacity up to … ⌘ Read more
Some Americans Are Trying to Heat Their Homes With Bitcoin Mining
An anonymous reader shared this report from CNBC:
[T]he computing power of crypto mining generates a lot of
heat, most which just ends up vented into the air. According to
digital assets brokerage, K33, the bitcoin mining industry generates about 100 TWh of heat annually — enough to heat all of
Finland.This energy waste within a very energy- … ⌘ Read more
Unipi Edge E410, E411, and E413 Controllers Built on Raspberry Pi CM4
Unipi has introduced the Edge E410, E411, and E413 controllers, a family of DIN-rail industrial devices based on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4. The systems combine PLC, RTU, IPC, and gateway functionality in a compact chassis targeting building automation, HVAC control, energy management, and industrial monitoring. All three models use the quad-core Arm Cortex-A72 […] ⌘ Read more
Mac Pro Reportedly on ‘Back Burner’ and ‘Largely Written Off’ at Apple
Apple’s high-end Mac Pro desktop computer is currently “on the back burner,” according to the latest word from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.
In his [Power On newsletter today](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-11-16/apple-s-iphone-road-map-iphone-air-2-iphone-18-mac-pro-future-tes … ⌘ 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
OAK 4 D and OAK 4 S Standalone Edge Vision Cameras with PoE and 48MP Imaging
Luxonis has opened early access preorders for the OAK 4 D and OAK 4 S, two standalone edge-processing cameras designed for computer vision tasks. Both systems provide a 48MP RGB sensor with optional autofocus or wide-angle variants, USB 3 and PoE connectivity, IP67-rated enclosures, and on-device inference capabilities. Both devices are built around the RVC4 […] ⌘ Read more
A Quantum Error Correction Breakthrough?
The dream of quantum computers has been hampered by the challenge of error correction, writes the Harvard Gazette, since qubits “are inherently susceptible to slipping out of their quantum states and losing their encoded information.”
But in a newly-published paper, a research team “combined various methods to create complex circuits with dozens of error correction layers” that “suppresses erro … ⌘ Read more