Zak Killian
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Ever since at least the Ryzen 3000 series, AMD's release schedule for its Ryzen desktop processors has been to launch the enthusiast-focused "X" processors first, followed by the very-slightly neutered "non-X" versions after. The standard model Ryzen chips usually differ from their "X"-branded brethren only in that...
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The launch of Grand Theft Auto VI is going to be a huge event for the games industry, and even perhaps culture at large. Hype levels are stratospheric, and there's no question that the release of Rockstar's magnum opus will be a "canon event" for the game industry at large, no matter how good the actual game is. One...
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If you're of a certain age, you might remember those Maxell cassette tape ads that featured a man in sunglasses in a recliner being literally blown away by the sound coming out of his hi-fi speakers. That's a bit like how we feel as we continue to test and benchmark this forthcoming laptop sporting AMD's new Ryzen 9...
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A fresh leak from familiar self-described "PC Tech Fan" 포시포시 (better known as @harukaze5719 on Xwitter) has revealed details about AMD’s upcoming Gorgon Point mobile APUs. The information comes from a Naver.com article covering an LG Gram × Ryzen launch event, where slides detailing AMD’s roadmap were apparently shown. We say "apparently"
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If you, faithful Edge, Safari, or Firefox user that you are, have finally decided to give up your futile resistance and be assimilated into the all-consuming swarm of Google Chrome users today, you may have been met with this message on your Windows 11 PC:
Don't panic. It's not that Google has implemented onerous...
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Laptops are one of the most egregious product categories with regards to e-waste. Most laptops are made of almost completely proprietary components that are exclusive to that device, and the chips are generally BGA, meaning it's impractical to desolder and re-use them when a board fails. Framework was the first...
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Did you read our explainer on display technologies? If so, you'll already be well aware of the concept of PPI, or "pixels per inch," which is a more informative measure of "display resolution" than a static value like 1024×768. Typical PC monitors have PPI values in the 90-130 range, while smartphones go as high as...
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When you read that headline, it probably sounds like former Intel CTO and CEO Gelsinger's got a case of sour grapes. Of course, the man's far more mature and experienced than that. His comments came while speaking to the Acquired podcast as an invited guest at NVIDIA's GTC 2025 conference, where the GPU vendor...
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It's been six months (yes, really) since we were first introduced to the Zen 5 CPU architecture with the Ryzen 9000 series desktop CPUs, and it's been nearly a year and a half since AMD unveiled the Threadripper Pro 7000 series processors. Isn't it about time for a new Threadripper generation? Apparently so, because...
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AMD's just launched its Strix Halo high-end mobile APUs, but progress marches ever forward, and so it goes that we are now looking at leaks concerning the Strix successor, supposedly known as Medusa Point. Based on the Zen 6 "Morpheus" CPU core, Medusa Point has been said to sport a twelve-core CPU CCD as well as an...
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Imagine, for a moment, that you had a brand-new M.2 SSD rated for sequential transfers of over 15 GB/second. Obviously, it's the latest design, using four lanes of PCI Express 5.0 to achieve this immense throughput. Alternatively, it could be an x1 design—using PCIe 7.0. That's right kids: PCIe 7.0 offers per-pin...
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Building out the datacenters—or as NVIDIA calls them, "AI factories"—required for training and operating state-of-the-art AI models is extremely expensive. So much so that even hyperscalers like Google and Microsoft are going to have to plan these purchases well in advance. To that end, NVIDIA offered a sneak peek of...
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NVIDIA's Blackwell GB200 is an absolutely monstrous processor with up to 10 petaflops of dense FP4 tensor compute and 192GB of lightning-fast HBM3e memory delivering 8 TB/second of bandwidth per GPU. That number, though, that 192GB, is still limiting for hyperscalers building the latest, greatest AI models. For those...
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Intel has achieved a significant early milestone in its Arizona semiconductor fabrication plant, with the first wafers successfully processed on its advanced 18A process node. This achievement, announced at the same time as its March 13th conference, signals positive momentum for the company's manufacturing...
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If you're not a big gamer, you may have been perplexed at the recent preponderance of portable gaming PCs in handheld game system form. We could talk at length about why they've exploded in popularity *now*, but that's not why you clicked on this article. Instead, you're here to read about Qualcomm's new Snapdragon G...
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The last few weeks for AMD have been pretty remarkable. The chipmaker is firing on all cylinders: the Ryzen 9 9900X3D and 9950X3D have arrived to universal praise, the Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo" processors finally launched to wide acclaim, and the Radeon RX 9070 series graphics cards brought the RDNA 4 architecture and...
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One by one, the barriers to gaming bliss on Snapdragon laptops are falling. Back in November, a new build of Windows brought support for Intel's Advanced Vector Extensions to the Prism emulator that is used to translate x86-64 program code into Armv8 instructions that the Snapdragon CPUs can execute. Now, Epic Games...
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For decades, the semiconductor industry has been laser-focused on shrinking silicon transistors, but Peking University researchers believe the future might lie in changing materials entirely. In a newly published paper, the team presents a 2D gate-all-around (GAA) transistor that they claim beats the latest...
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The problem with introducing a new technology, whether it be an upscaler like FSR 4 or a hardware feature like AVX, is that you have to wait for software to make use of it. Except maybe not, in the case of FSR 4, thanks to the OptiScaler mod and its fresh support for AMD's new AI-powered scaling tech.
OptiScaler is...
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Have you ever been sitting at your desk wishing you had room for an air purifier alongside all of your computer gear? No? Me neither, but those who have serious hay fever or similar allergies to airborne allergens likely already have such a setup. In case you fall into that category and haven't arranged for an air...
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If you were frustrated by an inability to doomscroll Xwitter on your lunch break, don't worry, you're not alone. The site has been suffering intermittent connectivity issues all morning. What's the deal? Did Musk forget to pay some bills? Has X's famously skeletonized staff failed to keep the ship righted? Is the...
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Nevermind the fact that the overwhelming majority of consumer desktop tasks don't really scale past four to six cores—fanboys have accused AMD of "stagnating" much as Intel did in years past, by having its top-end Ryzen desktop CPUs max out at sixteen cores for four successive generations. That period may be over...
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