Zak Killian
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
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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We can talk until we're blue in the face about the actual effects of software piracy, but it's not hard to understand why companies like Electronic Arts and Nintendo get up in arms about it. Nintendo in particular has been highly aggressive in its efforts to scourge the web of unofficial ways to acquire and play its...
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Update: 3/6/25 - 5:24 PM: We have just received an official statement from representatives at AMD on this matter, and it appears there's more to this story for sure. We have left the entirety of our previous coverage in tact below, however...
"It is inaccurate that $549/$599 MSRP is launch-only pricing. We expect...
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The world's first "biological computer" has officially hit the market, marking what may actually be a significant breakthrough in AI technology. Developed by Australian company Cortical Labs, the CL1 fuses human brain cells with silicon hardware to create a dynamic, learning neural network. This innovative system...
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It's pretty ironic, if you think about it. AMD makes desktop CPUs, then turns them into BGA chips for the high-end mobile market. Laptop vendors don't buy as many of those CPUs as AMD would like, and they start to filter into the market via alternative channels—like these Minisforum "Mobile on Desktop" (MoDT)...
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In what is a depressingly-rare show of pre-release transparency, AMD has posted a support article concerning UEFI support on its RDNA 4-based GPUs, including the soon-to-be-released Radeon RX 9070 series. The article is surprisingly wordy for such a simple topic: AMD will only officially support UEFI systems with...
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You've probably done it yourself: you need to know how hard a given application is hitting your CPU, so you pull up Windows' Task Manager to check the CPU utilization. For a casual inquiry, this is fine, but for anything approaching scientific rigor, you need to be using a third-party application because Windows' Task...
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At MWC, Qualcomm announced that it is expanding its 5G portfolio with the Qualcomm X85 5G Modem-RF and the Dragonwing FWA Gen 4 Elite platform, which is the first major product under the company's new Dragonwing branding. While AI is sometimes just a buzzword, Qualcomm notes it's using machine learning to meaningfully...
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Monster Hunter Wilds isn't perfect, but it is excellent—I spent about twelve hours playing it yesterday. It's a new main-line Monster Hunter game, with all that entails, including peak development expenditure from CAPCOM on one of its biggest properties to produce a detailed, high-effort monster slaying experience...
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When you hear "Framework", if you're familiar with the laptop vendor, you probably think of modular components and repairable PCs. Indeed, the company allowed popular repair guide website iFixit early access to the very exciting Framework Desktop, and the machine is as easy as expected to tear down given that it is...
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The latest entry in the venerable Monster Hunter game series is set to launch tomorrow. Known as Monster Hunter Wilds, it's the next mainline title and marks the beginning of the sixth generation of Monster Hunter games. Wilds brings a great many innovations to the storied franchise, including a persistent mount, the...
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Micron's memory technology is taking another step forward with the launch of its new 1γ (1-gamma) DRAM, pushing DDR5 speeds to 9200 MT/s and LPDDR5X to an impressive 9600 MT/s. This marks the latest step in the company's longstanding race to shrink DRAM nodes while improving both power efficiency and performance. Compared to its last-generation
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One of the controversies surrounding the ongoing launch of the GeForce RTX 50 series concerns the fact that it has dropped hardware acceleration for PhysX effects in 32-bit games. This affects the majority of titles using PhysX, particularly those from its halcyon days as NVIDIA's exclusive technology. Well, you can...
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Ever since we first saw the rumored specifications for AMD's Ryzen AI MAX processors—back when they were simply known by the code name "Strix Halo"—the first thought we had was "this thing would make an awesome living-room PC." Framework apparently had the exact same thought upon hearing about these chips, because the...
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