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According to well-known Intel leaker Jaykihn, Intel is preparing two “Nova Lake-S” CPU models with a 22-core configuration, enhanced by the big Last Level Cache (bLLC). These processors are part of the Core Ultra 5 400S family, and Intel is developing two mid-range configurations, each with 22 cores. Both models will feature 6 “Coyote Cove” P-Cores, 12 “Arctic Wolf” E-Cores, and 4 LPE-Cores. This design includes a single compute die aimed at mid-range gaming rigs. Alongside the 22 cores, Intel plans to add an extra 108 MB of bLLC cache to boost gaming performance, similar to AMD’s approach with its Ryzen X3D gaming CPUs, which currently lead in gaming performance. Intel aims to match raw CPU compute power with newer CPU cores and use bLLC to improve latency-sensitive tasks like gaming. The only difference between the two new models is that one is an unlocked 125 W TDP version, part of the “K” overclockable family, while the other is a 65 W base TDP model.

South Korean giants Samsung and SK hynix have announced plans to invest about 1,350 trillion won, roughly $870 billion at the time of writing, into expanding semiconductor manufacturing capacity and data centers over the next ten years. This ten-year plan includes memory, storage, and logic, which both companies produce. For SK hynix, this investment will cover DRAM and NAND Flash, while for Samsung, it will cover DRAM, NAND Flash, as well as logic for its LSI division. The investment is so comprehensive that it will include more than just creating new fab production capacity for increased wafer output. For example, it will also encompass AI data centers, batteries, display manufacturing, chip-making tools, etching, photomasks, and much more.

The upcoming Sony PlayStation 6 is slated to launch sometime in 2028, and with recent reports claiming that the ongoing RAM crisis likely won’t end or ease up much before then, concerns are mounting about the price of next-gen gaming consoles. Those concerns are seemingly justified, with ubiquitous hardware leaker, KeplerL2, indicating that the PS6’s bill of materials cost has increased by as much as $200 since they predicted the cost at $760. This puts the BOM cost of the PS6 at around $960, if the leaker is to be believed, and current speculation suggests that the console may be priced at around $850-899 when it reaches the end consumer.

Ubisoft has been undergoing a controversial restructuring, having previously laid off hundreds of staff across multiple studios. In the latest round of layoffs, announced earlier in June, the gaming giant laid off 51 employees—28% of its staff at the location—at its Barcelona studio, resulting in the announcement of a strike at the branch. According to Insider Gaming, employees at Ubisoft Barcelona will strike every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon between June 30 and July 16.

Wildgate, the sci-fi PvPvE shooter, launched on Steam in July 2025, and less than a year after its launch, Dreamhaven and Moonshot Games have revealed that Wildgate will be getting its last content update in July. After that update, patch 1.5.4, which will deliver a host of new content, the game will enter maintenance mode. This means that the game will still receive updates, including “bug fixes, balance updates, and small events, activations or rewards that generally repurpose existing content,” but the studio says it “has not found a large enough audience to sustain ongoing development. Wildgate will still remain playable and purchasable on all platforms where it is available, and the developer says that “we plan on participating in as many sales and discounts as we can.”

Following the recent release of FSR 4 support on RDNA 3 GPUs, Valve engineer, Pierre-Loup Griffais, has announced in a post on Bluesky that the same support has officially been added to Linux via Steam’s Proton compatibility layer. Support for FSR 4 on RDNA 3 comes by way of the latest version of Proton Experimental, so it’s by no means a stable implementation just yet, but the engineer specifically calls out SteamOS and the Steam Machine as the target system for the new upscaler support, suggesting that Valve will invest development resources into getting the support into a more complete state ahead of the full roll-out of the Steam Machine.

Lords of the Fallen 2 (stylized as Lords of the Fallen II) is an upcoming indie dark fantasy RPG with Souls-like combat that was originally slated to launch in fall 2026. According to a new update by CI Games founder, Marek Tyminski on X, Lords of the Fallen II has been moved to Q1 2027. There is still no fixed launch date, however, and Tyminski has provided some insights as to why the launch window was moved, and, surprisingly, it isn’t entirely because of GTA VI, although that is certainly part of the reason for the change.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/shit/p/1213362/sam-altman-you-will-answer-to-allah-for-the-crimes-you-ve-committed

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NVIDIA’s next generation of graphics cards, under the “Blackwell-Next” name, began their integration into the Linux kernel some time ago. The latest set of patches now includes updates for handling Compute Express Link (CXL). This particular patch is intriguing because it refers to the next generation of NVIDIA GPUs with the “Blackwell-Next” architecture, even though NVIDIA has publicly confirmed the codenames for its upcoming GPU architectures multiple times. From the “Blackwell” generation, we have seen another variant called “Blackwell Ultra” in the B300 series. However, the next-generation architecture has been publicly confirmed to be called “Rubin.” Therefore, it is unclear why NVIDIA’s engineers are referring to the next generation GPU design as “Blackwell-Next,” given that the codenames have been public for some time.

Following the recent updates to the Keychron wireless keyboard line-up, with new ZMK firmware and mechanical and Hall effect models reaching gamers, Keychron has started to tease an upcoming version of its V6 keyboard that it is calling a next-gen keyboard architecture. The post on X revealing the keyboard’s design and existence reveals that it will have TMR sensing technology, which is known to be more efficient than Hall-effect sensors, and a “Nova Socket architecture,” with a hybrid platform. This all suggests that Keychron, which has long used TMR sensors in its wireless “HE” keyboard series, will leverage TMR sensors in order to support both mechanical and analogue magnetic switches.

We recently reported that Xbox seems to be having some troubles, with significant layoffs and a 100-day plan on the cards to bring the ship around. Some of Microsoft’s issues include plummeting revenue, an affordability crisis, and low adoption rates. According to Xbox Gaming’s Chief Stragety Officer, Matthew Ball, ad-supported tiers may be one potential tool to help improve things at Xbox. In an interview with The Game Business, Ball addresses the rising costs of gaming, saying that “the costs have gone up way too high on development, and at the same point, everyone feels terrible with prices going up on hardware or software or microtransactions. That is a challenge. It’s not good if that is the only option.” He goes on to compare it to streaming, noting that the vast majority of new streaming subscriptions in recent years have been on supported subscription tiers. The comparison to ad-supported streaming services suggests Ball is mostly talking about services like Xbox Game Pass, where there have been rumors of ad-supported tiers, or potentially even steeper subsidies for console hardware—an area Xbox is leaning into more and more since Asha Sharma took over as CEO in early 2026.

The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition sets a new standard for desktop performance, featuring 3D V-Cache on both chiplets for unprecedented gaming and productivity gains. With 16 cores paired with 192 MB of L3 cache, this processor delivers exceptional performance without the complexity of asymmetric caching. Yes, it dominates gaming, too.

We previously reported about how some game studios were pushing back game launches over fears of being overshadowed by Grand Theft Auto VI in November 2026, with game developers and publishers explaining that gamers have limited time and money to invest into their hobby all at once, and launching too near such a large-scale launch could negatively impact a game’s sales. It appears as though not even Xbox Gaming’s highly anticipated Fable is immune to those same fears, as a recent announcement by Xbox on X has confirmed that Fable will now launch in February 2027 instead of its previous “autumn 2026” launch window. It has not been confirmed that GTA VI is the reason for the delay—which is not Fable’s first delay, mind you—but Xbox’s explanation that the game is being moved “so it can have the dedicated moment it deserves,” seems to suggest that GTA VI may at least be one of the factors. The original release of Fable may also have been too close to the launch of Gears of War: E-Day, which is slated to launch in September 2026. The full statement by Xbox follows.

Intel originally introduced the ATX12VO (ATX 12 Volt Only) standard in 2020, promising simplified PSU designs and efficiency improvements over the standard ATX standard, with the ATX12VO V2 standard arriving in 2022 with further efficiency improvements, especially when it comes to idle power draw. According to a recent leak by @momomo_us on X, ATX12VO appears to be getting yet another revision with further improvements to efficiency. It’s not clear when Intel will officially announce the standard update, but the proximity to Computex suggests that a Computex 2026 launch may be possible.

Valve’s SteamOS 3.8.6 Beta update has officially been announced, and although it brings the usual list of bug fixes and stability updates, the new update also adds support for a host of new hardware and some software features. For one, it looks as though AMD’s work to get HDMI 2.1 functional on Linux is progressing, with SteamOS 3.8.6 bringing support for VRR over HDMI on devices with native HDMI output. The HDMI VRR support is noted as preliminary, so it may still be an imperfect experience, but it seems as though the work is coming along. VRR frame pacing has also been improved, and TCL TVs will now more reliably connect to the handheld via the Steam Deck Dock.

According to The Korean Economic Daily, citing insider sources, Krafton has now been forced to pay out that bonus, which equates to $3.12 for every $1 every month that Unknown Worlds surpasses $69.8 million in revenue, with an upper limit of $250 million. This amounts to around 35% of Krafton’s operating profit in 2025, which may explain why Krafton fought tooth and nail to avoid paying the sum.

Following the dismissal of 31 workers in 2025, which Rockstar and Take-Two argued were motivated by gross misconduct, which drew allegations of union busting and were even commented on by UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, Rockstar workers have officially announced the Rockstar Game Workers Union as part of the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB). The union is prioritizing pay transparency, flexible working, and an end to crunch. It is also taking Rockstar to court over the aforementioned firings, and it has confirmed that a court date for the final hearing in the legal battle has been set, although it has not shared when the hearing will take place. In the meantime, the union is collecting donations to fund the legal battle.

Mina the Hollower, a new retro action-adventure 2D platformer from the creators of Shovel Knight, is coming to Steam, Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, and Xbox on May 29, but ahead of the game’s launch, it has been reviewed by a number of publications, who have consistently rated the game highly enough that it has reached the number-one spot in Metacritic’s 2026 game rankings, beating out both Forza Horizon 6 and Pokémon Pokopia. As we’ve seen before, though, the official Metacritic score does not always line up with the user score, although Shovel Knight is a legendary retro game, so the developer, Yacht Club Games, clearly has some idea of what the fans want.

Recent moves indicate that Valve is planning an imminent launch for the Steam Machine, but more recently, Valve increased the pricing of its existing Steam Deck hardware across the board by as much as $300. Following the announcement of the Steam Deck price changes, notable industry insider, Brad Lynch, who has previously supplied accurate leaks regarding Valve products, compared the updated Steam Deck pricing to what he had heard about the starting price of the Steam Machine. According to the leaker, the planned Steam Machine pricing from two months ago was “still higher than today’s Steam Deck prices.”

Amid news of NVIDIA retiring the legacy Win32 Control Panel application for its graphics driver with its latest GeForce 610.47 WHQL Game Ready driver, an important new development flew under the radar. The driver apparently introduces profile settings related to DLSS Neural Rendering that’s part of the next-generation DLSS 5. Warkratos, over at Guru3D Forums discovered three new DLSS NR (Neural Rendering) and DLSS NR SL (Neural Rendering Streamlined) settings in Profile Inspector—"Enable DLSS NR Override,” “Enable DLSS NR SL Override,” and “Override DLSS NR Presets.”

Samsung is steadily working towards its goal of creating 1000-layer NAND Flash storage modules. However, as manufacturing complexities increase, the company cannot achieve this with a single chip. Instead, it is turning to advanced packaging solutions to stack two 450-layer V-NAND modules into a single 900-layer V-NAND chip. According to ET News, which first reported this manufacturing achievement, Samsung is using Cell Multi-Bonding (CMB) technology, a variant of wafer stacking achieved through hybrid bonding. This process forms a permanent bond between two silicon chips using embedded metal bumps that are fused together to create a single chip. Multiple dies, or in Samsung’s case, multiple whole silicon wafers, can be connected by stacking two chip back ends together. Samsung’s proprietary process, called CMB, paves the way for 1000-layer V-NAND chips by 2030.

Gigabyte’s MO27Q2A is a 27-inch 1440p gaming monitor built around Samsung’s third-generation QD-OLED panel, driven at 280 Hz. It builds directly on the MO27Q2 with a 40 Hz speed bump, a VESA ClearMR step-up, otherwise having identical hardware. Our testing shows excellent grayscale accuracy after minor tuning, and near-instant pixel response which is great for gaming.

Earlier this year, we learned that NVIDIA began selling its “Vera” CPU generation as a standalone solution, offering hyperscalers and cloud providers a CPU ready for the agentic AI era. It appears that the “Vera” CPU generation could propel NVIDIA to become one of the largest CPU makers, just behind AMD and Intel in their own game. According to the company’s own estimates, NVIDIA is projected to sell about $20 billion worth of “Vera” CPUs, unlocking a $200 billion Total Addressable Market (TAM) with its standalone offerings. As NVIDIA partners with every major hyperscaler to supply “Vera” CPU racks, we are starting to see many deployments across infrastructure providers for their own use cases and offering it to third-party customers. This approach allows NVIDIA to tap into a massive market, potentially propelling it to become one of the largest CPU makers.

Creative launched the Sound Blaster AE-X to its PCIe sound card lineup, following the Audigy FX Pro model that was introduced back in March. While the Audigy FX Pro was aimed at desktop users who are making the shift from onboard audio, the new Sound Blaster AE-X is aiming more towards gamers, audiophiles, and professionals. The sound card is equipped with the ESS ES9039Q2M dual-channel DAC, supporting playback up to 32-bit/384 kHz, a claimed 130dB SNR, and direct DSD256 decoding. The DSD256 (Quad-rate DSD) is an ultra-high-resolution digital audio format mostly used by those working with high-resolution lossless audio formats. Headphone amplification is done by the Creative X-amp discrete architecture, rated for headphones up to 600 ohms. This covers most high-end studio and audiophile headphones that tend to struggle with standard motherboard audio outputs. ASIO 2.3 (Audio Stream Input/Output) support is also included for low-latency recording and monitoring.

NVIDIA reported its Q1 2026 earnings with revenue reaching $81.6 billion, setting a new record. Amid these record-breaking results, the company announced a change in how it reports revenue from its GeForce RTX gaming GPUs. According to NVIDIA CFO Colette Kress, the standalone GeForce RTX GPU gaming revenue is no longer separately listed and is now integrated under the “Edge Computing” segment. This segment “highlights devices for agentic and physical AI, including PCs, game consoles, workstations, AI-RAN base stations, robotics, and automotive.” The last standalone report for gaming revenue was in Q4 2025, where NVIDIA posted $3.7 billion. Now, under the “Edge Computing” category, NVIDIA reported $6.4 billion, an increase of 10% from the previous quarter and 29% from the same period last year, when this segment had a different name.

KDE Plasma 6.7 Beta Introduces Plasma Bigscreen Mode for HTPCs

After 2026 saw the launch of several strong single-player games—Pragmata, Resident Evil Requiem, Crimson Desert, and Far Far West showing strong performance in terms of sales, Sega has just released its financial results for the year ending on March 31 (FY 2026), and it’s not looking good for the gaming giant’s live-service games. According to the results, Sonic Rumble Party showed poor performance, and there was a delay in some as-yet unannounced games. Most notably, Sega has officially cancelled its mystery “Super Game,” citing no additional costs with associated with the game’s cancellation. What exactly this super game was is unclear, but it was announced as far back as 2021 as a collaboration with Microsoft and would see Sega build a game using Microsoft Azure.

Neowiz, the game studio behind the 2023 standout, Lies of P, has officially confirmed in its Q1 2026 earnings report that the sequel to Lies of P is officially in full-scale development, although likely in the very early stages of the process, since parts of the report still list the game as being in “vertical slice,” which is a stage of development in which the studio makes a small part of the game to develop a feel for what the rest of the game will feel like. A new job listing on the Neowiz website also sees the game studio hiring a developer to work in an art team at Round8 where they will “leverage generative AI technology to maximize the efficiency of the art production process and innovate the visual quality of games.”

In the world of Hall effect and TMR gaming keyboards, tactile switches are somewhat of a rarity, largely because the tactile bump somewhat defeats the object of having an adjustable actuation point. Despite this, Keychron has just announced not one, but two tactile magnetic switches for its Ultra-Fast Lime Magnetic Switch line-up: the Banana and Silent Banana switches. There is also a new Silent Red linear switch joining the two Banana variants and the original Lime linear switch. The new switches are available on Keychron’s online store for $29.99 for a pack of 110 switches, which is very much on the affordable side of the spectrum, especially compared to the Gateron Magnetic Jade Emerald Heavy Tactile switch, which comes in at $59.50 for 70 switches or $76.50 for 90.

The Ninkear YBOOK 15 is a decent option for light users who want a 2-in-1 for casual web browsing. It stays cool and quiet no matter the load, and the solid keyboard and large touchpad make it pleasant to use daily. However, that aging CPU platform and the dim screen might be an issue for many, even at such a good price.

Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) and Solid State Drives (SSDs) are among the most sought-after commodities in computing today, as the expansion of AI data centers consumes everything in its path. According to Seagate, Sandisk, and Western Digital, demand is so high that customers are signing long-term supply agreements lasting up to five years. This duration is significant because customers are now planning their contracts around demand expansion, which is not only substantial but will also bring better balance to the supply chain. With customers driving steady demand, HDD and SSD manufacturers know exactly how much spinning rust or NAND Flash to produce to meet this demand. Over time, this is a positive development for a supply chain that will adapt with expanding production capacity. However, it poses a short-term challenge for PC gamers.

Intel recently unveiled its “Wildcat Lake” Core 300 series of laptop processors, designed for the entry-level market with excellent CPU and GPU capabilities to meet basic needs. By combining two “Cougar Cove” P-cores with four LPE “Darkmont” cores, these processors should provide sufficient CPU power for basic tasks in the entry-level segment. Especially when paired with the NPU 5, Xe display and media engine, and a GPU featuring up to two Xe3 cores, this SoC should handle tasks with ease, including some very light entry-level gaming. Today, the first benchmarks appeared, showcasing what this CPU is capable of and how it compares to industry-leading solutions in this price range, such as Apple’s newest MacBook Neo, thanks to the initial PassMark benchmark results.

You know we’ve hit rock-bottom with memory affordability when ASRock innovates a new memory standard to lower prices. The new “HUDIMM,” or half unbuffered DIMM, is an ASRock-innovated standard. It calls for UDIMMs with half a rank of memory, populating just one of the two 40-bit sub-channels. Such a DIMM would only offer half its bandwidth even at its rated memory clock, and of course half the density. The HUDIMM standard is targeted at entry-level builds and business desktops that just want a modern platform for everyday tasks, and something to tide over the DDR5 memory crunch. ASRock partnered with Team Group to manufacture the first HUDIMM memory modules, which it tested to work on its Intel 600-series, 700-series, and 800-series chipset motherboards. HUDIMM support probably requires some UEFI firmware-level awareness of the standard, and ASRock is expected to release firmware updates for the same.

An Assassin’s Creed Black Flag remake has long been rumored, with recent news out of the rumor mill indicating an April launch for what will apparently be called Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced. More recently, it has been revealed by a game description scraped from the Indonesian Game Ratings System scraped by IGRSDB that Black Flag Resynced will also include new characters and stories compared to the new game. The game will also have an 18+ rating in Indonesia, and it also lists PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series platforms, suggesting Ubisoft will stick with its previous day-one cross-platform launch strategy. Curiously, there is no mention of the Nintendo Switch 2, but given the launch of AC: Shadows on Nintendo’s handheld, it seems reasonable to assume it will launch there as well.

t was recently leaked that Epic Games was planning a host of new game modes for Fortnite, following a brutal round of layoffs that saw as many as 1,000 workers lose their jobs. However, if a recent Bloomberg report is anything to go by, one of the game modes mentioned in the Fortnite leak may be its own game entirely. The report cites conversations with four current and former Epic employees, who say that the game company will use its partnership with Disney to build a game featuring Disney characters in an Arc Raiders-like extraction shooter format.

Intel Foundry has been delivering some interesting research lately, and the newest installment is the world’s thinnest gallium nitride (GaN) chiplet, with the base silicon measuring just 19 micrometers in thickness. The company manufactured a 300-millimeter GaN-on-silicon wafer, which is one of the first combinations of GaN with traditional silicon logic on a single chip. In traditional manufacturing setups, GaN is reserved for power electronics and is not mixed with silicon-based computational logic. However, Intel has managed to combine GaN semiconductors for power delivery with silicon-based compute logic, meaning that power chips can now perform basic computations and actions on their own, without needing a separate chip to dictate behavior.

The NVIDIA App update today introduced some interesting features, such as DLSS 4.5 dynamic multi-frame generation and a 6x mode. Additionally, the app now includes a new beta version of NVIDIA Auto Shader Compilation (ASC). This feature takes DirectX 12 shaders from games and quietly compiles them while the system is idle or not running any graphically intensive tasks. Typically, when you start a game, you have to wait for all assets to load and shaders to compile before you can begin playing. However, with ASC, NVIDIA aims to shorten this process by pre-compiling shaders to reduce loading times and, interestingly, decrease in-game stuttering, which can occur when shaders don’t load properly. NVIDIA states that this feature is opt-in within the NVIDIA App and can be enabled by navigating to the Graphics Tab > Global Settings > Shader Cache. Once in the menu, users can access a range of settings, including the option to turn on Auto Shader Compilation.

Intel’s “Wildcat Lake” processors, part of the Core 300 series non-Ultra family, have been leaked by a reputable source Jaykihn0 on X, revealing the entire lineup across various configurations and SKUs. The lineup includes six SKUs across the Core 3, Core 5, and Core 7 tiers, all designed to operate within a 15 to 35 W TDP range. Each model features a hybrid core configuration, pairing two “Cougar Cove” P-cores with four low-power efficiency cores, completely omitting the traditional “Darkmont” E-cores. Boost clocks range from 4.3 GHz on the entry-level Core 3 304 up to 4.8 GHz on the Core 7 360. All six SKUs share 6 MB of L3 cache, a single NPU tile, and integrated Xe3 graphics. The leak suggests that Intel is bringing architecture closely related to the Core Ultra 300 “Panther Lake” mobile platform into the embedded and industrial space, or perhaps into low-cost laptop configurations that don’t require the power of “Panther Lake,” appealing to buyers seeking budget-friendly options.