Luke James
freelance journalist
$ UK-based tech journalist reporting on semiconductors, AI, hardware, and the policy and infrastructure powering it all.
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TOM'S HARDWARE PREMIUM
Here's why HBM is coming for your PC's RAM
HBM consumes around three times the wafer capacity of DDR5 per gigabyte, as AI supercharges demand for chips and advanced packaging.
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These articles are paywalled, but I can provide PDFs on request.
- Chinese Z.ai's latest model tops AI ranking charts amid Anthropic Fable 5 ban — blacklisted China firm's popular open-weight GLM-5.2 AI model powered by Huawei silicon
- China tops the list of fastest supercomputers with a CPU-only behemoth, ending US champion El Capitan's reign — 2.198 exaflops of performance without a single GPU
- Google reportedly books Intel for packaging more than 3 million TPUs in 2028 — SK hynix is testing Intel's EMIB packaging for HBM integration
- Intel's fab roadmap examined — Arizona, Ohio, Ireland, and the two deadlines deciding 14A process node
- Intel Xeon 6+ Computex roundtable interview transcript — Kira Boyko and Tim Wilson on 18A wafer allocation, Clearwater Forest, and dropping hyper-threading
- The rise of local agentic computing faces a brutal reality: rising DRAM prices — RTX Spark, Gorgon Halo chips subject to 63% DRAM contract price hike this quarter
- Jensen Huang says 'every edge device will become autonomous' — Nvidia maps one computing pattern from the cloud to robotics
- Anthropic's warning over AI self-improvement has a hidden message — accelerating development requires more compute before companies ever risk losing control of frontier AI models
- Nvidia's RTX Spark could caplitalize where Qualcomm's Arm-based efforts have not — following the expiration of Qualcomm's Windows on Arm deal, Nvidia stands poised to pick up the slack
- Qualcomm aims Snapdragon C laptop chip at the budget laptop segment, as manufacturers feel the DRAM squeeze — analysts warn sub $500 laptop market may disappear before 2028
- SMIC founder and AMEC CEO urge Chinese fabs to test domestic chipmaking tools on active production lines — equipment makers post record revenue but falling margins
- Intel's EMIB-T packaging technology set for fab rollout this year — as TSMC CoWoS capacity remains limited, EMIB-T is preparing for advanced AI accelerator designs
- Why Nvidia just poured $2 billion into AI ASIC competitor Marvell — NVLink Fusion turns into soft ecosystem lock-in
- The global helium shortage is a direct threat to the chipmaking supply chain — disruption impacts critical processes, high-capacity HDDs, and alternative supplies are plagued by delays
- Pentagon formalizes Palantir's Maven AI as a core military system with multi-year funding — platform's investment grows to $13 billion from $480 million in 2024
- GTC 2026: Ian Buck press Q&A transcript — VP of Hyperscale and HPC speaks out on shelving CPX and shipping LPU decode this year
Tom's Hardware
- Huawei-led team claims it post-trained DeepSeek's 1.6-trillion-parameter model — 1,000 Ascend 910C chips used in training
- SK hynix to double memory wafer capacity within five years, chairman says — AI-driven shortage will persist until at least 2030
- Samsung chip workers vote to accept $340,000 average bonus, ending months-long strike threat — resentment over deal has slowed down Samsung foundry division
- Trump administration considers mandatory pre-release vetting of AI models — Anthropic's Mythos cited as catalyst for policy reversal
- DeepSeek launches 1.6 trillion parameter V4 on Huawei chips as U.S. escalates AI theft accusations — U.S. gov't alleges IP theft by DeepSeek and other Chinese AI firms
- CPU requirements for AI workloads are multiplying, driving intensifying shortages and price hikes — Intel already shifting production from consumer chips to Xeon as inference workloads drive server CPU ratios back toward parity with GPUs
- Bolt Graphics tapes out its first Zeus GPU test chip on TSMC 12nm — firm touts 17x lower cost of compute
- Every SK hynix employee could receive $477,000 bonuses this year, almost $900,000 next year — 35,000 workers reportedly set to benefit from share of $169 billion projected operating profit
- China's premiere memory-maker YMTC plans two additional Wuhan fabs using homegrown chipmaking tools — Phase 3 crosses 50% domestic tooling threshold
- Iran's forced nationwide internet blackout becomes second-longest on record as it passes 1,000 hours offline — possessing Starlink terminals punishable by death, country using 'military-grade jamming' against service
- South Korea's telecom giants surprise 7 million users with unlimited, universal internet — net access declared a 'basic telecommunications right,' 400 Kbps data after monthly plans run out
- Fujitsu plans dedicated 1.4nm AI chip manufactured entirely in Japan by Rapidus — AI chip to be designed and manufactured domestically
- SMIC sent chipmaking tools to Iran's military, Trump administration officials say — report claims exchange began a year ago, 'almost certainly included technical training on SMIC's semiconductor technology'
- Elon Musk unveils $20 billion 'TeraFab' chip project to make chips, memory, and package processors all under one roof — targets a terawatt of annual compute
- SK Group chairman says memory chip shortage will last until 2030 — wafer supply trails demand by 20%
- Taiwan to spend $3 billion turning nation into 'AI island', targets top five global compute power — new goals threatened by energy shortfalls
- OpenAI asks U.S. to expand CHIPS Act tax credit to cover AI infrastructure despite firm's denial wanting a government 'backstop' for its massive loans
- AMD swoops in to help as John Carmack slams Nvidia's $4,000 DGX Spark, says it doesn't hit performance claims, overheats, and maxes out at 100W power draw — developer forums inundated with crashing and shutdown reports
- ChatGPT chief Sam Altman says AI could eliminate jobs that aren't 'real work' — comments come among mounting evidence of jobs being replaced by AI
- Intel reveals 288-core Clearwater Forest Xeon at Hot Chips — 18A process' first outing promises big efficiency and performance gains
- China issues port crackdown on all Nvidia AI chip imports, says report — enforcement teams deployed to quash smuggling and investigate data center hardware, targeting H20 and RTX 6000D shipments
- Amazon and Google tip off Jensen Huang before announcing information about their homegrown AI chips — companies tread carefully to avoid surprising Nvidia, says report
- Nvidia rumored to ditch its first-gen custom memory form factor for newer version — SOCAMM1 for faster 'SOCAMM2' standard
- Borderlands 4 on PC crushing even the most powerful rigs — RTX 5090 struggles in some scenarios, but day one patch solves plenty of issues
- Nintendo secures $2 million settlement against Switch modder — Modded Hardware creator agreed to stop selling backup devices, but continued to, prompting lawsuit
Laptop Mag
Recent clips
Latest pieces, pulled automatically from my Authory feed.
Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron sued over alleged DRAM price fixing amid record memory costs — lawsuit claims coordinated HBM shift was cover to curtail DDR3 and DDR4 production
A California class action accuses the three memory makers of choking DDR3 and DDR4 supply.
Read →Indie Launches Edge AI SoC for Perception Systems in Autos and Robots
The new system-on-chip pairs a heterogeneous AI compute engine with a low-latency multi-camera image signal processor, and can ship…
Read →400 domains used for illegal 2026 World Cup streams seized by US Justice Department — operation is five times the scale of the previous crackdown
Operation Offsides previously took down 78 domains during the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar.
Read →Apple will skip its high-end M6 Mac chips and fast-track an AI-focused M7 generation for 2027, report claims — may release a base M6 chip for entry-level Macs this year
Pro, Max, and Ultra tiers move to the M7 line as Apple chases memory bandwidth for on-device AI.
Read →Microsoft extends free Windows 10 security updates for a second year — program now ends on October 12, 2027
Just as the memory shortage pushes PC prices even higher.
Read →Riot Vanguard finally drops its controversial always-on requirement for anti-cheat — new on-demand mode requires a strict Windows 11 security stack
The toggle needs Windows 11 25H2 plus TPM 2.0, Secure Boot, VBS, HVCI, and IOMMU.
Read →Qualcomm Unveils Mixed-Reality Platform for AI-Driven Spatial Computing
The next-generation XR chipset delivers up to 48 TOPS of on-device AI and 4.4K-per-eye visuals. The device will debut this fall in XREAL's…
Read →Qualcomm plans China-specific data center chips — new Dragonfly lineup will include nerfed AI accelerators that comply with export thresholds
The Dragonfly lineup heads into a market where buyers are being “nudged” toward Huawei and Cambricon.
Read →China tops the list of fastest supercomputers with a CPU-only behemoth, ending US champion El Capitan's reign — 2.198 exaflops of performance without a single GPU
Ending years of Chinese absence from the TOP500.
Read →SK hynix files to raise up to $29 billion in historic Nasdaq listing — all proceeds going to advanced AI memory fabs and EUV tool orders
New capacity won't come online until 2027 at the earliest.
Read →3 Pocket-Sized Photonics Innovations Power MedTech to Atomic Clocks
Research teams at EPFL, Harvard, and UC San Diego each reported photonic devices that shrink or repurpose light-based hardware.
Read →2003-era DDR2 memory prices jump up to 60% — AI-driven DRAM shortage reaches the oldest standard still in production
TrendForce expects another 40% rise in Q3 as buyers downgrade specs to secure supply.
Read →Open-source Vulkan driver NVK gains experimental DLSS support — bringing Nvidia’s upscaling tech to Linux via imported CUDA binaries
Depends on compatible bytecode being available for your GPU.
Read →Samsung and SK hynix bonuses for chip workers flagged as a national inflation risk — Bank of Korea projects full-year inflation significantly above its 2% target
Memory boom payouts worth up to $455,000 per worker are now a variable in the central bank's price outlook.
Read →New web app can make Valve's Steam Controller drift across your desk like an RC car — web app drives the gamepad using its rumble motors
A WebHID page pulses the controller's haptics to scoot it over flat surfaces.
Read →The BC109: Europe’s Low-Noise Transistor and the Silicon Behind the Fuzz Face
Created by Philips and Mullard in 1963, the BC109 was the low-noise member of a transistor family that dominated European electronics for…
Read →Post-silicon era gets closer as industry giants crack the 2D transistor scaling bottleneck with breakthrough tech — imec, ASML, and TSMC fab complementary 2D-material transistors at 50nm pitch on a 300mm wafer
EUV-printed 28nm gates and 94% working devices, all on standard production tooling.
Read →Intel hires former SK hynix chief Seok-Hee Lee to lead Intel Foundry advanced packaging — company establishing section as 'focused business with dedicated leadership'
Intel carves back-end packaging into a standalone business.
Read →