Zak Killian
Recent posts
Some folks act as if Intel and AMD have killed off the "high-end desktop" or HEDT market, but that's never really been the case. Instead, what happened is that mainstream desktops went from a maximum of four cores to 16 - 24 cores...
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When you think NVIDIA, you think "GPUs." It's easy to forget that NVIDIA's been making system-on-a-chip products for nearly 20 years; the first Tegra SoC came out in early 2008. The company's chips haven't really found their way into mainstream laptops, but that's about to change with the...
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An AI-powered toy company exposed more than 50,000 private chat logs between children and its products after leaving a web console almost completely unsecured. According to WIRED, anyone with a Gmail account could access transcripts of...
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What's the purpose of a computer chassis? If you said "to protect my parts from the environment," (or to protect your home from your parts), you might as well click off this post right now. If you instead said "to hold my parts in place,"...
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Remember the Samsung 9100 PRO? We reviewed it back in August. It's an amazing performer, and despite being a high-end PCI Express 5.0 SSD offering sequential speeds in excess of 13GB/second, it actually runs pretty cool thanks to the use...
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Intel may take on a limited role in manufacturing and packaging NVIDIA's next-next-generation GPUs, according to a report from DigiTimes Asia. Citing supply chain sources, DigiTimes reports that NVIDIA plans to partially involve Intel in...
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The star of Intel's CES 2026 show was of course its new Core Ultra 300 series processors, code-named Panther Lake. We have our review up if you haven't read it already, but the short version is that they offer all-around impressive...
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When we first confirmed the existence of intel's BMG-G31 GPU, the so-called "Big Battlemage", we heard about four different SKUs, only one of which was an 'Arc' GPU for gamers. The other three were Arc Pro models intended for the...
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Despite CEO Satya Nadella already having "a bunch of chips sitting in inventory" due to a shortage of power, Microsoft just announced its own next-gen AI silicon: the Maia 200 accelerator, built to run large models in the cloud faster and...
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Microsoft has confirmed that it provided BitLocker recovery keys to the FBI in response to a valid legal order, giving investigators the ability to decrypt hard drives that would otherwise have been unreadable. In the case reported by...
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You've probably heard about AMD Ryzen 3D V-Cache ("X3D") CPUs failing in ASRock motherboards, but ASRock is far from the only vendor seeing these failures, and it may not even be the most prominent one. ASUS has now formally acknowledged...
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There were a number of new products that we expected to hear about at CES, including the much-rumored Ryzen 9 9950X3D2, NVIDIA's N1X SoCs, and the next Intel Arc GPU release. None of those came, but perhaps the most surprising omission was...
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The Ryzen 7 9850X3D, which was announced by AMD during (not at) CES 2026, has had a date and price finally set: January 29th, and $499 USD. That's only a $20 jump over the Ryzen 7 9800X3D's MSRP, although those parts have been available as...
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Who makes CPUs? Well, you've got AMD, Intel, Apple, Qualcomm, and Mediatek as the major players in consumer devices, with companies like Samsung, Broadcom, Google, Huawei, UNISOC, and Rockchip each making up smaller slices of the market...
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Let's talk about transformers, and not robots in disguise, but the neural network architecture that underpins basically every modern AI model. Transformers are smart, but they trade training efficiency for inference complexity. To help...
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Over on Overclock.net, user OC_Beer posted what appear to be the first leaked overclocking results for AMD's upcoming Ryzen 7 9850X3D. The chip isn't even on shelves yet, as AMD only announced it at CES 2026 less than two weeks ago, but if...
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This past Saturday, Microsoft released an out-of-band Windows to address two serious bugs that it introduced itself with its January 2026 security updates, affecting a wide range of Windows 10, Windows 11, and Windows Server systems. The...
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Taiwan and the United States have announced what's being described as a $500 billion commitment aimed at expanding semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S., a striking figure that reflects how strategically important chip production has...
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Can you smell what ASRock is cooking? Tired wrestling references aside, what ASRock is cooking looks pretty darn tasty — especially for something called "Rock". Four new motherboards in a new family are the inaugural components, which...
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In case you missed it, at CES 2026 AMD actually did have a few consumer announcements despite that the keynote was almost entirely about AI and data center products. Among those were a couple of new Strix Halo products: the Ryzen AI Max+...
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AMD's extant "X3D" processors include a feature called 3D V-Cache, which involves bonding a slab of SRAM cache to the logic die in such a way that it physically extends the L3 cache of the CPU to triple its original capacity. What if we...
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Before we get started here, let's take a moment and explain the headline. You see, Rockstar's in a bit of legal hot water right now for terminating a group of employees in Scotland over purportedly leaking information about GTA VI into a...
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