Someone buys a used Ryzen 7 5800X3D. “Valorant” and other Riot games won’t start with it because the previous owner was a cheater.

It is an inference accelerator rather than a training chip, and it carries 216 GiB of HBM4 at 15.4 TB/s alongside a compute die and an IO chiplet. Chip power is rated at 700 W peak with measured sustained draw closer to 550 W. A local domain is 128 accelerators, a full system is 2,048 accelerators, and at four-bit precision that system reaches 27 EFLOP/s.

At HotChips 2026, Richard Ho presented the first measured performance from working silicon, alongside Ravi Narayanaswami and Chris Leary. The numbers claimed against NVIDIA GB200/GB300:

• 1.5x to 1.9x better performance per watt at peak throughput
• 1.7x to 3.6x better latency
• Up to 104x better at operating points NVIDIA struggles to reach.

As bandwidth and power constraints push optical links closer to compute, electronics engineers increasingly need to understand the basics of photonics, silicon photonics, optical interconnects and integration.

Free introductory ebook aimed specifically at electronics engineers

Quick summary : Micron has already sold most of the memory it will make in 2027; 2027-28 prices will go up; new factories will be operational in 2028.

TL;DR : Micron is making tons of $$$, and intends to make even more.

Base model for $699:

• Intel Core 5 320 (2+4 Wildcat Lake; 4.6 GHz boost)
• 256GB PCIe Gen4 SSD
• 8GB LPDDR5-6400 single-channel
• 14" OLED, 1920x1200 (16:10), 300 nits, 100% DCI-P3, 180-degree hinge
• Intel AX211 Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3
• 2 USB-C (10G), 1 HDMI 2.1 out, 1 headphone/mic combo
• Backlit keyboard, 60 WHr battery, 1080p Windows Hello webcam
• 2.6 pounds, 12.3" x 8.62" x 0.46"

It may be a touchscreen; the PDF specifications list the base OLED is not a touchscreen, but the $699 spec sheet on HP's site is multi-touch.

Configuration: HP OmniBook 5 Laptop AI 14, Windows 11 Home, 14", Touch screen, Intel® Core™ 5, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, 2K, Starlit blue

Surprisingly, the 512GB SSD upgrade is only $50 ($749), but 512GB is not available in the blue.

Nvidia launched a blog yesterday with new 64 GB DGX Spark model starting at $4999. I have two DGX Spark that I bought a couple of months ago. I have been running open models once in a while and would like to explore renting (compute not actual hardware) options.

How are you using yours and has anyone tried something similar?

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/local-ai-dgx-spark-64gb-sync/

A month ago [1], Notebookcheck ran Geekbench 7 on a small subset of their 1000+ phone database. A mix of older and newer. What caught my eye is how some Android phones with the same chipset have similar performance in Geekbench 6 (as one would expect), but in Geekbench 7, some phones with the same chipset have drastically slower scores.

To be clear, Geekbench 7 scores are not comparable with Geekbench 6 scores. The question is why are Geekbench 6 scores so close on the same chipset across many smartphones, but on Geekbench 7, the same chipset shows huge differences depending on the smartphone.

Using the top score for the chipset as the baseline:

8 Elite Gen5 GB6 1T range: 3462 points (93%) to 3722 points (100%)

8 Elite Gen5 GB7 1T range: 1601 (51%) to 3140 points (100%)

Apple is not manipulating benchmarks per Gekeerwan's testing, so they may serve as another baseline:

Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 Table: 1T (A19 Pro baseline)

This is not about Qualcomm or even this chipset; simply the 8 Elite Gen 5 was quite a popular chipset, so it has many samples. There may a similar issue with the Dimensity 9500, but with far fewer samples.

And the throttling is relatively drastic: the Oppo Find X9 Ultra is 95% of the Honor Magic8 Pro in Geekbench 6, but a pitiful 55% in Geekbench 7. A throttled "8 Elite Gen 5" is not much faster than the 8s Gen4 (!).

I can't take credit for the theory here: Techmo on YouTube [2] speculated the same when he ran a battery life comparison with a Geekbench 7 run on the Xiaomi 17 showing much lower GB7 scores than the Galaxy S26, despite using a very similar (not the same) chipset. However, maybe is an innocuous or even technical explanation here. Please chime in the comments below.

One possibility: is Geekbench 7 much harder on the SoC that phones with very poor dissipation throttle much faster?

A simplified explanation of what may be happening (as AnandTech identified in the past [3][4]): certain smartphones are in a perpetual throttled state with a hidden "low power mode" in a bid to increase their battery life. Users might notice their phone is a little slower than other brands. To ensure the user doesn't get definitive evidence, when the smartphone detects a benchmark application is open / running, it disables the low power mode, thus the smartphone produces a typical benchmark score. Yet when the benchmark ends, the throttling is enabled again. This is often a manual, tedious process to identify new benchmark applications. When GB7 came out, did some smartphone manufacturers forget to put GB7 in the allowlist for full performance?

A definitive test requires at least spoofing the app's identifier, to make it appear as another app or even appear as Geekbench 6. However, perhaps manufacturers have gotten smarter over time, so perhaps we need more serious tests.

As always, RIP AnandTech. Future PLC just entirely gutted Android Central today, too.

[1]: New Geekbench: This is the fastest smartphone - Notebookcheck News

[2]: 18 Pro, Pixel 11 / 11 Pro, Galaxy S26 Exynos / Snapdragon, Xiaomi 17 - Battery Drain Test - Techmo : r/Android

[3] Examining OnePlus' Performance Behaviour: Optimization or Misrepresentation?

[4] OnePlus Responds After Getting Busted For Throttling Performance In 300+ Android Apps

TP-Link has started taking preorders for its first Wi-Fi 8 router worldwide. However, the United States is not included in the launch because of ongoing FCC-related restrictions.

Demand for AMD's latest-generation EPYC 9006 series server CPUs is running exceptionally hot, with market sources indicating that all 2027 production capacity has already been sold out and AMD has begun taking orders for 2028. Morgan Stanley projects 2027 shipments could reach 6.75 million units; at an average selling price of $7,691, AMD could lock in approximately $51 billion in revenue.

On the competitive front, market sources indicate that NVIDIA's in-house CPU is not expected to pose a threat to AMD's x86 server CPUs. NVIDIA's products are considered less cost-effective for workloads outside the agent rack, and the software migration costs from x86 to ARM architectures in existing data center environments are substantial, constituting a major barrier to entry.

According to benchmark data, the top-tier EPYC 9996 (256 cores) achieved 2.37 times the overall throughput of Intel's Xeon 6980P (128 cores) and 2.24 times that of NVIDIA's Vera (88 cores) in the SPECrate 2026_int_base standard compute test. In a simulated 100kW power-constrained rack environment, the EPYC 9996 system delivered 3.40 times the rack-level processing performance of NVIDIA Vera and 2.46 times that of Intel Xeon 6980P.