Zak Killian
Recent posts
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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Enthusiast sleuth Gray (@Olrak29_ on Xwitter) has been digging into the shipping logs again, and this time the rabbit hole leads straight into NVIDIA's long-rumored Arm ambitions for consumer PCs. This time around, he spotted a...
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Chinese IP vendor Innosilicon, who we previously reported hitting 10 Gbps with LPDDR5X, has announced the first commercial delivery of its LPDDR6 memory controller and PHY IP, marking an early milestone in the rollout of the...
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Well, well, well. It turns out AMD does have another Ryzen 9000X3D processor on the way besides the one it didn't announce at its CES 2025 keynote. "Yeah Zak," you're thinking. "It's the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2." That chip is probably still on the way, but it's not the topic of today's post. Instead...
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Remember back in September when NVIDIA announced the existence of the Rubin CPX processor at the AI Technology Conference? We theorized at that time that Rubin CPX could be the chip destined to eventually appear in next-generation GeForce...
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At CES 2026, we got to go hands on with the Dell Pro Max GB300 desktop. This is the big brother of the Dell Pro Max GB10, which as you could probably guess from the name, is essentially Dell's take on the NVIDIA DGX Spark concept. The...
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At its CES 2026 presentation, Intel announced both its Core Ultra Series 3 processors (codenamed "Panther Lake") as well as a forthcoming reference platform for gaming handhelds based on the chips. Looking at the available configurations...
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Intel's new Core Ultra Series 3 processors (codenamed Panther Lake) offer extremely impressive integrated graphics performance, as we noted in our brief testing yesterday. They're also based on what is arguably the most advanced...
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In case you missed the memo, Intel has officially launched its Core Ultra Series 3 processors, codenamed Panther Lake. These chips are a significant step forward for the brand, with new architectures on every single major IP block: new...
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Of course, not to be left out, MSI's at CES 2026 with a pile of premium products. In this post, we're taking a short look at the three lines of laptops that MSI brought to the show as well as a new version of the Claw gaming handheld that...
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