Latest News - Page 136

UFS 5.0 is set to become the new standard for embedded flash storage in next-gen mobile devices, including high-end smartphones. Delivering the speed and performance required for on-device AI and other hardware-intensive workloads, UFS 5.0's new M-PHY version 6.0 introduces a new mode that can theoretically support speeds of up to 46.6 Gigabits per second (Gb/s) per lane.

And with that, compact next-gen devices with UFS 5.0 flash storage should be able to achieve read/write performance of around 10.8 GB/s (10,800 MB/s) across two lanes. And with that, even though UFS 5.0 is still being standardized by JEDEC, KIOXIA has begun shipping evaluation samples of UFS 5.0 flash memory to chipset vendors.

These samples feature a custom in-house controller for UFS 5.0 alongside KIOXIA's groundbreaking 8th-generation BiCS FLASH 3D flash memory, with CBA (CMOS directly Bonded to Array) technology to boost power efficiency, performance, and density. With a compact 7.5 x 13mm size and capacities of 512GB and 1 TB, these samples are all about flexibility and suitability for a wide range of devices and applications.

Seamus Blackley hasn't been a Microsoft employee for decades, but he was a key part of the core team that brought the first Xbox console to market, spearheading the movement and design of the original 'DirectX Box' that would compete with the likes of Sony and Nintendo. And with that context out of the way, in a recent interview with GamesBeat, Seamus Blackley shared his thoughts on the recent seismic shake-up over at Microsoft Gaming and Xbox.

With Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer and Xbox President Sarah Bond retiring, and newcomer Asha Sharma taking over with a history in AI, there has been a lot of speculation about what this could mean for Xbox's long-term future. However, communication from everyone has been on message, reassuring fans that Xbox isn't going anywhere and is committed to a future of games and new console hardware.

And with that, from Seamus Blackley's perspective, it's essentially the beginning of the end for Xbox at Microsoft. "Satya Nadella has made an incredible number of bets and invested an incredible amount of money and credibility in the transform model AI future," Blackley said. "Xbox, like a lot of businesses that aren't the core AI business, is being sunsetted."

New reports appearing online from users and even hardware manufacturers suggest that AMD has discontinued official driver support for its first major PC gaming handheld APU, the Ryzen Z1 Extreme. The APU, which pairs Zen 4 CPU Cores with RDNA 3 Radeon Graphics, is only a couple of years old, which is why this is cause for concern.

The Ryzen Z1 Extreme powers the original Lenovo Legion Go and ASUS ROG Ally X flagship Windows 11 gaming handhelds, and users of both devices report that neither has received a driver update for several months. In the case of the Lenovo Legion Go, the company's Korean community team responded to a user asking about support that there are "no more plans" to release new drivers for the original Legion Go handheld.

Now, it's worth noting that AMD hasn't announced it won't release drivers for the Ryzen Z1 Extreme, so this isn't official. However, no new driver releases for several months is not great news for PC gamers with these devices. Without updated drivers, they'll miss out on optimizations for new game releases and other performance-related updates.

Retail prices for desktop-class DDR5 memory for new PC builds or upgrades have increased dramatically in recent months due to the ongoing memory crunch affecting the entire consumer technology market. The situation is pretty dire, so even if what we're seeing here is simply a short-term course correction, it's still some good news in what has been a couple of months of bleak reporting on the state of PC hardware.

Tracking the average and lowest prices of memory kits, it looks like prices have dropped across Europe in recent weeks. As reported by a group of enthusiasts on Reddit, with Tom's Hardware also confirming the price changes with some of Germany's largest suppliers of PC hardware. Tracking 32GB DDR5 memory kits from companies like Corsair and Kingston, the outlet has confirmed the downward trend.

However, even though it's technically a steep decline when pricing drops from €550 for a Corsair kit in January to €463, it's still a lot more expensive than the average price of around €100 back in October of last year. It will be interesting to see whether this downward trend continues, if prices increase, or if they settle at a new average for the remainder of 2026.

AMD formally launched its new FSR Redstone, covering FSR Upscaling, FSR Frame Generation, and FSR Ray Regeneration, all powered by cutting-edge AI models. A fourth component, FSR Radiance Caching for accelerating ray-tracing performance, is on track for a 2026 release, with the entire 'ML-Enhanced' suite of technologies exclusive to AMD's RDNA 4 generation of Radeon RX 9000 Series graphics cards.

Currently, the only game that supports all three available FSR Redstone technologies is Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, which supports FSR's AI-powered upscaling, frame generation, and ray regeneration for its ray-tracing features. Although several titles already support the new FSR Upscaling and FSR Frame Generation technologies, the second game to support the FSR trifecta is set to be the highly anticipated Crimson Desert.

According to developer and publisher Pearl Abyss marketing lead Will Powers (via Videocardz), Crimson Desert is an AMD-partnered release and the studio has collaborated with Team Red to enable FSR Redstone technologies, including Ray Regeneration for the game's ray-tracing features.

Intel is apparently moving towards the rumored goal of a unified core strategy for its processors, or so a recent job advert suggests.

Olrak29 on X (via Wccftech) spotted the ad for a senior CPU verification engineer at Intel, which mentions seeking a highly motivated individual to join the 'Unified Core' design team.

As you're doubtless aware, Intel's current hybrid approach for CPU cores is to have them split into performance and efficiency cores (and of late, a scattering of low-power cores, too).

Recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sat down for a lengthy interview with The Indian Express, where he gave a rather strange and cold response to a question about the energy required to train complex AI models. This has become a significant concern in many markets, as AI energy consumption is now dwarfing that of most, if not all, other industries.

And with that, the underlying approach of Sam Altman's bizarre response is more or less the idea that if a human can complete a task in a few seconds or minutes versus an AI model that took vast amounts of energy, more than, say, a small city, to train, what's the point or benefit?

"One of the things that is always unfair in this comparison, where people talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model relative to how much it costs for one human to do an inference query," Sam Altman says. "It also takes a lot of energy to train a human; it takes 20 years of life, and all of the food that you eat during that time, before you get smart."

Select products in Lenovo's 'Intelligent Devices Group' portfolio, which includes PCs, tablets, and mobile devices, are reportedly going to experience a price increase in early March 2026. This news arrives via CRN, citing Lenovo's Wade McFarland as the source.

In a letter to its partners, confirmed by Lenovo, "the scope and impact of any updates will vary, and specific details will be communicated directly where applicable." In a follow-up statement provided to CRN, Ryan McCurdy, Lenovo's North America president, added that "there's no way around it" and that the company "absolutely had to adjust and continue to adjust" prices in response to the global DRAM and NAND crisis.

The last couple of months, or the beginning of 2026 to be more precise, have been tumultuous for the consumer technology market as the dramatic increase in memory and storage prices, alongside limited supply, has led to an unprecedented situation where the biggest players in the space, like Lenovo, are having to deal with the situation brought on by the current AI boom.

Although official roadmaps and even standard CPU cycle expectations have put AMD's new Zen 6-powered lineup of desktop Ryzen processors on track for a 2026 release, new reports are indicating that we shouldn't expect to see next-gen Ryzen until 2027 at the earliest. This news arrives via the outlet Benchlife, which claims the codename 'Olympic Ridge' CPU lineup is no longer on the cards for this year.

Interestingly, or unsurprisingly, this doesn't mean that we won't see Zen 6 at all in 2026, a processor technology that AMD describes as an "industry-first 2nm" CPU architecture. With AMD's roadmap highlighting "more AI pipelines" and expanded AI data type support, there's a good chance the company is simply prioritizing or allocating 2026's Zen 6 chips for its EPYC server processors.

This new rumor coincides with reports that Intel is also delaying the reveal and launch of its next-gen Nova Lake-S desktop processor to 2027. Both companies were originally set to go head-to-head in the desktop space with new architectures and different process technology later this year. But with the state of the consumer PC market at the moment, a delay feels almost inevitable, given that memory prices are skyrocketing and the biggest players in the CPU and GPU space have shifted to a "data center first" approach.

ASUS has quietly announced a new GeForce RTX 5070 for small-form-factor or SFF, builds with the ASUS Dual GeForce RTX 5070 EVO and ASUS Dual GeForce RTX 5070 EVO OC Edition graphics cards. And we say quietly because the product pages for these new models are now live, but there's no word on when these might hit retail shelves, and at what price.

These new SKUs arrive after ASUS also launched a series of slimmer Dual 'EVO' GeForce RTX 5060 and RTX 5060 Ti GPUs late last year. Whereas those were all slim 2.1-slot-thick cards, the Dual 'EVO' GeForce RTX 5070 variants are 2.5-slot-thick and feature a slightly different, more premium design. Still compact at 229 x 120 x 50mm, they feature dual axial-tech fans with 0dB technology and vented backplates.

With the ASUS Dual GeForce RTX 5070 EVO OC Edition shipping with a Boost Clock OC Mode of 2572 MHz compared to the 2542 MHz 'OC Mode' of the non-OC edition, this looks to be the only real difference between the two. As seen with other GeForce RTX 5070 GPUs, using ASUS's GPU Tweak III platform or another app, both cards should be able to be tuned to hit the same level of performance.

Intel was meant to launch its next-gen Nova Lake-S desktop processors this year, but according to the latest leaks, we'll be seeing Nova Lake-S unveiled at CES 2027 next year.

In a new post by leaker "Golden Pig Upgrade" on Weibo: "It's alright, Nova Lake-S will also be released in 2027, they're all rushing to CES". We have been hearing about a "product winter" coming, meaning no major releases this year because of all of the headaches that the DRAM market is making... and now Intel is reportedly delaying its next-gen consumer desktop processor, and so too is AMD with rumored delays on Zen 6 until 2027.

Intel's next-gen Core Ultra 400 series "Nova Lake-S" was the biggest release of the year, as it will bring Intel up to a better competitive position in the consumer desktop CPU market against AMD and its mega-successful Ryzen CPUs. Nova Lake-S was rumored to also include a new X3D competitor with Intel's own "bLLC" cache on dual-tile, power-hungry 800W+ processors.

Announced on Friday, one of the biggest gaming stories of the year has been the unexpected shake-up at Microsoft Gaming and Xbox. To summarize, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer is retiring after almost 40 years at the company, and the relatively unknown Asha Sharma will step into the role.

Without a background in gaming or PC hardware, Asha Sharma is stepping into the role after serving as President of Microsoft's CoreAI product, and before that, as a Vice President at Meta and as COO of Instacart. With Microsoft spending the last couple of years shifting the Xbox brand to become a platform where everything from a PC to a smartphone to even a PlayStation 5 console is considered "an Xbox," Xbox fans and gamers alike are concerned about what this shake-up means for Xbox going forward.

With the announcement of the shake-up, including communication from Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO of Microsoft, outgoing Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer, and newcomer Asha Sharma, it's the latter who offers an early glimpse at what this means for the Xbox brand and Microsoft Gaming going forward. For those worried about a full pivot toward AI, which is increasingly becoming a mainstay with Microsoft's Windows 11 operating system, there is some good news.

NVIDIA has reportedly been working on an even higher-end version of the GeForce RTX 5090, with leaks on the purported "Blackwell TITAN" or an RTX 5090 Ti.

In a new video from leaker Moore's Law is Dead, a source said that NVIDIA has indeed been working on a higher-end GB202-based GPU. The source said: "I was able to confirm that the "Blackwell TITAN" is real... and has been in testing since at least H1 2025. Now to be clear, I have no idea if it will launch, and I have no idea if the specs I'm about to tell you are still accurate but someone I talked to who tested it last year confirmed the following".

The source continued, that the purported Blackwell TITAN or RTX 5090 Ti would have:

Phil Spencer is officially retiring from Xbox on February 23, 2026, sources tell IGN's Ryan McCaffrey.

It's an end of an era at Xbox. Phil Spencer, who has been with Xbox for decades, will leave Microsoft in just a few days' time. Xbox president Sarah Bond has also left the company. Microsoft AI boss Asha Sharma will now lead the Xbox games division, now called Microsoft Gaming, and Matt Booty is now Chief Content Officer (CCO), a promotion from his previous position as Xbox Game Studios head.

"I want to thank Phil for his extraordinary leadership and partnership. Over 38 years at Microsoft, including 12 years leading Gaming, Phil helped transform what we do and how we do it," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a memo to staff.

Arc Raiders is doing so well that Nexon is ready to entrust the future of its gaming brand to one of the leads behind the game.

Nexon, one of the biggest gladiators in the billion-dollar live service arena, today announced a surprise business decision by appointing a key creative to a high-level executive position.

Patrick Soderlund, the CEO of Arc Raiders developer Embark Studios, has been promoted to executive chairman at the company. Having spent years working on Battlefield as CEO of DICE, Soderlund went on to found Embark and create one of the hottest gaming sensations on the planet. Soderlund's rise within Nexon is similar to that of the late (and great) Vince Zampella, who received a hefty promotion to lead the Battlefield franchise following Apex Legends' billion-dollar success.

We're big fans of Corsair's modular and impressive FRAME 4000D case, and it's something that we use daily as part of our latest PC gaming and hardware test rigs. When paired with the company's InfiniRail Fan Mounting System and iCUE LINK cooling, you not only get a great-looking case, but one that delivers optimal cooling with minimal clutter and a friendly DIY installation approach.

Of course, things like aesthetics are subjective, but if you're a fan of the mesh-panel look of the FRAME 4000D, then the new limited-edition Corsair FRAME 4000D Nova and Galaxy models, part of the Vault Series, are worth checking out. Especially if you're a fan of metallic blue and purple. The new "color-shift paint finishes" offer a sportscar-like, pearlescent finish that changes with the lighting and moves across the surface.

"Nova shifts from blue through teal to purple highlights, while Galaxy transitions from pink through green to gray, giving each case a distinct visual identity," Corsair explains. But, there's more to the new FRAME 4000D Nova and Galaxy cases than a fancy coat of paint - they're also introducing some upgrades and even some design changes, like a more compact PSU shroud.

As spotted by Videocardz, it looks like a new GPU world record was recently set by none other than AMD, working with experienced overclockers Bill 'Sampson' Alverson and Allen 'Splave' Golibersuch. The attempt included overclocking an air-cooled Radeon RX 9060 XT before moving on to liquid nitrogen cooling to see just how high the GPU clock speed could go.

And with that, it recorded 4.769 GHz (4,769 MHz), handily beating the world record for GPU frequency. This is a massive 50+% increase over the 3.13 GHz (3,130 MHz) listed by AMD as the maximum Boost Frequency for both the Radeon RX 9060 XT 8GB and 16GB models. Unfortunately, the short video posted by AMD doesn't include the full spec breakdown of the world-record attempt, which is an impressive achievement.

Increasing clock speeds is often tied to power draw, so the expectation is that the Radeon RX 9060 XT we saw was probably drawing more power than the GPU's 160W power rating. Unlike memory and CPU testing, there's no one official ranking or leaderboard collating and verifying each GPU frequency world record attempt; the 4.769 GHz is definitely a lot higher than Splave's own 4.02 GHz record captured with a GeForce RTX 4090.

Although not limited to the GeForce RTX 5090, it makes sense that the majority of reports relating to burning, melting, or damaged 12V-2x6 power cables and connectors are related to NVIDIA's latest flagship. One of the latest reports from a user (on the Mobile01 forum) posting images of their burned-out cable and connector involves GIGABYTE's AORUS GeForce RTX 5090 MASTER ICE.

However, what makes this case a little different is that, even though it is a premium GeForce RTX 5090 with out-of-the-box overclocked settings, the user actually had it undervolted and the GPU power limit reduced to 500W from the default 600W. The voltage limit was reduced to 0.9v, about 0.2v lower than stock settings, so you'd think this would help mitigate some of the risk of the connector failing.

However, as we've seen cases of the Radeon RX 9070 XT and the GeForce RTX 5080 experiencing this issue, no high-powered GPU seems safe when using the new 16-pin standard and 12V-2x6 power cables. In this case, both the cable connecting to the GPU and the GPU's connection appear to be affected.

Razer has announced a new $499.99 USD flagship PC gaming keyboard, calling it its most "ambitious keyboard to date." The Razer Huntsman Signature Edition, launching with a limited drop of 1,337 numbered units, sports a CNC‑milled 6063-aluminum chassis treated with a PVD (Physical Vapor Deposition) finish and polish you'd find on luxury watches and jewelry.

The keyboard itself appears to be a custom version of the impressive Razer Huntsman V3 Pro TKL 8K that we recently reviewed, with the same Razer Analog Optical Switches Gen-2, true 8,000 Hz polling, and gamer-friendly features like Rapid Trigger. Except here, each Razer Huntsman Signature Edition keyboard is hand-polished and goes through a "rigorous unit-level inspection."

It certainly looks impressive, with its all-black finish and polished edges. The "mirror-polished metallic" snake keycap is also a nice touch, adding a dose of style and luxury to the design.

ASUS and Microsoft released the ROG Xbox Ally X gaming handheld late last year, positioning the Windows-based device as more of an Xbox console thanks to the introduction of the Xbox Full Screen Experience for Windows. Launching with an MSRP of $999 in the US, and powered by the AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme chip with integrated Radeon 890M GPU, it's one of the most powerful portable gaming options on the market today.

And now, in certain regions, it's also among the most expensive, thanks to price increases driven by the current memory and storage crisis that is disrupting all corners of the consumer technology market. In Australia, the already high $1,599 AUD price (about $1,125 USD) has received an unannounced $200 price increase to $1,799 AUD (about $1,265 USD).

This price is already reflected at retail outlets in the country, with additional reports indicating that the ROG Xbox Ally X price increase has also hit Japan. There, the handheld has seen its price increase by ¥30,000, around $200 USD. It's unclear whether the price increase will hit more markets in the coming days or weeks, but based on ASUS's response to the Australian price increase, it's very likely.