Ping-Pong Robot Makes History By Beating Top-Level Human Players
Sony AI’s autonomous table-tennis robot Ace has become the first robot to compete against top-level human players. Reuters reports: Ace, created by the Japanese company Sony’s AI research division, is the first robot to attain expert-level performance in a competitive physical sport, one that requires rapid decisions and precision execution, … ⌘ Read more

China’s CATL Reveals 621-Mile EV Battery, Under-7-Minute Charging
CATL unveiled a new wave of EV battery tech, “including a lighter battery pack rated for a 1,000-km (621-mile) driving range and an upgraded fast-charging battery that can go from 10 percent to 98 percent in under seven minutes,” reports Interesting Engineering. From the report: The launches were made during a 90-minute event in Beijing ahead … ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD Working On Intel FRED Support, Laptop Improvements Continue
FreeBSD is out today with their Q1-2026 status report to outline the many different development initiatives their open-source developers have participated in over the past quarter. There is a lot of hardware enablement efforts ongoing as well as continuing to make a more compelling desktop experience and also improving GUI and management options for FreeBSD systems… ⌘ Read more

Intel LLM-Scaler vllm-0.14.0-b8.2 Released With Official Arc Pro B70 Support
As part of Intel’s LLM-Scaler initiative for AI inferencing on Intel Arc hardware, out today is their vllm-0.14.0-b8.2 update that includes officially supporting the Arc Pro B70 graphics card… ⌘ Read more

Framework Laptop 13 Pro Is a Major Overhaul For the Modular, Upgradeable Laptop
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Framework has been selling and shipping its modular, repairable, upgradable Laptop 13 for five years now, and in that time, it has released six distinct versions of its system board, each using fresh versions of Intel and AMD processors (seven versions, if you … ⌘ Read more

Framework Computer Announces The Framework Laptop 13 Pro
At Framework Computer’s next-gen hardware launch event today they announced the Framework Laptop 13 Pro as a ground-up redesign of their 13-inch modular laptop… ⌘ Read more

Framework Previews The OCuLink Dev Kit
In addition to announcing the Framework Laptop 13 Pro today, Framework Computer at their next-gen hardware event also previewed the OCuLink Dev Kit for attaching high throughput peripherals like external GPUs (eGPUs) to Framework Laptops… ⌘ Read more

Global Growth In Solar ‘the Largest Ever Observed For Any Source’
The IEA says 2025 marked a turning point for global energy, with solar posting the largest growth ever seen for any energy source and helping carbon-free power outpace rising demand. The trend led the agency to declare that the world has entered the “Age of Electricity.” Ars Technica reports: The IEA report covers energy use, including the el … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 Lands Workaround For Arm C1-Pro Erratum
Merged yesterday to the Linux 7.1 kernel is a workaround for an Arm C1-Pro CPU hardware bug around its Scalable Matrix Extension implementation… ⌘ Read more

AMD’s GAIA Makes It Easier To Import/Export Custom AI Agents Across PCs
AMD on the software side continues investing heavily in GAIA “Generative AI Is Awesome” as their cross-platform solution built around the Lemonade SDK for running local AI agents on your AMD-powered hardware from CPUs to GPUs and NPUs. With today’s GAIA update, custom-generated AI agents are now portable with easy import and export support… ⌘ Read more

Apple CEO Tim Cook Is Stepping Down
Apple announced that Tim Cook will step down as CEO in September after 15 years in the role, handing the job to hardware chief John Ternus. Longtime Slashdot reader sinij shares the news from MarketWatch: Cook leaves an impressive legacy after growing the company to a $4 trillion market capitalization from just $300 billion 15 years ago. Over Cook’s 15-year tenure as CEO, Apple’s stock has risen 1,932%, … ⌘ Read more

Robots Beat Human Records At Beijing Half-Marathon
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The winning runner at a Beijing half-marathon for humanoid robots finished the race today in 50 minutes and 26 seconds – significantly faster than the human world record of 57 minutes recently set by Jacob Kiplimo. […] [T]he winning time is a massive improvement over last year’s race, when the fastest robot fin … ⌘ Read more

New Lenovo Legion Go Drivers & More Sony HID Device Support In Linux 7.1
The HID subsystem updates landed this week for the in-development Linux 7.1 kernel that includes new hardware support and other changes… ⌘ Read more

Is the Iran War Driving a Surge of Interest in Electric Cars?
In October and through November, America’s EV sales reached their lowest point since 2022 after government subsidies expired, remembers Time. “But first-quarter data for 2026 shows that used EV sales were 12% higher than the same time last year and 17% higher than the previous quarter.

“One factor likely helping push buyers toward these cars is hig … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 Adds Some New PCIe Drivers While Nuking Some PCI Drivers
The PCI subsystem updates were merged this week for the Linux 7.1 kernel with a wide assortment of PCI(e) changes from new to old hardware… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 Sound Code Adds Bus Keepers: Aiming For Better Apple Silicon Support
The sound subsystem changes were merged this week for Linux 7.1 that include some new hardware support and other useful additions… ⌘ Read more

Remembering Zip Drives - the Trendy Storage Technology of the 1990s
Back in the 1990s, floppy disks “had a mere capacity of 1.44MB,” remembers XDA Developers, “which would soon become absolutely tiny for the increasingly large pieces of software that would come about.”

Floppy disks also felt quite fragile, and while we got “superfloppy” formats that were physically larger and had more capacity, those w … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 Adds New AMD SMCA Bank Types, Presumably For Upcoming EPYC Venice
The AMD Machine Check Exception “mce_amd” driver as part of the Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) subsystem is introducing support for new SMCA bank types on AMD platforms. Given the timing these new bank types are presumably for AMD’s upcoming Zen 6 / EPYC Venice hardware… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Increases the FAT32 Limit From 32GB To 2TB
Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo writes: Windows has limited FAT32 partitions to a maximum of 32GB for decades now. When memory cards and USB drives exceeded 32GB in size, the only options were exFAT or NTFS. Neither option was well supported on other platforms at first, although exFAT support is fairly widespread now. In their latest blog post, Microsoft announced … ⌘ Read more

New Lenovo Fan Driver, More ASUS Motherboards With Sensor Monitoring For Linux 7.1
All of the hardware monitoring “HWMON” subsystem updates were merged this week for the Linux 7.1 kernel… ⌘ Read more

‘TotalRecall Reloaded’ Tool Finds a Side Entrance To Windows 11 Recall Database
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Two years ago, Microsoft launched its first wave of “Copilot+” Windows PCs with a handful of exclusive features that could take advantage of the neural processing unit (NPU) hardware being built into newer laptop processors. These NPUs could enable AI and machine le … ⌘ Read more

Europe Has ‘Maybe 6 Weeks of Jet Fuel Left’
The head of the International Energy Agency warned that Europe may have only “six weeks or so” of jet fuel left if oil supplies remain blocked by the Iran war and the Strait of Hormuz stays disrupted. The Associated Press reports: IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol painted a sobering picture of the global repercussions of what he called “the largest energy crisis we have ever faced,” s … ⌘ Read more

IPv6 Usage Reaches Historic 50% Across Google Services
IPv6 usage briefly reached 50% across Google services for the first time, marking a major milestone for a protocol created in 1998 to solve IPv4’s address shortage. Tom’s Hardware reports: […] IPv6 was dismissed early on as a headache-inducing, hard-to-implement complication that would hardly ever gain any traction – despite offering 2^128 possible numbers, solv … ⌘ Read more

New Media Drivers Merged For Linux 7.1
The media subsystem updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 7.1 merge window and includes new hardware support… ⌘ Read more

UK Households To Be Urged To Use More Power This Summer As Renewables Soar
Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from the Guardian: Households will be called on to boost their consumption of Great Britain’s record renewable energy this summer to help balance the power grid and lower energy bills. Under the new plans, people could be encouraged to run dishwashers and washing machines or … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 Delivers Performance Regression Fix For Sheaves
The Linux 7.1 kernel is bringing performance improvements for Sheaves, the per-CPU caching layer introduced several kernel cycles ago (Linux 6.18) for better efficiency on today’s high core count hardware. Sheaves began as an opt-in feature but since Linux 7.0 is now being used for all caches… ⌘ Read more

Boston Dynamics’ Robot Dog Can Now Read Gauges, Spot Spills, and Reason
Boston Dynamics has integrated Google DeepMind into its robotic dog Spot, giving it more autonomous reasoning for industrial inspections like spotting spills and reading gauges. Spot can also now recognize when to call on other AI tools. IEEE Spectrum reports: Boston Dynamics is one of the few companies to commercially deploy legge … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 Is A Big Win For Intel Panther Lake With FRED Now Enabled By Default
Last month I ran benchmarks showing the very positive performance impact FRED has on Intel’s new Panther Lake processors while wondering why Flexible Return and Event Deliver wasn’t enabled by default yet on Linux. Hours after that story was published, an Intel engineer posted the patch to enable FRED by default with the rationale they were waiting for hardware to be publicly released in order to evaluate the performance benefit. D … ⌘ Read more

Intel Arc Pro B70 Open-Source Linux Performance Against NVIDIA RTX & AMD Radeon AI PRO
Last week after receiving the Intel Arc Pro B70 review hardware I began with some benchmarks looking at how the Arc Pro B70 compared to existing Intel GPUs on Linux with their fully open-source driver stack. Today’s article features the latest Arc Pro B70 benchmarks under Linux in looking at how the performance and value compares to other NVIDIA RTX and AMD Radeon (AI) PRO workstation graphics cards in the lab. ⌘ Read more

Rivian’s Illinois Factory Will Run On Recycled EV Batteries
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: Rivian is joining with Redwood Materials to reuse EV batteries for energy storage – the largest repurposed-battery energy storage system for an automotive manufacturer in the U.S., executives told The Wall Street Journal. Redwood Materials is a battery-recycling firm started by Tesla co- … ⌘ Read more

AMD EDAC Driver In Linux 7.1 Adds Support For Zen 3 Rembrandt Hardware With ECC
The Error Detection And Correction “EDAC” subsystem updates have been merged for Linux 7.1 that deal with reporting of ECC memory errors and the like from various hardware drivers… ⌘ Read more

AMD ROCm 7.2.2 Brings Optimization Guide For Ryzen AI / RDNA 3.5 Hardware
ROCm 7.2.2 is out today as a small point release to this open-source AMD GPU compute stack. There are a few code changes but most notable is arguably on the documentation side… ⌘ Read more

California Ghost-Gun Bill Wants 3D Printers To Play Cop, EFF Says
A proposed California bill would require 3D printer makers to use state-certified software to detect and block files for gun parts, but advocates at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) say it would be easy to evade and could lead to widespread surveillance of users’ printing activity. The Register reports: The bill in question is AB 2047 … ⌘ Read more

LLM-Assisted Patches For Linux 7.1 May Have Negative Impact On 32-bit Systems
Code now merged for the Linux 7.1 kernel may provide some negative performance implications for those still running modern Linux kernels on 32-bit hardware. A fundamental change can present cache line alignment and slab sizing implications for 32-bit Linux OS users but will provide for cleaner code with modern 64-bit computing… ⌘ Read more

Thousands of Rare Concert Recordings Are Landing On the Internet Archive
A Chicago concert superfan Aadam Jacobs who has recorded more than 10,000 shows since the 1980s is working with Internet Archive volunteers to digitize the collection before the cassettes deteriorate. “So far, about 2,500 of these tapes have been posted on the Internet Archive, including some rare gems like a Nirvana performan … ⌘ Read more

GNU Linux-libre 7.0 Deals With Deblobbing More Drivers & Cleansing DT Files
Building off last night’s release of the Linux 7.0 kernel is now the GNU Linux-libre 7.0-gnu kernel release for that downstream kernel that removes support for loading non-free-software kernel modules, blocks the loading of loadable microcode/firmware even when it means greatly reduced hardware support, and other sanitization of code in the name of software freedom… ⌘ Read more

How Good is Windows on Arm With Snapdragon X?
A new powerful chipset has arrived to take on x86 CPUs and Apple’s M5, writes Wccftech.

The blog Windows Central writes that “Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 processors are here” — and they run Windows:

Microsoft has done a massive amount of work to improve compatibility and has also convinced developers to embrace Windows 11 on Arm. Users of Windows 11 on Arm PCs spend 90% of their ti … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Released With New Hardware Support, Optimizations & Self-Healing XFS
As expected the stable Linux 7.0 kernel was just released today in marking this next kernel release. The Linux 7.0 milestone comes due to Linus Torvalds’ preference of bumping the major version number after hitting X.19 as opposed to any single major change, but in any event there are a lot of great improvements and changes to find with this new kernel version. Linux 7.0 is also what’s powering the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release… ⌘ Read more

Hisense’s New Backlit RGB LED TV ‘a Shot Against OLED’s Bow’, and Includes a DP Port
“RGB LED TVs have been the talk of the TV world this year,” argues The Verge, with models coming from all the manufacturers.”
And the first one of 2026 is here — the UR9 from China’s Hisense — “the first look at the viability of the new backlight technology outside of demo rooms.” They call it “a step above … ⌘ Read more

Neuroscientist’ AI-Powered Startup AIms To Transform Human Cognition With Perfect, Infinite Memory
Bloomberg describes him as a “former Harvard Medical School professor whose research has focused on the intersection of AI and neuroscience.”
“For the past 20 years, I studied how the human brain stores and retrieves memories,” Kreiman writes on LinkedIn. And now “My co-founder … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Sees Last Minute Fix For Bogus Hardware Errors On AMD Zen 3
Ahead of the Linux 7.0 stable kernel release expected later today are some last minute pull requests sent out this morning. Notable for those using AMD Zen 3 hardware is addressing some bogus hardware errors that began appearing for some users on recent versions of the Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

Trisquel 12.0 Released For Free Software Foundation Endorsed Distribution
For those sticking to absolute free software ideals, Trisquel 12.0 was released this weekend for this Free Software Foundation (FSF) approved distribution for only containing free software and foregoing loadable microcode/firmware and running on the Linux-libre kernel even with its reduced scope in hardware support… ⌘ Read more

AI That Bankrupted a Vending Machine is Now Running a Store in San Francisco
Remember that AI-powered vending machine that went bankrupt after Wall Street Journal reporters “systematically manipulated the bot into giving away its entire inventory for free”? It was Anthropic’s experiment, with setup handled by a startup named Andon Labs (which also built the hardware and software integration). But for th … ⌘ Read more

Researchers Build a Talking Robot Guide Dog to Help Visually Impaired People Navigate
“Only about 2% of visually impaired people in the United States use guide dogs,” notes StudyFinds.com, “partly because breeding and training takes years and fewer than half the dogs in training actually graduate.”

But someday there could be another option:

What if you could ask your guide dog where … ⌘ Read more

The AI RAM Shortage is Also Driving Up SSD Prices
In 2024 the Verge’s consumer tech reporter paid $173 for a WD Black SN850X 2TB SSD. But “now that same SSD costs $649…”

“Like with RAM, demand from the AI industry is swallowing up supply from a limited number of manufacturers, leading to a drastic reduction in the inventory that’s available to consumers” — and skyrocketing prices:

The price on my WD Black drive nearl … ⌘ Read more

CPU-Z 与 HWMonitor 官网遭入侵 6 小时，下载链接被篡改，指向恶意文件[已完成修复]
如果你这两天刚刚从官网下载过 HWMonitor 和 CPU-Z，并且已经安装，就需要格外注意了。「4 月 9 日至 4 月 10 日期间」 多家媒体确认（cybernews、Tom’s Hardware、PC Gamer），以及用户社区反馈，著名的 Windows 硬件监控工具 HWM ⌘ Read more

Framework Computer To Announce Their Next-Gen Hardware Later This Month
Linux-friendly hardware vendor Framework Computer sent out a notice this morning that they will be announcing their new 2026 hardware products later this month… ⌘ Read more

TUXEDO Laptops Will Enjoy More Features With The Upstream Linux 7.1 Kernel
TUXEDO Computers’ laptops received some heat in the past from upstream Linux kernel developers over their out-of-tree kernel drivers but fortunately that situation has been improving. The Uniwill driver premiered in the Linux 6.19 kernel with that OEM manufacturing many of the TUXEDO Computers laptop models. That Uniwill x86 platform driver enabled more functionality for TUXEDO hardware in the mainline kernel and has continued improvi … ⌘ Read more

Amazon May Sell Trainium AI Chips To Third Parties In Shot At Nvidia
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says the company may eventually sell its Trainium AI chips directly to outside customers, not just through AWS, which would put Amazon in more direct competition with Nvidia. “There’s so much demand for our chips that it’s quite possible we’ll sell racks of them to third parties in the future,” Jassy wrote in his … ⌘ Read more

Valve Developer Improves The Linux Gaming Experience For Limited vRAM Hardware
Natalie Vock of Valve’s Linux graphics driver team primarily working on the RADV Vulkan driver has come up with a new interesting creation: patches to the Linux kernel and KDE for sharply improving the gaming experience for those running systems with limited amounts of video memory. Such as for graphics cards with just 8GB of dedicated vRAM, the patches now available – initially on CachyOS for a nice out-of-the-box experience – p … ⌘ Read more