NASA Eyes Popular PC Hardware Performance Tool for Its Flight Simulators
NASA Langley has initiated the U.S. government software approval process to install CapFrameX, a benchmarking tool popular among PC gaming enthusiasts, on its cockpit simulators used to train test pilots. The space agency reached out to CapFrameX, not the other way around, according to an X post from the company.

NASA builds cu … ⌘ Read more

What a Sony and TCL Partnership Means For the Future of TVs
How would Sony ceding control of its TV hardware business change the industry? The Verge has an optimistic take: […] As of today, Sony already relies on different manufacturing partners to create its TV lineup. While display panel manufacturers never reveal who they sell panels to, Sony is likely already using panels for its LCD TVs from TCL Ch … ⌘ Read more

AMD AOMP 22.0-2 Released With Flang Fortran Improvements
Yesterday along with releasing ROCm 7.2 there was also the release of AOMP 22.0-2 as the newest version of their open-source downstream of LLVM/Clang/Flang that is focused on offering the best OpenMP/OpenACC offloading support to Instinct/Radeon hardware… ⌘ Read more

FBI’s Washington Post Investigation Shows How Your Printer Can Snitch On You
alternative_right quotes a report from The Intercept: Federal prosecutors on January 9 charged Aurelio Luis Perez-Lugones, an IT specialist for an unnamed government contractor, with “the offense of unlawful retention of national defense information,” according to an FBI affidavit (PDF). The case attracted national att … ⌘ Read more

AMD Making It Easier To Install vLLM For ROCm
Deploying vLLM for LLM inference and serving on NVIDIA hardware can be as easy as pip3 install vllm. Beautifully simple just as many of the AI/LLM Python libraries can deploy straight-away and typically “just work” on NVIDIA. Running vLLM atop AMD Radeon/Instinct hardware though has traditionally meant either compiling vLLM from source yourself or AMD’s recommended approach of using Docker containers that contain pre-built versions of vLLM. Finally there is now a blessed P … ⌘ Read more

Energy Costs Will Decide Which Countries Win the AI Race, Microsoft’s Nadella Says
Energy costs will be key to deciding which country wins the AI race, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said. CNBC: As countries race to build AI infrastructure to capitalize on the technology’s promise of huge efficiency gains, Nadella told the World Economic Forum (WEF) on Tuesday that “GDP growth in any place … ⌘ Read more

Support For More Bluetooth Guitars & Other HID Changes Ahead Of Linux 6.20~7.0
A lot of HID subsystem updates have been queuing up ahead of the Linux 6.20~7.0 merge window in February. There is a lot of new hardware support on the way along with quirks for some existing hardware support ranging from laptop keyboard issues to enabling support for more PS4/PS5 guitars under Linux… ⌘ Read more

Sony Is Ceding Control of TV Hardware Business To China’s TCL
Sony plans to spin off its TV hardware business to a new joint venture controlled by Chinese electronics giant TCL, the two said Tuesday, a significant retreat for the Japanese giant whose Bravia line has long occupied the premium end of the television market. TCL would hold a 51% stake in the venture and Sony would retain 49% under a nonbindin … ⌘ Read more

China Consumed 10.4 Trillion Kilowatt-Hours of Electricity In 2025 - Double the US
Slashdot reader hackingbear summarizes this report from Bloomberg: China consumed totally 10.4 trillion kilowatt hours (10.4 petaWh) in 2025 according to data from the National Energy Administration. That’s the highest annual electricity use ever recorded by a single country, and doubled the amount used by th … ⌘ Read more

ChaosBSD Is A New BSD For “Broken Drivers, Half-Working Hardware, Vendor Trash” Test Bed
A new BSD on the block is ChaosBSD that intends to serve as a testing distribution for unfinished and broken drivers not suitable for upstreaming to FreeBSD proper… ⌘ Read more

Shotcut 26.1 Beta Video Editor Adds New Hardware Decoder Options
The Shotcut 26.1 beta was released overnight as the newest version of this Qt6-based, cross-platform video editing solution. Standing out the most with this new development release are some new GPU-accelerated hardware decode options for aiming to help speed-up this free software video editor… ⌘ Read more

Biggest Offshore Wind Project In US To Resume Construction
A federal judge has temporarily lifted the Trump administration’s suspension of the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, allowing construction on the largest offshore wind project in the U.S. to resume. CNBC reports: Judge Jamar Walker of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia granted Dominion’s request for a preliminary injunction Frida … ⌘ Read more

Trump Wants Tech Companies To Foot the Bill For New Power Plants
The Trump administration urged the largest electricity grid in the U.S. to make big tech companies pay for new power plants to support the surging electricity demand from AI and data centers. CNBC reports: Electricity prices have exploded in recent years on PJM Interconnection due in part to the data centers that tech companies are building t … ⌘ Read more

Hard Drive Prices Have Surged By an Average of 46% Since September
Tom’s Hardware: Extensive research into the pricing of some of the best hard drives on the market for large capacity, economical storage indicates that prices are beginning to increase sharply, with some of the most popular models on the market seeing increases upwards of 60%. According to research from ComputerBase, pricing analysis on 12 … ⌘ Read more

New York Introduces Legislation To Crack Down On 3D Printers That Make Ghost Guns
New York Governor Kathy Hochul is proposing first-of-its-kind legislation that would require 3D printers sold in the state to include built-in software designed to block the printing of gun parts used to make “ghost guns.” The plan would also add criminal penalties for making 3D-printed firearms and hold prin … ⌘ Read more

ASUS Stops Producing Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti and 5060 Ti 16GB
Reports suggest ASUS has effectively ended production of NVIDIA’s RTX 5070 Ti and 5060 Ti 16GB GPUs due to a severe memory crunch driven by AI infrastructure demand, even as NVIDIA insists it’s still shipping all GeForce SKUs. YouTube channel Hardware Unboxed broke the news in its most recent video where it states ASUS “explicitly” told them the RTX 5070 Ti is “ … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 To Expand Temperature Reporting For Intel Graphics Cards
The upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle will provide expanded GPU temperature reporting capabilities for Intel graphics cards. Additional temperature sensors will now be exposed under Linux with the Intel Xe driver using the hardware monitoring (HWMON) interface for easy consumption by different Linux user-space software… ⌘ Read more

Burn 0.20 Released: Rust-Based Deep Learning With Speedy Perf Across CPUs & GPUs
A significant update to Burn was released today, the MIT and Apache 2.0 licensed tensor library and deep learning framework written in the Rust programming language. Burn 0.20 brings some low-level changes as it continues to strive to deliver high performance AI across the diverse hardware ecosystem… ⌘ Read more

Britain Awards Wind Farm Contracts That Will Power 12 Million Homes
The UK government has awarded guaranteed electricity prices to offshore wind projects totaling 8.4 GW in a bid to revive wind development, attract nearly $30 billion in private investment, and stabilize energy costs. The New York Times reports: On Wednesday, the British government said that it would provide guaranteed electricity prices … ⌘ Read more

US Approves Sale of Nvidia’s Advanced AI Chips To China
The U.S. has approved limited sales of Nvidia’s H200 AI chips to China, the Department of Commerce said on Tuesday. Exports will be allowed to “approved customers” with security safeguards and a 25% U.S. government cut. The company’s most advanced Blackwell chips will remain restricted. The BBC reports: The H200, Nvidia’s second-most-advanced semiconductor, had … ⌘ Read more

Bezos’s Vision of Rented Cloud PCs Looks Less Far-Fetched
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos once told an audience that he views local PC hardware the same way he views a 100-year-old electric generator he saw in a brewery museum – as a relic of a pre-grid era, destined to be replaced by centralized utilities that users simply rent rather than own. The anecdote, shared at a talk a few years ago, positioned Amazon Web Services a … ⌘ Read more

Intel Compute Runtime Updated With Initial Crescent Island & Nova Lake S Support
The Intel Compute Runtime 26.01.36711.4 was published today as their first release of 2026 for this open-source GPU compute stack providing Level Zero and OpenCL support across their range of graphics hardware going back to Tiger Lake. Notable with this new Compute Runtime release is having now production-ready Panther Lake support while also introducing early support for next-generation hardware… ⌘ Read more

ZLUDA Boasts Full Llama.cpp Support, Better Windows Handling For CUDA On Non-NVIDIA GPUs
The open-source ZLUDA project for bringing CUDA to non-NVIDIA hardware that can run unmodified is out with a new progress report. ZLUDA had a productive fourth quarter with now enjoying better Microsoft Windows support, full support for running Llama.cpp atop ZLUDA, AMD ROCm 7 support, and other enhancements… ⌘ Read more

America’s Biggest Power Grid Operator Has an AI Problem - Too Many Data Centers
America’s largest power-grid operator, PJM, which delivers electricity to 67 million people across a 13-state region from New Jersey to Kentucky, is approaching a supply crisis as AI data centers in Northern Virginia’s “Data Center Alley” consume electricity at an unprecedented rate.

The nonprofit expects demand … ⌘ Read more

Trump Says Microsoft To Make Changes To Curb Data Center Power Costs For Americans
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: President Donald Trump said in a social media post on Monday that Microsoft will announce changes to ensure that Americans won’t see rising utility bills as the company builds more data centers to meet rising artificial intelligence demand. “I never want Americ … ⌘ Read more

The Surprising Spectre BHI Mitigation Performance Impact On Meteor Lake
When recently carrying out performance benchmarks of Intel Meteor Lake performance on Linux since launch day two years ago, the geo mean came in at 93% the original performance. Finding the performance trending clearly lower with an up-to-date Linux software stack compared to in December 2023 was quite surprising considering the rather nice gains we have seen over time on other Intel/AMD hardware. As noted in that article though, one of the … ⌘ Read more

Nova Lake & Crescent Island Support Lands In The Intel Graphics Compiler
Released this morning is the Intel Graphics Compiler “IGC” 2.27.10 that comes with initial support for next-generation Nova Lake and Crescent Island Xe3P hardware… ⌘ Read more

China Tests a Supercritical CO2 Generator in Commercial Operation
“China recently placed a supercritical carbon dioxide power generator into commercial operation,” writes CleanTechnica, “and the announcement was widely framed as a technological breakthrough.”

The system, referred to as Chaotan One, is installed at a steel plant in Guizhou province in mountainous southwest China and is designed to recover … ⌘ Read more

China’s ‘Artificial Sun’ Breaks Nuclear Fusion Limit Thought to Be Impossible
“Scientists in China have made a breakthrough with fusion energy that could finally overcome one of the most stubborn barriers to realising the next-generation energy source,” reports the Independent:

A team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) said its experimental nuclear reactor, dubbed the ‘artificial Sun’, a … ⌘ Read more

Meta Signs Deals With Three Nuclear Companies For 6+ GW of Power
Meta has signed long-term nuclear power deals totaling more than 6 gigawatts to fuel its data centers: “one from a startup, one from a smaller energy company, and one from a larger company that already operates several nuclear reactors in the U.S,” reports TechCrunch. From the report: Oklo and TerraPower, two companies developing small modular … ⌘ Read more

Intel Is ‘Going Big Time Into 14A,’ Says CEO Lip-Bu Tan
Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan says the company is “going big time” into its 14A (1.4nm-class) process, signaling confidence in yields and hinting at at least one external foundry customer. Tom’s Hardware reports: Intel’s 14A is expected to be production-ready in 2027, with early versions of process design kit (PDK) coming to external customers early this year. To that end … ⌘ Read more

AMD Enabling New GFX12.1 & More RDNA 3.5 Hardware Blocks With Linux 6.20~7.0
AMD today sent out their latest pull request to DRM-Next of new AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver changes they are looking to get into the next kernel cycle, which will either be known as Linux 6.20 or more than likely be called Linux 7.0. Notable with this week’s pull request is enabling a lot of new GPU hardware IP blocks, including GC/GFX 12.1 as a new addition past the current GFX12.0 / RDNA4… ⌘ Read more

Qualcomm Sends Out Linux Patches For RAS Support On RISC-V For Reporting Hardware Errors
The latest work by Qualcomm on the RISC-V CPU architecture is sending out their first non-RFC patch series for enabling Reliability, Availability and Serviceability (RAS) support by making use of the RISC-V RERI specification. This RISC-V RAS support is useful for conveying hardware errors to users and will be especially important with future RISC-V Linux servers… ⌘ Read more

Mesa 26.0 Now Supports GPU Hardware Replay With The Intel Xe Kernel Driver
The Intel Mesa graphics drivers have supported a GPU hardware replay feature for making it easier to reproduce issues. But until now that functionality has only worked with the i915 kernel driver while for Mesa 26.0 the Intel Xe driver will also be supported… ⌘ Read more

Etnaviv Driver Wires Up PPU Flop Reset Support Needed By Some Vivante Hardware
Sent out today was the latest batch of drm-misc-next changes to DRM-Next for staging ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle. The reverse-engineered Etnaviv DRM driver for Vivante graphics/NPU hardware has added a new “PPU flop reset” feature gleaned off studying the downstream vendor kernel driver… ⌘ Read more

Power Bank Feature Creep is Out of Control
The humble power bank has transformed from a simple pocket-sized battery into a feature-laden gadget that now sometimes includes screensavers, Bluetooth connectivity and built-in Wi-Fi hotspots. The Verge’s Thomas Ricker highlighted the $270 EcoFlow Rapid Pro X Power Bank 27k at CES 2026 as a prime offender – a device he declared “too expensive, too big, too slow, and too heavy.” Its … ⌘ Read more

Samsung’s Rolling Ballie Robot Indefinitely Shelved After Delays
Samsung Electronics has once again sidelined Ballie, a long-anticipated robot that was first announced six years ago but never released. Bloomberg News: The device – designed to roll and roam throughout the home – is completely absent from this week’s CES, the biggest electronics trade show. And though Samsung said last year that Ballie was … ⌘ Read more

Intel Is Making Its Own Handheld Gaming PC Chips At CES 2026
An anonymous reader quotes a report from IGN: Last year, Intel had the best iGPU on the market. This year, it’s broken that record by over 70% with Panther Lake and it’s a huge win for handhelds. “We’ve overdelivered” is how Intel CEO Lip Bu Tan categorized the Panther Lake launch during the company’s CES 2026 Keynote address, and that really does se … ⌘ Read more

Dell Admits It Made a Huge Mistake When It Abandoned XPS
Dell has reversed course and resurrected the XPS brand as its “premium consumer” brand of laptops, admitting it was a mistake to kill it in the first place. Slashdot reader joshuark shares a report from Gizmodo: At last year’s CES, Dell made the eyebrow-raising decision to ax all its legacy laptop brand names and instead opt for Apple-like conventions. Inste … ⌘ Read more

Hyundai and Boston Dynamics Unveil Humanoid Robot Atlas At CES
At CES 2026 today, Hyundai and Boston Dynamics publicly demonstrated its humanoid robot Atlas, showing off fluid movement and announcing plans to deploy a production version in Hyundai’s EV factory by 2028. NBC News reports: “For the first time ever in public, please welcome Atlas to the stage,” said Boston Dynamics’ Zachary Jackowski as a life-s … ⌘ Read more

SanDisk Says Goodbye To WD Blue and Black SSDs, Hello To New ‘Optimus’ Drives
SanDisk is retiring the WD Blue and WD Black SSD brands and replacing them with a new “Optimus” line that carries the same model numbers as its predecessors. The move follows Western Digital’s late-2023 decision to split into two companies – one retaining the WD name for hard drives sold to NAS and data center customer … ⌘ Read more

Radeon Linux Driver Patches For Next-Gen Hardware Point To New NPU Integration
Back in November AMD began posting open-source Linux graphics driver patches for some next-gen graphics IP. Those IP block patches were for MMHUB, PSP, and other blocks making up modern AMD GPUs. The GFXHUB patch pointed it to being part of the GFX12 / RDNA4 family. Out today are new patches for enabling the SMU15 IP and an interesting takeaway there is some apparent NPU integration for future Radeon graphics… ⌘ Read more

Workstation Owner Sadly Marks the End-of-Life for HP-UX
Wednesday marked the end of support for the last and final version of HP-UX, writes OSNews.

They call it “the end of another vestige of the heyday of the commercial UNIX variants, a reign ended by cheap x86 hardware and the increasing popularisation of Linux.”

I have two HP-UX 11i v1 PA-RISC workstations, one of them being my pride and joy: an HP c8000, the last … ⌘ Read more

Are Hybrid Cars Helping America Transition to Electric Vehicles?
America’s electric car subsidies expired at the end of September, notes Bloomberg. Yet in those last three months, “while fully electric cars and trucks made up 10% of all auto sales in the US… another 15% of transactions were for hybrid vehicles.”

The EV market is slowing in the U.S., but analysts expect hybrid sales to continue accelerati … ⌘ Read more

Furiosa’s Energy-Efficient ‘NPU’ AI Chips Start Mass Production This Month, Challenging Nvidia
The Wall Street Journal profiles “the startup that is now one of a handful of chip makers nipping at the heels of Nvidia.”

Furiosa’s AI chip is dubbed “RNGD” — short for renegade — and slated to start mass production this month. Valued at nearly $700 million based on its most recent fun … ⌘ Read more

The US Effort to Break China’s Rare-Earth Monopoly
The New York Times checks in on U.S. university researchers and start-ups trying to create domestic rare-earth processing facility:

There is too little money to be made in rare earths for the elements to be of much interest to mining giants, so the challenge of reestablishing a domestic industry has fallen to small companies like Phoenix Tailings, a Boston-area startup … ⌘ Read more

New Tesla Video Shows Tesla Semi Electric Truck Charging at 1.2 MW
An anonymous reader shared this report from Electrek:

Tesla has released a new video showing a Tesla Semi truck charging at a massive 1.2 megawatts (MW), finally giving us a clear look at the charging speeds that will enable long-haul electric trucking…>

Tesla claimed the Semi would be able to charge 70% of its range in 30 minutes. For … ⌘ Read more

AMD Closes in on Intel in Latest Steam Hardware Survey
AMD’s share of processors among Steam users climbed to 47.27% in December 2025, a 4.66% jump in a single month that continues the company’s steady encroachment on Intel’s once-dominant position in the gaming CPU market. Intel held roughly 77% of the Steam Hardware Survey five years ago, and that lead has eroded considerably as AMD broke the 40% threshold in the third qua … ⌘ Read more

Radeon Linux Driver Enhancements, Linux 6.19 Activity & Other December Highlights
During the month of December on Phoronix there was new and original content each and every day, ending the month with 305 original news articles and 25 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles. Here is a look back at the most exciting Linux/open-source hardware content in ending out 2025… ⌘ Read more

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club

Steps to world domination:

1. “Invent” “AI” (by using other people’s data).
   
2. Get people hyped about it and ideally hooked on it.
   
3. Only provide it as a cloud service. But hey, if you want to, you can run it locally!
   
4. Buy all hardware available on the market, so that nobody but you can build more systems.
   
5. All PCs of consumers and competitors are too weak now and can’t be upgraded anymore.
   
6. Everybody depends on your cloud service! Win!
   

All of that is possible because corporations don’t have a “conscience” in capitalism. Nobody forces the RAM manufacturers to sell all their stuff to just one or two buyers, but since the only goal of that manufacturer is to make money, they do it.