Latest News - Page 57

After a long silence, we've recently seen a spike of activity in terms of rumors for NVIDIA's RTX 5000 Super refresh, and these GPUs have again popped up, this time courtesy of a well-known YouTube leaker.

Moore's Law is Dead's latest video focuses on NVIDIA's GPUs and mainly the rumored Super variants, but also touches on RTX 6000 graphics cards.

And what Moore's Law is Dead (MLID) tells us is pretty much along the lines of the same info he furnished us with last year (in September).

KIOXIA has long been a pioneer in flash memory, so much so that it's already been a couple of years since it partnered with HPE to deliver 130 Terabytes of data as part of the HPE Spaceborne Computer-2 project that essentially put a data center on board the International Space Station. From scientific applications to generative AI in space, the future of data centers and computing is not confined to our planet.

At HPE Discover Las Vegas 2026 next week, KIOXIA will highlight its contributions to HPE's Spaceborne Computer missions and how its SSDs will one day be part of lunar exploration. Yes, it seems like it will only be a matter of time before we see the first data center on the moon. One component of the most recent HPE Spaceborne Computer-2 project was to test and see how high-performance KIOXIA SSDs could support scientific research and edge computing in extreme environments.

Of course, KIOXIA will also showcase how its flash storage is helping transform modern cloud, AI, and hybrid environments at HPE Discover 2026. As a longtime HPE partner, KIOXIA's SSD solutions have long been a part of HPE's platforms, both large and small, so attendees will get to see everything from high-capacity cutting-edge PCIe 5.0 storage in the popular Enterprise and Datacenter Standard Form Factor (EDSFF) and 24G SAS (SAS-4) form factors through to cost-effective solutions.

Microsoft says that its next-gen Xbox console will require partnerships in order to release, hinting at a reference and OEM hardware scheme similar to the PC graphics cards market.

Things are bad for gaming right now, and particularly so at Xbox. Consoles are so expensive to make that Microsoft can't afford to make them--Xbox's new CEO Asha Sharma says that storage costs will be up more than 7x since the time she arrived by holiday 2027. This puts a unique squeeze on Microsoft because it fully subsidizes its Xbox hardware, meaning it makes no actual money on each console sold. So if Microsoft were to start making consoles again, the losses generated by each unit would be up 5x to 7x over previous years.

What can Microsoft do? In a recent memo published on the Xbox Wire, current games division CEO Asha Sharma lays out the sobering reality of Project Helix: Microsoft needs help to make the console. The costs are just too high, and signs show that they will continue rising into next year.

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and head of Xbox Game Studios Matt Booty have co-authored a new blog post detailing the next 100 days at Xbox, which outlines the company's hurdles in the coming future. Some will be much easier to navigate than others.

The post on Xbox Wire put some harsh realities into the public eye, such as Xbox ending the year at about a 3% accountability margin, and that being down year-over-year. Additionally, the post states that over the past five years Xbox has spent $20 billion on ongoing investments, which includes content development (games), platform improvements, and a hardware subsidy, yet its annual revenue has declined "nearly half a billion during that time. Going forward, this cannot continue". Notably, that $20 billion total doesn't include the acquisition of Activision Blizzard King.

Another struggle is the ongoing hardware component crisis, spurred by AI companies' endless lust for more compute. AI is consuming the world's hardware for dedicated data centers, etc., straining other electronic markets, particularly gaming hardware, as components within those devices become scarcer as manufacturers shift to making components for AI-specific hardware.

Ubisoft is being hit with another round of layoffs as the publisher is reportedly closing two more development studios, resulting in hundreds of employees being laid off.

The news comes from Insider Gaming's Tom Henderson, a well-known and credible source on Ubisoft's internal workings. Henderson took to X and wrote that Insider Gaming has received email confirmation from Ubisoft employees that upper management decided to close two development studios. The reporting from Insider Gaming prompted Ubisoft to contact the publication and confirm that the layoffs were planned, saying the information about them was under embargo.

Now, reports are surfacing that Ubisoft has closed Ubisoft Winnipeg and Ubisoft Belgrade. The closure of Winnipeg resulted in approximately 65 staff members being laid off. Ubisoft Belgrade is the next studio to be hit, which has resulted in around 100 employees being let go and the total closure of the studio. So, why the layoffs and closures? Ubisoft shutting the doors to two more development studios comes after what seems to be a years-long restructuring plan to bring the company back to its former glory after catastrophic performance following the COVID-19 pandemic.

At Computex 2026, NVIDIA unveiled Vera, its new CPU purpose-built for large-scale AI deployments and agentic systems. With its 88-core Arm-based design, it's a general-purpose data center-focused CPU powered by Arm v9.2-A 'Olympus' cores. Compared to the previous generation's Grace processor, NVIDIA claims a 1.5X increase in IPC and around 50% faster performance than existing x86 solutions.

Although a lot of the focus in the past has been placed on GPU performance, with the rise of AI factories and agents, the CPU is quickly becoming a critical component - and it's an area or market that's still relatively new for NVIDIA. Not so for AMD, which has been delivering its data center-focused EPYC processors for years now. When it comes to AI, AMD has released new performance benchmarks showing that its EPYC lineup, including the next-gen 256-core EPYC 'Venice' processor, outperforms NVIDIA Vera and Intel Xeon.

However, it's worth noting that these benchmarks are based on a single data-center rack with a 100 kW power budget, and Vera's performance is an estimate based on currently available data. "Data centers are provisioned in racks, and racks are bounded by a fixed power and thermal budget, finite floor space, software-compatibility requirements, and operational readiness," AMD explains. Adding that its numbers are based on a full workload set rather than a "single favorable benchmark."

Although its delay into early 2027 was probably the direct result of trying to avoid Grand Theft Auto 6, Playground Games' Fable reboot is still one of the most highly anticipated game releases on the horizon. And this week, in addition to the cinematic story-focused trailer that debuted at the recent Xbox Showcase event, we've now got one of our best looks at the game to date, with an uninterrupted 30-minute deep dive that showcases a wide range of gameplay and moments.

This includes traversal, engaging with NPCs in a small village, and how the questing works. For fans of the original Fable games, the blend of high-fantasy, fairy tales, and a distinctly British sense of humor is the standout. Early on in the video, we see an amusing side quest or story involving a talking pig, with branching dialogue and choices to make. Playground Games notes that this is one of hundreds of smaller side stories with choice and consequence to discover in the game, separate from the two-plus hours of motion-captured dynamic cinematic sequences in the main quest.

The new gameplay deep dive does a great job of showcasing the game's new morality system and how it's much more complex than a binary good-or-evil label for your actions. One of the more interesting aspects of this is how it's based on your actions and surroundings, so whatever you do in one particular town will shape your reputation in that area and how the town's citizens react and interact with you.

Logitech's latest productivity-focused mouse is also built for portability, with the new Mobi Fold being its first foldable mouse. The design, which integrates the folding mechanism directly into its shape and form factor, is for those seeking a simple, intuitive alternative to a laptop trackpad.

According to Logitech's research on laptop workers setting up shop in public spaces, only 26% use a mouse, even though 72% of professionals own one. The reason is fairly straightforward: carrying a 'bulky' mouse alongside a laptop adds unwanted "bulk and friction." And so, with the foldable pocket-sized Mobi Fold, you've now got a productivity mouse that's reminiscent of the eras when everyone carried a flip phone in their pockets.

The Logitech Mobi Fold is a Bluetooth mouse that can connect to up to three devices across Windows, macOS, Chrome OS, Android, iPadOS, and Linux. The Mobi Fold for Business variant includes a Logi Bolt receiver for low-latency wireless connectivity. And to extend battery life, the mouse automatically powers on and off when you fold and unfold it, with a quick one-minute charge delivering up to 22 hours of use.

Valve has officially confirmed that it will not be shipping out any more physical Steam gift cards to retailers after this year is up.

2026 is the last year for users to buy physical Steam gift cards in stores. A new Steam Support page, Valve is besieged by scammers and fraudsters that keep finding new ways to pull a fast one on the company.

"As we have continued to put more and more restrictions in place, scammers have adapted. They continue to have an impact on Steam customers and other unsuspecting individuals. So we've made the difficult decision to end the Steam Gift Card program at retail stores,"Valve said in the update.

Microsoft has released its June 2026 Patch Tuesday update, and it is a record-breaker. The company patched 206 vulnerabilities this month, surpassing the previous record of 175 set in October 2025. Of the 206 vulnerabilities patched, 33 are rated Critical, with 28 of those being remote code execution flaws.

The full breakdown covers 65 Elevation of Privilege vulnerabilities, 55 Remote Code Execution vulnerabilities, 30 Information Disclosure vulnerabilities, 27 Spoofing vulnerabilities, 19 Security Feature Bypass vulnerabilities, and 7 Denial of Service vulnerabilities. Five are zero-day vulnerabilities, and one is already being actively exploited in the wild.

CVE-2026-41091 is an Elevation of Privilege flaw in Microsoft Defender that lets attackers gain system privileges. Microsoft has already pushed out a fix through the daily automatic Defender updates, with the patched Malware Protection Engine carrying version 1.1.26040.8 or later. To check your engine version, open Settings > Privacy and Security > Windows Security > About.

It's been over 7 years since Bethesda revealed The Elder Scrolls VI, but it might not be much longer until the game is ready for a full-on reveal.

Xbox management has seen The Elder Scrolls VI in action, and the game is apparently progressing well. In a recent interview with Variety, Microsoft's gaming chief content officer Matt Booty says that Todd Howard is currently playing the hugely anticipated RPG and that it looks simply fantastic.

"So I can tell you, having visited Bethesda and sat with Todd and seen 'Elder Scrolls' playing, it looks amazing, and it's coming along well," the Xbox CCO said.

Despite a rough couple of years for the company, Intel could be set to make a turnaround after its foundry just received what could be its biggest validation yet. According to a report from The Information, Google has placed an order with Intel to manufacture more than three million Tensor Processing Units in 2028. Intel's stock jumped more than 9% on the news, adding to a gain that has already seen the stock climb nearly 169% this year.

Google's TPUs are its in-house AI chips, designed to reduce reliance on NVIDIA's GPUs while powering its own AI services and cloud offerings. Google is reportedly expected to produce more than six million TPUs between 2027 and 2028, with Intel handling roughly half that volume. Previously, TPUs were co-designed by Google and Broadcom with TSMC handling production.

TSMC holds around 73% of the global foundry market and remains the dominant producer of advanced chips for NVIDIA, Apple, and Google. But the AI boom has pushed demand well beyond what TSMC can comfortably handle. TSMC's own chairman recently acknowledged that customer demand is reaching the limits of what the company can manage, and the company is reportedly fully booked out until at least 2028. That capacity crunch has created an opening for Intel that would have been difficult to imagine a few years ago.

Doom usually gets all the glory when it comes to unusual ports, but Argentine developer Dante Leoncini has just made a strong case for Half-Life. He has successfully ported Valve's 1998 shooter to a Nokia N95, a 2007 slider phone running the long-defunct Symbian OS, and it runs at around 30 FPS with full Bluetooth mouse and keyboard support.

The port is built on Xash3D FWGS, an open-source engine designed to make the original Half-Life compatible with modern and not-so-modern platforms beyond the PC. Leoncini handled the Symbian-specific work himself, building a native port rather than relying on emulation. The result runs on a 240x320 screen, which is admittedly tiny, but the single-player campaign is working, including sound, weapons, and dedicated server creation.

The hardware gap between the Nokia N95 and a late-90s gaming PC is smaller than you might expect. The N95 packs a dual ARM11 CPU running at 332 MHz and 128 MB of RAM in its 8GB model. Half-Life's original PC requirements called for a 133MHz Pentium and 24MB of RAM, meaning the phone actually clears those specs comfortably. What it is missing is a dedicated graphics card, but Leoncini has made it work regardless.

Intel's next-generation desktop platform may not have been officially announced, but the very first Intel Z990 motherboard was hiding right under our noses. Publications, including PCWorld and BenchLife, pieced together the discovery after visitors to the GIGABYTE booth were shown a mysterious, unnamed motherboard.

The motherboard shown at Computex Taipei 2026 had its CPU socket covered in tape and stripped of any visible branding. The giveaway was a small "Z99Pro" label printed on the rear of the PCB, which GIGABYTE has since confirmed is the AORUS Z990 PRO, an Intel Z990 board for the upcoming LGA-1954 Nova Lake-S platform.

This reveal confirms the upcoming motherboards, and also gives us a look at what the Z990 platform will bring. Most notably, there are at least three PCIe 5.0 x4 M.2 slots alongside three additional PCIe 4.0 slots, giving the board a total of six NVMe drive bays. Earlier chipset leaks suggest PCIe 5.0 lanes from the chipset will be exclusive to Z990, Q970, and W980, which would make this level of high-speed storage support a differentiating feature of the flagship tier.

UPDATE: Microsoft has confirmed the layoffs, publishing the memo on the Xbox Wire. Xbox's CEO Asha Sharma confirms that the division will have a 3% accountability margin (similar to profit) for the entire Fiscal Year 2026 period.

Xbox will conduct significant layoffs as part of a major business reset, sources tell Bloomberg's Jason Schreier.

Not so long ago, new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma said that Microsoft will reset the gaming business. The CEO has gone to say that Xbox has to look at ways to make the next console more affordable, stressing how much hardware production costs have increased--over 7.5x, Sharma says. Now it's been revealed that Microsoft is planning to hold heavy layoffs at Xbox as part of this reset.

Microsoft is making big changes to Xbox and is now specifying what's going to happen moving forward.

Exclusives are back at Xbox and Microsoft has now re-committed to shipping two Xbox console exclusives by 2027. But what does that actually mean? The term is somewhat misleading, and really just means "not on PlayStation or Switch." It means that the content is being excluded from other consoles, but not entirely from other platforms.

In a recent interview with Game Informer, Xbox's chief content officer Matt Booty defines the terms for gamers: "When we say 'console exclusives,' it means Xbox console. It'll still show up on all the normal places where we sell the PC version, and our cloud. Wherever you can get Xbox Cloud streaming."

Anthropic recently announced its latest state-of-the-art AI model, Claude Fable 5, and with the release of this extremely powerful model, we are beginning to see the creations people are coming up with due to its increased capabilities.

In a new Reddit post on the r/ClaudeAI subreddit, user FiLo420blazeit shared a short video showcasing how Fable recreated Microsoft's Minecraft in HTML. The video shows the user navigating terrain, placing blocks with the appropriate sound effects, pulling up their inventory, detonating TNT, and much more. The original poster described the result as "really, really good," adding, "it even added background music."

Additionally, the poster wrote that they aren't sure of the exact cost, which is a reference to how many tokens Fable had to use to generate the Minecraft test, but they believe it was somewhere around $30.

Anthropic released Claude Fable 5, the company's first publicly released Mythos-level AI model, and while it is state-of-the-art, Microsoft is reportedly running it through its legal department before authorizing its use in its products.

The news comes from The Verge's Tom Warren, who writes that he has heard from unnamed sources that Fable isn't available in the model picker for Microsoft employees using GitHub Copilot. Notably, every other Anthropic model is available in the model picker, as each complies with Microsoft's Zero Data Retention (ZDR) rules. However, Fable is different: the model's sophistication levels require data retention to operate, which violates Microsoft's internal policies.

Since Fable requires some data retention, Anthropic stores data such as prompts and the AI's responses. Anthropic deletes this data after 30 days, but some prompts and outputs can be stored by Anthropic for up to two years depending on how badly either has violated Anthropic's usage policies. So, to remedy this, Microsoft has handed over Fable to its legal department to evaluate the model, and see how it can use it safely.

Xbox recently announced that it has selected Asha Sharma, the company's new CEO, and under her leadership, along with a bunch of other executive-level departures and entries, Xbox will be entering a genuine strategic reset. But what does that mean exactly? And how long will this newfound directional change last?

Windows Central's Jez Corden has reported from the ground floor at Summer Game Fest, speaking with several Xbox executives and developers. Corden admits he was somewhat pessimistic about Xbox's new direction, given the company's history of empty promises and various strategies that have hurt Xbox fans. However, Corden reports that after speaking with Xbox executives and developers, he believes there is a genuine desire to rebuild the Xbox brand to its former glory, and one way to do that will be through exclusives.

The report states that Microsoft's push to make everything an Xbox significantly hurt its brand and weakened the Xbox ecosystem as a whole, but now, with the shift toward exclusivity, having two titles already announced and on the way, new Xbox leadership is viewing exclusivity as not a financial burden, but as a means of rebuilding the Xbox culture, community, and fan trust.

Xbox's new CEO Asha Sharma has sat down for an interview with Fortune Conversations, where she was asked a series of questions about Xbox as a brand, it's future, and where it stands versus the competition.

Sharma is stepping into the CEO role at Xbox during a time where the company's lost most of its identity through extensive marketing campaign that was pushed by former Xbox leadership that "everything is an Xbox". With that messaging, along with the end of exclusivity for titles, many Xbox fans felt there was very little reason to own an Xbox.

Sharma has recognized this, and many other problems with Xbox, saying in the interview that it's been difficult to balance Xbox as a publisher, and Xbox as a platform. In an effort to reignite the Xbox brand, the publisher recently unveiled Gears of War: E-Day and inXile's Clockwork Revolution will be "signature exclusives" to Xbox, and that if the Xbox brand becomes healthy more exclusives will be considered.