Samsung Foundry is slowly tightening its grip on the semiconductor market against foundry leader TSMC with major contract wins from tech giants like Apple, NVIDIA, and Tesla.

In a new report from the Korea Herald, the outlet has looked at some of the recent deals Samsung Foundry has inked, which is helping it reduce its semiconductor foundry losses, and better position the company to be a direct competitor to TSMC.

An industry official said: "As foundry orders have been heavily concentrated in TSMC, client firms are now compelled to diversify their supply chains to reduce risks. Since Samsung Electronics is the only company besides TSMC capable of producing advanced chips at the 2-nanometer level, more business opportunities are likely to follow".

In another tech scam where a purchased component turns out to be just a shell of what it should be, the buyer of an external hard drive got a nasty surprise.

As per a Reddit post uncovered by Tom's Hardware that you can see above, the drive in question was a Seagate model, supposedly a 1TB Backup Plus Slim external HDD.

However, while "everything about it looked and felt legit" at first according to the Redditor, when the case of the external device was opened, there was a microSD card inside (presumably with a small capacity).

It's been a little over two weeks since the release of Battlefield 6, and the title has attracted hundreds of thousands of players, but for those who didn't buy the game, EA has a surprise for you - the new free-to-play Battlefield 6 battle royale is now available.

EA has confirmed to me that as part of the first season of Battlefield 6, Battlefield Studios is releasing "Battlefield REDSEC," a "genre-shifting free-to-play destination built on Battlefield's iconic DNA". Players will be dropping into Fort Lyndon, Battlefield's biggest map in the franchise where 100 players in teams are pit against each other as they scavenge to find valuable loot, while also crafting unique game-winning strategies of taking out their opponents.

Players will be able to leverage the destruction seen in Battlefield 6, within the new battle royale mode, as Battlefield Studios writes, "The power of Tactical Destruction brings an entirely new level of strategy to the genre, as players create their own paths to victory or turn the environment into their own deadly weapon while crushing opposing squads."

If you haven't heard about the return of the optical drive to the world of PCs, you have now - Fujitsu has some new notebooks coming out that boast such drives.

As Fudzilla reports (via VideoCardz), this is happening over in Japan, where there's currently a resurgence in the popularity of optical drives which is tied in with support for Windows 10 ending (as we've seen in other recent media reports, such as Tom's Hardware).

Whether there's an element of exaggeration in the apparently booming sales of DVD drives in Japan - caused by people wanting to keep playing their physical media discs after upgrading to a new Windows 11 PC - it's difficult to say for sure. But clearly there's enough of a need for Fujitsu to produce notebooks that have both DVD and Blu-ray drives on board.

There have been some creative solutions in terms of brackets to hold up hefty GPUs, but someone using an ancient Nokia phone as an anti-sag support is one of the more amusing solutions ever shared on Reddit.

And as VideoCardz, who flagged this up from Notebookcheck.net, points out, there are plenty of Redditors who've used weird and wonderful things to prop up their heavyweight GPUs.

In this case, Bulochklem on Reddit has used a Nokia 6124 Classic to prop up their XFX graphics card, and as one commenter put it, when it comes to GPU support brackets: "This is it, we reached peak."

Northridge Fix is an electronics repair shop in Los Angeles, California, with over a decade of experience covering all things tech. It also has a successful YouTube channel detailing the various repairs it has undertaken, from laptops that wouldn't power on with no display to dead GPUs. The latest video focuses on the latter, specifically a damaged GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition.

"One thing I can tell you, never in your life buy a 5090 Founders Edition," Northridge Fix states in the opening section of the video. Strong words, and before we go through the reasons as to why Northridge Fix has strong feelings about NVIDIA's Founders Edition design, it's worth quickly going through what makes the GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition one of the most unique modern GPU releases to date.

Not only does it sport Double Flow Through cooling, but the dual-slot GPU includes a complex, compact, and modular PCB with a separate PCIe interface. At the time of the GPU's release earlier this year, the connectors inside the GPU were described by many as fragile, and the design wasn't considered suitable for custom water-cooling mods in the same way a traditional partner GeForce RTX 5090 would.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, or ACCC, is an independent government body that monitors fair trading and robust consumer protection laws in Australia. The body's latest target is Microsoft, which it is suing for allegedly misleading 2.7 million Australian consumers over its Microsoft 365 subscriptions.

It all boils down to recent price increases for Microsoft 365 plans, which cover the Microsoft Office suite, cloud storage, and more. Basically, Microsoft increased the subscription price for Microsoft 365 after integrating its Copilot AI tools and services. The only problem, from the ACCC's perspective, is that the company "deliberately hid" the fact that subscribers could have kept the old price if they didn't want Copilot.

According to the ACCC's investigation, once Microsoft increased prices on October 31, 2024, customers were notified that their auto-renewal would include the higher Microsoft 365 pricing, with the only other option being to cancel the service. However, once the cancellation process began, customers were informed about a hidden "classic" Copilot-free plan at the previous price point.

With the launch of NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 50 Series of graphics cards this year, MSI has not only revamped its lineup but also introduced new designs, including the brushed-gold Inspire series. The minimalist design of MSI's new Inspire range drops the company's tried-and-true gamer style for something sleeker, simpler, and creator-focused.

And this week, MSI is expanding its Inspire range to include a new compact, entry-level GeForce RTX 5050 model, available in OC and non-OC variants. The OC model pushes clock speeds to 2617 MHz in Extreme Performance mode, while the non-OC variant reaches 2587 MHz. Both offer increased performance over the 2572 MHz reference spec.

However, the most impressive part of the new MSI GeForce RTX 5050 8G INSPIRE ITX is its compact Mini-ITX form factor, measuring 147 x 120 x 45mm. This is the sort of GPU you could install in a tiny rig, which draws just 130W from a single traditional 8-pin power connector.

With official support for Windows 10 ending and the popular operating system reaching end-of-life, not everyone is making the jump to a new Windows 11 rig. But, people are buying new PC and laptops, with a new report from Counterpoint Research showing that global PC shipments grew 8.1% year-over-year in Q3 2025. The report cites "end-of-support for Microsoft Windows 10 in October 2025" and evolving US tariff policies as the main drivers of growth.

As Windows 10 support ends, both enterprise and consumers are replacing older systems with new ones, and this process will continue to serve as a "catalyst for PC market growth" in the years ahead. However, once you take a closer look at the OEM data, it appears that one of the biggest winners from Windows 10's departure is Apple. Apple's Mac and MacBook shipments for Q3 2025 grew 15% year-over-year, second only to Lenovo.

On the PC side, ASUS, HP, and Lenovo experienced double-digit growth, while Dell's shipments saw a slight decline. Naturally, part of Apple's continued growth in the PC and notebook sector comes down to the company releasing new MacBook models; however, like others, it's benefiting from ex-Windows 10 users buying something new.

Battlefield 6 getting a Battle Royale mode similar to Call of Duty: Warzone or Battlefield 5's Firestorm has been known for some time, with EA even confirming it was in development as recently as last month. A few days ago, we reported on leaks and data from within Battlefield 6 that hinted the mode was coming soon and would shadow drop this week alongside the launch of Battlefield 6 Season 1 on October 28.

Well, it looks like that's the case with EA officially teasing the Battlefield Redsec, a free-to-play Battle Royale mode for Battlefield 6. Unfortunately, neither EA nor Battlefield Studios is providing details on the mode or how it will interact with the definitely not free-to-play Battlefield 6. Will it be a separate game title on Steam and other platforms? Time will tell.

As for the setting, the short teaser showcases four soldiers in a suburban setting with a downed plane in the background and plenty of palm trees. We also see soldiers parachuting in the distance, a Battle Royale staple: jumping out of an aircraft to reach the surface. The map itself could be a potential version of Season 1's California and Eastwood map, which was recently detailed as part of Season 1's new content.

NVIDIA is preparing for the big move away from its Blackwell GPU architecture to its next-generation Rubin GPU architecture, with new patches published that will see NVIDIA moving from Boot0 to Boot42 in new Linux driver updates.

The folks over at Phoronix spotted that NVIDIA has been submitting new open-source "Nova" driver patches that show the company is currently transitioning to Boot42, ditching Boot0 for Rubin. NVIDIA engineer John Hubbard discussed the move in the patch notes, explaining that future-gen GPUs will move away from the long-standing "NV_PMC_BOOT_O" register, to the new "NV_PMC_BOOT_42" to simplify detecting the logic for Nova.

The release notes also mention that there have been 33 lines of code removed, making it cleaner and a more forward-compatible structure. This is a rather interesting development, with the new Nova code being written in Rust, there is now progress towards the next-gen Rubin GPU architecture by the NVIDIA Linux team.

A Redditor has shunt modded his RTX 4090 gaming laptop and unlocked 19% more performance, bringing its performance closer to a much more expensive RTX 5090 gaming laptop.

In a new post on Reddit, "u/thatavidreadertrue" shunt modded the GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop GPU inside of his ASUS Zephyrus M16 GU604VY gaming laptop, stacking a 1m Ohm resistor on top of the existing 5m Ohm resistor, lowering the resistance to around 0.83m Ohm. This tricked the laptop GPU into thinking it was consuming 6x less power, which is why the power draw reading displayed 40-45W, compared to its actual power draw of closer to 240W, which is 1.6x more power than the reading.

Increased power always means more heat being generated, with the user repasting the old liquid metal on the GPU using Honeywell PTM 7950, a phase-change thermal interface material (TIM) which is known for excellent performance. The user also upgraded the VRM thermal pads with the Upisren UX Pro Ultra.

AMD has just inked a deal with the US Department of Energy (DoE) on two new supercomputer projects using AMD hardware.

AMD will be building out two new supercomputers -- the Lux and Discovery supercomputers -- for the US DoE that will be used mostly for academic purposes. In a press release, AMD explained that when fully deployed, the new Lux and Discovery supercomputers will represent a combined $1 billion investment of private and public funding, enabling the DoE to build a secure, federated and standards-based infrastructure for sovereign US-based AI and science.

The new Lux AI supercomputer is co-developed between AMD, ORNL, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and HPE, powered by AMD Instinct MI355X AI GPUs, AMD EPYC CPUs, and AMD Pensando advanced networking technologies. The new Discovery AI supercomputer deepens the collaboration between DoE, ORNL, HPE, and AMD with next-gen AMD "Venice" GPUs, and AMD Instinct MI430X GPUs -- a new MI400 series AI accelerator engineered specifically for sovereign AI and scientific computing.

Apple Maps is soon to get adverts, much in the same vein as Google Maps, if some fresh speculation is to be believed.

If you're thinking this is just a rumor so it's most likely fine to ignore it, well, you might be right there, but it comes from one of the more reliable Apple leakers, Mark Gurman, in his Power On newsletter for Bloomberg (via TechRadar) - so that gives it a bit more weight than your average rumor.

At any rate, the theory is that Apple will use paid promotion in its Maps app, possibly as soon as next year (it's only a couple of months away now).

NVIDIA's Blackwell flagship is well out of reach for most people in terms of its colossal asking price, and the closest thing the majority of PC gamers might come to owning the mighty RTX 5090 graphics card is a drink coaster.

How so? Well, this is limited to another niche set of tech enthusiasts, admittedly, but VideoCardz spotted a 3D printer design for a coffee (or tea, or other preferred beverage) coaster.

It's a replica of the main printed circuit board inside NVIDIA's RTX 5090, with all the components in the correct places - and it does look rather nifty.

The console wars have been declared as over - if you listen to Gamestop commenting on Halo becoming a cross-platform title - and according to an Xbox exec, this is very much the case, and Sony is no longer Microsoft's biggest competition.

Neither is Nintendo for that matter, and in an interview with The New York Times, the theory floated by Matt Booty, who is Head of Xbox Game Studios, is that it isn't another console that Microsoft is really competing against.

We touched on this in our earlier report, which pointed out that Booty said: "Our biggest competition isn't another console. We are competing more and more with everything from TikTok to movies."

UPDATE: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella confirms the new Xbox will "innovate" on both console and PC form factors on a system level.

Microsoft is making a major departure with its next-gen console: sources tell Windows Central that the new Xbox will be a PC that mimics the console environment and plays all existing Xbox console games from gen 9 and below.

New reports indicate that Microsoft will make radical changes to its Xbox gaming business in the coming years. Sources tell Windows Central's Jez Corden that the new Xbox will be a PC running Windows with a traditional console "experience" layered on top. As was rumored and inferred, the special console-ized version of Xbox/Windows on the Xbox Ally X handheld was essentially a test for the new console.

GameStop has taken to X to declare that the "console wars" are over now that Halo is coming to PlayStation, and has jumped into taking a stab at the community.

In the X post, GameStop says that the console wars are over, adding that "for the past two decades, the global gaming community has been engaged in an ongoing and increasingly petty conflict known as The Console Wars". The company says that the conflict originated in the early 2000s with the release of Halo: Combat Evolved as an Xbox-exclusive title.

It was announced a few days ago that Halo would be coming to PlayStation in 2026 with cross-platform play, with GameStop adding that the company is "acting under its authority as a "Neural Entity and The World's Retail Gaming & Trade-in Destination, hereby declares the official cessation of the console wars".

Apple's purported 18-inch foldable iPad plans are "now in flux" according to the latest reports, with the foldable iPad postponed with a release in 2029 "at the earliest".

In his latest "Power On" newsletter, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says that Apple is preparing a slew of new products that would be the "most compelling" in its history, including the first foldable iPhone, a revamped iPhone Pro smartphone for the device's huge 20-year anniversary, new smart glasses, a tabletop robot, and other home tech.

One of those exciting devices was meant to be an 18-inch foldable iPad, but Gurman writes that unfortunately, "this device is suffering some hiccups". Apple reportedly had plans -- just like the last 6+ months of rumors have teased -- to release the foldable 18-inch iPad sometime in 2028, but the company has "run into challenges tied to the weight of the prototypes and the ultra-advanced folding OLED panel".

Apple's next-gen M6 processor will be even more powerful, and an even bigger thermal problem for a new iPad, with rumors suggesting the company will deploy a vapor chamber cooler to stop thermal throttling.

Apple recently unleashed its new M5 processor for its new MacBook Pro and iPad Pro products, but the new M5 MacBook Pro has been suffering from thermal throttling inside, with its M5 chip hitting 99C under load. To avoid any thermal throttling issues on the next-gen M6 iPad Pro, it looks like the company will be adopting the use of vapor chamber cooling, just like its recently-launched iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max smartphones.

In his latest "Power On" newsletter, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman writes that Apple will reportedly use a vapor chamber cooler inside of its next-gen M6 iPad Pro. The new M5 iPad Pro that Apple just launched features a graphene sheet to transfer heat, with the aluminum chassis acting as a heatsink.