An AMD engineering sample has made an appearance in a listing on OpenBenchmarking. According to a report by TechPowerUp, the chip could potentially be a part of AMD’s upcoming Gainsborough family and a possible candidate for the next-generation Steam Deck handheld console. As per the OpenBenchmarking listing, the chip comes with a six-core, 12-thread processor paired with 24GB of high-speed LPDDR5 memory.

The engineering sample with part number 100-000001930-12_Y was tested on an AMD GBR-FF6-SKT validation board, with the CPU running at clock speeds of 2.4 GHz. The system also features four 6GB SK Hynix memory packages, resulting in 24GB of LPDDR5 memory running at 9,600 MT/s. That’s a big jump when compared to the current Steam Deck, which comes with 16GB of LPDDR5 memory running at 6,400 MT/s, alongside a four-core, eight-thread AMD Zen 2 processor.

The benchmark listing also provides some clues about the processor’s underlying architecture. As per Notebookcheck, the sample’s CPU microcode revision corresponds to AMD’s Family 1Ah, model DCh. Linux kernel changes indicate that this model falls within the range reserved for newer Zen 6 processors, suggesting that Gainsborough could use AMD’s next-generation CPU architecture. However, there is no clarity or any confirmation whether it will use standard Zen 6 cores or the denser Zen 6C variant.

The integrated GPU is listed with a clock speed of 2,400 MHz, although its architecture and compute unit count remain unknown. The sample was tested using the GpuTest benchmark suite on Ubuntu 24.04 at 1024 x 768 resolution, resulting in scores of 3,871 in GiMark, 3,508 in FurMark, and 9,319 in TessMark. While the FurMark score is comparable to the original Stam Deck, we can’t really come to any conclusions at this point, as the tests were conducted on an engineering platform using development software rather than a finished handheld. For now, the results do not establish how the chip would perform in games, as power limits, cooling, driver maturity, and the final GPU configuration all contribute to the performance in a compact gaming device.

If these specifications carry over to a future Steam Deck, the additional CPU cores along with the larger and faster memory would provide a meaningful hardware upgrade. That being said, neither AMD nor Valve have confirmed a connection between the Gainsborough family and a future Steam Deck. Thus, it is best to take this with a grain of salt and wait until there is more concrete information in the future.

The U.S. Army is allegedly developing a program to deploy autonomous AI agents that can navigate digital and network infrastructures, identify targets, and “neutralize” them. According to an Oct. 19 report by The Intercept, citing leaked official documents from the Army Cyber Command (ARCYBER), the nascent program, codenamed “ECHOTRIBBLE,” is primarily focused on offensive missions with the goal of neutralizing targets by “disabling the threat completely or temporarily, deleting the threat from the target.”

The program purportedly seeks to develop modular, autonomous AI agents that would function like computer worms, stealthily navigating adversary networks, moving between devices, and self-replicating across different operating systems. The agents would operate lightly in contested cloud environments and air-gapped systems alike, keeping reports minimal and concealing any required transmissions. Once an agent identifies and neutralizes a target, it would self-destruct, ideally without alerting the target or leaving any traces of its existence.

Cybersecurity experts have raised safety concerns about the project. A recent string of events has seen AI agents escape their environments and autonomously execute unassigned tasks. The document says the army will implement “predefined triggers” to help agents precisely distinguish targets. However, experts worry that if agents designed for benign tasks could execute unplanned, sometimes dangerous, actions to achieve those tasks, what should be expected of self-replicating agents designed specifically for offensive missions? Anthropic’s experiments showed AI agents can set up inference on different hardware and replicate across a network.

The Army also wants the agents to be capable of “Self-Directed Behavior,” acting with as little human oversight as possible, as this is necessary to achieve the desired level of autonomy. Conversely, this level of autonomy has seen AI agents bypass guardrails to complete their tasks. Government intelligence agencies have also been known to penetrate target networks through civilian infrastructure. “The target may well be hit. But what path will it take?” asked Hyrum Anderson, co-founder and CEO of the AI security firm Abundant, as quoted by The Intercept. “Will it go through a U.S. water utility on its way, because that’s where the adversary has staged its command and control, and take that down too?”

Another angle of concern is how the agents would make judgment calls. While AI agents are excellent at overcoming obstacles in their path, there's no predicting with 100% accuracy what they would consider obstacles or what path they would take to overcome them. “One of the reasons that we trust 19-year-old Marine corporals in Ramadi with live rounds and a weapon is because they have both the compute substrate — the brain and the eyes — but the deep world knowledge to understand, ‘Yeah, I probably shouldn’t do that,’” said William Marcellino, a senior behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation researching military AI applications. “That is not something that current public AI technology has.”

The ECHOTRIBBLE program is in the early prototyping and industry assessment phase and is led by ARCYBER, the Army Cyber Technology and Innovation Center (ArCTIC), and the Cyber Fusion Innovation Center (CFIC), with private vendors and academic researchers proposing and designing the software. ARCYBER and ArCTIC dictate the operational requirements and rules of engagement, while CFIC, a defense non-profit organization, acts as an intermediary between the Army and commercial tech companies. The Army recently held a virtual Assessment Event from October 6 to October 8, 2026, where it evaluated 65 technical whitepapers submitted by private vendors proposing solutions for the agentic framework and narrowed them to five. The final candidate(s) will be issued funding and formal prototype contracts.

The current and expected power draw of AI data centers has been the subject of strong discussion, but today, there appears to be some good news. Three U.S. nuclear reactors are being restarted after many years offline, expected to bring 2.25 GW total to the grid. According to a report, the Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan, the Crane Clean Energy Center on Three Mile Island (Pennsylvania), and the Duane Arnold Energy Center in Iowa are getting a fresh set of proverbial tires to get rolling again.

The Palisades plant was under active decommissioning, apparently marking this event as the first time a nuclear reactor is being put back to work after dismantling had begun. Despite what sounds like a tough starting point, this plant is the one that's furthest along, as it was loading fuel in August 2026 and is expected to generate 800 MW around March 2027.

Much like the other projects mentioned here, the Holtec Palisades firm running the reactor took a loan from the U.S. Department of Energy. Palisades borrowed from the DoE under the Biden administration's 2024 investment in nuclear energy, while the others were issued under the purview of the Trump administration's 2025 push.

The second reactor is the Crane Clean Energy Center on Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island, repurposing the facility's Unit 1. The project started in 2024, with Constellation Energy saying it would spend $1.6 billion total for the reactor. The firm then took a $1 billion loan from the Department of Energy in 2025. Microsoft is set to be the main customer, with a 20-year contract. This facility is projected to bring 835 MW online sometime in 2027.

This facility was famous in 1979 for the partial meltdown of its Unit 2, although mercifully the event had relatively tame environmental consequences. Constellation's ongoing project is restoring and refurbishing Unit 1, which didn't show significant issues until its 2019 decommissioning and has undergone a safety inspection from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. This entity still needs to grant its blessing before the reactor starts loading fuel.

The Duane Arnold Energy Center in Iowa is the third unit being brought back to the grid, in a collaboration between NextEra Energy and Google. The predicted output is 615 MW, with the juice expected to start flowing in 2029. Next Energy CEO John Ketchum stated that the firm was happy with its cooperation contract with Google, as it meant that "none of the costs are being paid by residential customers in Iowa."

All three facilities had previously been shut down at various points as they were deemed too expensive to run, as labor and maintenance costs made nuclear-generated watts pricier than alternative means of production.

But the financial landscape for power has shifted, plus with such overwhelming demand and grid connections being a primary blocker for data center buildouts, their operators are likely willing to pay for premium power as long as they get it now instead of in a few decades.

Some quick browsing indicates that Michigan is going to need somewhere between 1.2 and 2.3 GW for data centers alone around 2030. Pennsylvania's forecast has a wide range of 0.8 to 3.4 GW, while Iowa's range is 1.55 to 2.8 GW. These figures are loose, as they include planned capacity for data center projects that may or may not end up being built, and whose timetables may slip due to economic conditions, hardware availability, and public resistance against expansive buildouts.

The revelation that there was a ton of performance lying on the table in the remastered The Elder Scrolls Part IV: Oblivion won't be a surprise to people who have played the game, which is notorious for its hitching and stuttering. The reason primarily lies in its poor utilization of hardware, and that's a big part of what LTSharpe and Claude have addressed in the new Oblivion Remastered Performance Fix that changes nothing about the game's visuals yet increases performance by as much as 68% in the worst case. (h/t to ComputerBase)

Yes, this mod is just about 100% vibe-coded, and yet, rather than hacking Minecraft into GTA V on iPhone, or hacking CoD Black Ops 2 maps into Minecraft, this mod is a binary code modification for Oblivion Remastered that seeks to improve performance and stability considerably, and according to numerous jubilant and thankful posts on NexusMods, it seems to do exactly that, with one user proclaiming that the performance increase was "dramatic" and that the overworld stuttering that plagues the game is "completely gone."

The story goes like this: gamer and mod creator LTSharpe has a slightly older system with a Ryzen 7 5800X CPU. Not the newest chip on the block to be sure, but Zen 3 isn't so old that it should be crumpling under the weight of games just yet. Frustrated with the verifiably awful performance of the remaster of The Elder Scrolls Part IV: Oblivion, he paid for a subscription to Anthropic's Claude AI agent and started working with the assistant to diagnose and fix the performance problems.

"Diagnose" is a critical keyword here, because it isn't like Claude was hallucinating an engine.ini tweak somebody else published for the original game 20 years ago. The partners, with Claude doing the hard work and LTSharpe directing, reverse-engineered the game to the point that they were able to build a repeatable benchmarking framework. That allowed them to systematically diagnose the causes of the performance problems and then test fixes against the real behavior of the game with modified machine code.

That's the thing; this was done without source code. Neither TES4 Oblivion nor the remaster's Unreal Engine is open-source software. The sheer magnitude of the task would be incredibly daunting to a team of human engineers, much less a single person. According to LTSharpe, over the course of two weeks Claude successfully diagnosed and fixed bugs in not only the Remaster's Unreal Engine code, but also in the underlying Gamebryo original engine, in AMD's frame generation code, and even in the Unreal Engine itself, improving performance and avoiding crashes.

The developer—or perhaps we should say, coordinator?—is careful to acknowledge that the performance tweaks were created with his system specifically in mind and that they may not work well for others. Indeed, he has a Radeon graphics card, which puts him within a surprisingly small minority of PC gamers, and some portion of his fixes were aimed at making sure AMD's FSR upscaling and frame generation remain in effect despite a long-standing game bug that disables them when you task-switch (Alt+Tab) out of the game. The good lieutenant invites other gamers to try out the fix and report back, and he's even helping out with support requests on NexusMods, too. Head over there if you're keen to grab the fix and try it for yourself.

Here we are, nearly a year into the AI pricing apocalypse, and anyone who tried to build a PC during that time relied on some kind of combo deal to bring prices down to something more reasonable. If building a system on your own isn’t in the cards, Newegg is offering a great deal on its own ABS-brand prebuilt, which saves you money, time, effort, and hassle. You can buy the ABS Stratos II Aqua for only $2,549 and start gaming as soon as tomorrow without blowing your budget.

• Check out this deal at Newegg

For the money, you get a complete prebuilt gaming system complete focused around the previous generation flagship 14900KF processor, and Nvidia’s capable RTX 5070 Ti 16GB along with a cool looking ABS Stratos II MX220 Black Gaming Case with four pre-installed fans, quality Gamdias Helios ATX/PCIe(3.1/5.1) 850W Gold power supply, 240mm AIO cooler, 32GB of G.Skill Ripjaws M5 RAM, 2TB Team Group M.2 storage, and a Gigabyte motherboard, making this one of the better deals around for a complete gaming system.

The ABS Stratos II Aqua and the mid-tower chassis include an Intel Core i9-14900KF processor featuring 24 total cores (8P+16E) and 32 threads, with speeds up to a smoking-fast 6 GHz. While this isn’t the fastest gaming processor on the market, it still holds its own, especially at higher resolutions, which the video card can handle without issue.

The CPU drops into a Gigabyte Z790 US AC motherboard that offers plenty of connectivity, including 10 USB ports on the rear IO (one 20 Gbps Type-C), two M.2 sockets (both PCIe 4.0 x4), and six SATA ports for storage, 2.5 GbE and integrated Wi-Fi, and will handle the flagship-class i9-14900KF processor. It also pairs well with 32GB of G.Skill Ripjaws M5 Neo RGB DDR5-6000 RAM and a 2TB Team Group NV5000 PCIe 4.0 x4 SSD. ABS also includes the Gamdias Aura GL240 V2 240mm RGB AIO to help keep the unlocked, high-performance processor running smoothly.

The GPU is Gigabyte’s Windforce RTX 5070 Ti SFF OC, with three fans (2.5-slot-wide) and an all-black look that should pair well with the motherboard and other components. The RTX 5070Ti is a capable graphics card for high-refresh-rate 1080p gaming, 1440p gaming, and even some 4K titles. You won’t find any RGB lighting on this card, but the triple-fan cooling solution will keep the card running cool and quiet.

While it can be cheaper to gather the parts and build your own, it isn’t for everyone. If you build your own and it breaks, troubleshooting is on you. Some people just want to open a box and start gaming and not have to worry about support. ABS backs its systems with a 1-year warranty, so if anything goes wrong, you can easily get it fixed.

For $2,549 (a $450 savings), you can buy a complete, warrantied gaming system that will run anything you throw at it with aplomb without completely emptying your bank account.

Chinese technology giants ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent have reportedly spent over $35 billion on orders for more than 3 million Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 workstation GPUs. The huge order for the RTX Pro 5500, fully compliant with U.S. restrictions on exports of AI-capable GPUs to China, is reportedly far beyond Nvidia's planned production for this card. As a result, Nvidia has, according to sources who spoke to Reuters, told its customers that it isn't in a position to fill the orders as it far outstrips its planned production for this GPU.

The RTX Pro 5500 is a workstation GPU with the same number of CUDA cores as its flagship RTX 5090 GPU, but with 84GB of GDDR7 memory attached, making it a good option for AI applications. The RTX Pro 5500 is a popular choice at the moment for Chinese buyers as exporting it isn't currently restricted by the U.S. government. It's less powerful than the H200 and B300, Nvidia's AI-focused GPUs for the enterprise market, but those GPUs remain either banned or heavily restricted. As China competes with the U.S. in the race to produce newer, better AI models, GPUs like the RTX Pro 5500 continue to be indispensable.

The report reveals some interesting data about the Chinese tech firms orders. Two of its sources revealed that the cards are priced at around $11,400 each, reaching a total order value of $35 billion. Meanwhile, another source suggested that Nvidia has informed its partners that it may only be able to deliver enough cards to meet between 5% and 10% of the demand. Meanwhile, Nvidia is reportedly in a position to only produce 3 million RTX Pro 5500 cards globally in 2027.

Neither Nvidia nor the three Chinese companies have confirmed any of this on the record. However, an Nvidia spokesman told Reuters that demand from the Chinese market for these chips has faced "unprecedented growth since 2022" since export restrictions were introduced. "U.S. firms continue to be restricted by a combination of outdated U.S. export controls, which cover gaming products released nearly half a decade ago, and China's own limits on U.S. imports."

While trade hostility between the U.S. and China shows no sign of abating, demand for Nvidia's GPUs hasn't slowed down, despite U.S. attempts to restrict Nvidia's ability to export to China. Meanwhile, export-restricted Nvidia AI chips continue to reach China despite the restrictions, bypassing the Trump administration's efforts in the process.

Modern computing systems and devices typically require pieces of crucial open-source software, typically maintained by unpaid or low-paid volunteers. Recently, a report collated a list of critical open-source projects, noting which of them are chronically underfunded and/or understaffed. The information is sobering: 11 out of 23 of the listed projects currently only have one or two maintainers, and funding is generally scarce and sometimes nonexistent.

The Data Drop's report on open-source maintainers identifies that having only one or two sets of eyes on critical pieces of software means that sooner or later something breaks — and it tends to do so in spectacular fashion, given its ubiquity. So, what happens when these projects, which are widely used across software, go underfunded or understaffed?

Lessons from the past

In 2014, the same year as Heartbleed, Shellshock made waves: a vulnerability in the Bash shell that's present in Linux, macOS, and Unix-type systems. The problem was traced back to a line of code present since 1989, displaying how even software that's thought to have all the bugs hammered out of it can still fall prey to attacks. A quick look at Bash's commit history shows it's almost exclusively maintained by Chet Ramey.

In 2016, ImageMagick was exploited, providing attackers with remote code execution. This library is used for image manipulation across a wide range of software, in webpages, mobile apps, and more. A 2020 analysis revealed that hundreds of security issues had been found over the years in its extensive codebase. Nearly every code contribution in the past couple of years has been done by an individual named Dirk Lemstra.

Contemporary examples include 2021's Log4Shell exploit, a critical vulnerability in the Apache Log4j logging library used in millions of servers. The libwebp image-handling library saw a zero-day vulnerability in 2023, and the xz compression library used across Linux and iOS was compromised in 2024.

Thankless work

Key points in the report mention specific repos, which might be under threat. Somewhat unsurprisingly, the low number of overall maintainers and the unpaid nature of the work make it unattractive to perform.

The main time-zone file used across Linux-based operating systems is maintained pro bono by Paul Eggert, a UCLA teacher. Core-js, a piece of support software that lets new JavaScript work in old browsers and is estimated by the author to be used in half of the busiest websites in the world, is handled by Denis Pushkarev. He once had to endure criticism from the community because he added a command-line message to the library's installer asking for help or a job.

The HarfBuzz library developed by Behdad Esfahbod is a cornerstone in ligatures and text shaping in Middle Eastern languages. In those writings, a letter changes shape and/or orientation according to what's around it. Esfahbod handles that vast majority of the project's code, and doesn't mention public or corporate funding.

Libjpeg-turbo handles JPEG images on Android, Firefox, LibreOffice, and every Chromium-based browser. It's kept ship-shape by D.R. Commander aka DRC, who occasionally is contracted for library-specific work, though at arguably modest values of "3-4 figures rather than 6 or 7." Libxml2, just like the label says, handles XML reading and writing across numerous applications and operating systems. Nick Wellnhofer, the original maintainer, stepped down in September 2025, after years of work with little income.

The SQLite project provides a one-file database that's exceedingly easy to integrate into most software, instead of complicated, resource-heavy databases, while still retaining standard SQL language and accouterments. Thanks to its ease of use, it found its way into an astonishing number of applications. Examples include WhatsApp, Dropbox, Android, Windows, and all major browsers.

The project estimates that there are about a trillion instances of SQLite in use. Just four people keep this critical project together, and they've gone to the length of removing their names and photos from the project's page, as "there are a lot of crazy people in the world who might misuse that information." The project is funded by the offering paid support via the founder's company, though there's no word on effective income, especially when it presumably needs to feed four mouths.

Funding is there, but scarce

It's not all doom and gloom, though. Take curl (the software), for example. Almost every developer has used it, thanks to its URL-fetching abilities and extensive scripting options. The project was started by Daniel Stenberg, who is now paid to work full-time on it. The team has now grown to 11 and has received funding through Open Collective and Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency, among others.

Likely due to the lessons learned from their past respective debacles, both the Log4j and OpenSSL projects are likewise funded by the Sovereign Tech Agency, as are the FFmpeg video file handler and the OpenSSH secure shell software that's ubiquitous in Linux servers.

All things considered, it's easy to argue that the critical importance of all the aforementioned software merits sizable investments from industry players, especially those whose commercial products benefit the most from the community's efforts. Plus, even if the firms feel no moral obligation to contribute, in the day and age where AI agents are finding exploitable vulnerabilities in hours, donations to these open-source projects could also be considered investments.

Popular graphics post-processing injector software ReShade, commonly used to mod DLSS 5 into unsupported games, now has a foveated imaging add-on, including another standalone project that doesn't need precursor software, allowing DLSS 5 to affect only what's in view, reducing GPU load and increasing FPS.

Foveated imaging is nothing new; it's a technique that's been used in VR to increase performance. It works by only rendering what's in view, often increasing the resolution in the center and reducing it at the edges. Our eyes work in a similar way, with the clearest image in a small area in the center of your vision, blurring on the edges. With foveated rendering, you barely notice the lower-resolution edges as the peripheral vision is less concerned with fine details.

Instead of varying the resolution of the image, however, it varies the level of detail in DLSS 5 Neural Rendering. DLSS NR loads a whole AI model into your GPU and renders images in real time, making it a resource-intensive task; but the task is minimized greatly when most of the detail is only asked for in the middle of the image. That's what projects like maximedgoulet’s Foveated DLSS5 and ClarkCheekyKent’s CheekyFoveatedDLSS aim to do; with Foveated DLSS being a ReShade add-on and CheekyFoveatedDLSS capable of being a standalone integration.

Both implementations allow you to adjust the size of the center area with the highest rendering quality, with independent width and height adjustments to suit your personal situation, as some people have a larger focus area than others or have a different monitor distance. You can also adjust the render fall-off rate, so the image quality lessens more quickly or slowly past the focus area.

As Maximedgoulet's implementation is an add-on for an injector, the pipeline is quite long compared to the standalone integration of CheekyFoveatedDLSS, which Reddit comments claim is more convenient and more polished. Though both show a big improvement in performance, Maximed's Reddit post on Foveated DLSS5 claims an improvement from 48 to 80FPS in The Witcher 3 with 2x Multipass at ultrawide 7680x2160p on an RTX 4090. Considering Maximedgoulet’s 4090 could not handle DLSS-NR on an ultrawide, this implementation might genuinely be feasible to make Neural Rendering more playable.

Nvidia has earned billions selling AI accelerators, but with the emergence of agentic AI, CPUs are going to play a considerably more significant role than before, which creates new opportunities for the company. Reuters reports that Nvidia has secured a major design win with its Vera CPUs with AI cloud provider Modal. According to Modal, preliminary evaluations showed that Vera could deliver twice the throughput of its existing AMD and Intel processors, although the company does not intend to cease using CPUs from its current suppliers.

Modal provides cloud infrastructure that enables AI developers to deploy AI agents that can perform complex operations autonomously over extended periods. Such workloads require substantial CPU resources for software execution, data processing, and other tasks that cannot be efficiently handled by GPUs. Modal currently relies exclusively on AMD and Intel processors for these operations, but its tests indicate that Nvidia's new Vera CPUs could significantly improve performance in its specific workloads. Of course, since Vera is based on an Arm instruction set architecture, Modal's decision to adopt Vera will require substantial modifications to its software. Nevertheless, Modal believes that the potential performance improvements justify the additional engineering effort.

The reported 2x throughput advantage is particularly interesting because agentic AI workloads can involve numerous independent tasks that compete for CPU cores, cache capacity, and memory bandwidth. However, Modal has not disclosed detailed benchmark configurations it used, specific AMD and Intel processor models, or performance-per-watt figures. Consequently, it remains unclear whether Vera's advantage is enabled by advantages of its Arm v9.2-based Olympus CPU cores that can decode and execute up to 10 instructions per cycle, its memory subsystem with 1.2 TB/s of bandwidth, or other architectural characteristics. Also note that tests compared Vera against currently available AMD and Intel processors rather than their upcoming generations that will compete against Vera in the coming years.

Since Modal cannot port all of its software to Arm ISA overnight, the company will continue using x86 CPUs from AMD and Intel, according to Modal chief executive Erik Bernhardsson. Rather than sticking to one ISA for everything, Modal intends to operate a heterogeneous server fleet and select the most suitable processors for each workload. Naturally, the company intends to evaluate upcoming AMD and Intel processors once they become available to make its choices in the future.

For Nvidia, the agreement represents a major step toward making Vera a standalone server processor that commands a major share of the server market. The company expects Vera sales to generate at least $20 billion during its current fiscal year and estimates the potential total available market for these CPUs is approximately $200 billion. The company is on track to sell at least four million Vera CPUs in fiscal 2026.

The announcement comes shortly after Modal secured $750 million in financing led by Accel, which valued the company at $15.75 billion. Modal expects its annual revenue to reach $1 billion within the next year. The company's service consumption has increased 3X in the last 12 months, while revenue has surged more than 15 times compared with the previous year, Reuters reports.

Intel has asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to make an exception for the automated guided vehicles (AGVs) that the company uses to transport the sensitive silicon wafers and other materials, containers, and supplies needed to make the most advanced chips in its fabs. According to Bloomberg, the American chipmaker fears that its AGVs would fall under the blanket prohibition against foreign-made robots after they were added to the FCC’s Covered List.

AGVs are niche machines that chip fabs use to transport materials and supplies between tools and sections of the fab, helping ensure that the cleanroom conditions required for each manufacturing process are maintained. This makes them critical equipment for U.S. semiconductor manufacturing, but, apparently, there are no suitable domestic alternatives for these devices at the moment. Intel’s current fleet of AGVs requires continuous maintenance, including software and firmware updates, and if it’s forced to find a local supplier for its AGVs, the company says that it would take years, crippling the United States’ chipmaking efforts.

The biggest AGV suppliers are Japanese companies like Murata Machinery and Daifuku Co., while a few smaller businesses from South Korea and Taiwan are also trying to break into the market. It’s unclear why these companies haven’t applied for a conditional approval yet, which would allow them to continue selling these products in the U.S. while also promising Washington that they’ll set up a manufacturing base in the country. This is something that Netgear has already done, allowing it to continue selling its foreign-made routers despite being an American company.

Intel says that it remains unclear if updates to its AGVs would break compliance with the FCC, and that it’s asking the agency to issue a conditional waiver “out of an abundance of caution to ensure the ongoing operation of these specific AGV units.” While Team Blue is the only company concerned about AGVs at the moment, other chip manufacturers would likely need a similar waiver in the near future, especially as they build more fabs in the U.S. This includes TSMC, which is planning to build 12 more fabs and four packaging facilities in Arizona, Samsung, with its new Taylor, Texas, fab, and even Elon Musk’s Terafab, which has already begun construction.

Washington has been using the FCC to force companies to invest in American manufacturing. Its blanket bans on foreign-made products like drones and routers have affected some of the biggest brands in the U.S., including DJI and TP-Link. While these bans do not outright ban the sale of all products made by these companies, especially those that have already been approved before, they make it impossible for them to introduce new products and even release software updates to their existing product line. The FCC eventually walked back on the software update ban, but they still would not be able to register new products unless they build them in the U.S.

Windows 98 SE devotees can now enjoy (experimental) support for USB4 and Thunderbolt 3/4. Developer and maker Yeo Kheng Meng, who also enjoys retrocomputing, recently released the vibe-coded xHCI98 v3.0.0.0, enabling the practical use of generic USB 3.x, USB4, and Thunderbolt 3/4 host controllers on systems running Windows 98 SE, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, and 7. An extensive blog post by the dev provides further reading about the driver, compatibility, its creation, and usage.

Demo video “shows many different USB devices being hotplugged to a modern 2020 ThinkPad P14s Gen 1 with only xHCI controller.”

Some of you will be wondering why a project to bring USB4 (Thunderbolt 3 and 4) to PCs running Windows 98 SE exists. Retro computing fan Meng explains on his GitHub that this project should appeal directly to users of PCs from the mid-2010s that have xHCI-only (USB 3.x) chipsets and no legacy EHCI controller. However, older OSes don’t have xHCI drivers, and that’s where xHCI98 steps in. “Without xHCI support, even keyboards, mice, and flash drives need the BIOS's legacy support, cannot be hotplugged, and devices such as Ethernet and audio do not work at all,” explains Meng, revealing his motivation. “This project fills that gap.”

Impressively, xHCI98 drives a lot more than USB storage. It replaces Windows’ own USB port and hub drivers to facilitate the connection and use of USB 1.1 and 2.0 and SuperSpeed (USB 3.x) devices and hubs, UAS (USB Attached SCSI) storage through a second driver (xhciuas.sys), and Thunderbolt 3 and USB4 docks and NVMe enclosures through a third driver (xhcicm.sys).

Meng has developed and tested xHCI98 mostly on Intel hardware, as that is what he owns. Candidly, he admits “this is a solo human's project with AI assistance, so bugs are not unexpected,” even if you do have the same hardware as the dev - a 2020 ThinkPad P14s Gen 1 (Comet Lake xHCI, no EHCI). It stands up pretty well during the plug/unplug video demo above, though the test rig used is not quite the USB cart of death.

As a solo developer, Meng isn't shy to admit he leaned heavily on AI assistance to prepare the xHCI98 release. His vibe coding adventure was supported by Claude Fable 5.1 for planning, Claude Opus 5.5 for coding, and Codex GPT 6 Astra as an adversarial reviewer.

In addition to a few bug warnings, there are some other things to know about using this driver with the various older versions of Windows it supports, standby and hibernation, and more. The dev helpfully sketches out a process for checking your hardware, outlines various install methods, discusses updating, and talks about tuning the driver for those who will be jumping in at the deep end with this project.

What if you could buy a cheap used DDR5 SODIMM (laptop memory) kit and transform it into a super-fast DDR5 desktop kit? That’s what electronics hobbyist Blighted Agent recently did when they succeeded in converting a SK hynix 2x 16GB DDR5-5600 SODIMM kit they got from Facebook Marketplace for $120 into a 2x 16GB DDR5-7800 desktop kit, claimed to be worth around $1,000. They also had to buy some blank DDR5 desktop memory PCBs from AliExpress for around $16 each, and a set of heatsinks for around $18.

In the above video, our hero says they bought the donor laptop 2x 16GB DDR5-5600 sticks for just $120, which is a bargain. With extra bits and pieces from AliExpress (desktop DDR5 PCBs, etc.), the total bill of materials came to $175. Blighted Agent comments that the SODIMMs used what he believed to be SK hynix A-die modules, which are the same as the ICs used in expensive desktop DDR5 modules like the G.Skill Trident Royal line.

The process began with taking the memory ICs from the donor modules using a hot air station. Then they were cleaned and had 0.45mm leaded solder balls added, using a DDR5 stencil, reballing jig, and hot air. Next, the blank desktop DDR5 PCBs were prepared. A little solder was added to the plethora of BGA connectors to be ready for the memory chips to connect to.

The old DDR5 ICs and the new desktop modules could now be mated, using flux, the preheater, hot air, and watching and prodding carefully with a dental pick. Blighted Agent’s experience lets him know when the BGA chips have successfully mated with the PCB. You can eyeball when they pop precisely into place due to surface tension, and offer up a modicum of resistance to pick prodding.

Finally, the enthusiast added the SPD chip and BIOS chip from the SODIMMs to the new desktop DIMMs. These new desktop DIMMs were quickly tested in a PC before they were finished off with carefully applied thermal pads and the fancy-looking heatsinks.

Blighted Agent felt lucky that there were no issues with the newly created desktop modules. There’s a lot of intricate things that can go wrong during such a process. The initial boot verification showed them recognized in his Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Apex Encore motherboard as two “SK hynix 16,384MB 5600MHz” modules, which was correct. Some tuning resulted in rock-steady performance at DDR5-7800 CL38 and 1.40V. This was verified by stress testing for 90 minutes, which the enthusiast reckons was ample for a gaming PC. It is very likely a better result than using those mechanical SODIMM-to-DIMM converters you can buy, which can be problematic.

Blighted Agent seems to specialize in BGA soldering work, and has also successfully upgraded several graphics cards with double the VRAM. Though videos like this are edited to be brief, and they make the process look easy, the TechTuber admits there is a lot that can go wrong during this kind of rework. Moreover, with RAM modules, they lack the testing equipment to locate an issue with any particular IC on the PCB. So, if this module didn’t work, they might have ended up in a world of pain, not knowing which memory chip had an issue due to either an internal fault or a BGA soldering glitch.

Looking around at used DDR5 SODIMMs, it looks like Blighted Agent was very lucky to get a used working 32GB kit for $120. I just checked eBay U.S., and the best deal there was $320. Meanwhile, the best price for a new 32GB DDR5-6000 kit seems to be $449 at the time of writing.

We reported on Russian enthusiast VIK-on succeeding in a similar project earlier this year, but all their costing was in Rubles, and they went the extra mile in flashing custom firmware so the remade modules would be auto-detected with 6400 MT/s XMP support on most motherboards. In late 2026, DDR5 RAM continues to be too expensive.

Millions of dollars worth of gift cards were stolen and then used to buy high-value tech gear at retailers like Target, Sephora, and Lowe's after a Chinese crime ring gained access to an internal Staples system and then used it to issue more than 15,000 cards to itself. While the hack hasn't been made public to date, a 404 Media report notes that it actually took place back in 2023.

The outlet reviewed court records that show that Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) was told about the hack in October of that year. The hack came to light after it led to a search warrant that was unsealed last week. And while the document doesn't specifically name Staples as the victim of the hack, 404 Media has confirmed that it was the company affected based on other information. Such information includes the fact that the victim company is headquartered in Massachusetts, that it uses Blackhawk Networks to fulfill gift card orders, and that the company uses an internal customer support system called Nexus. The report notes that a reference to Nexus can be found on a former Staples executive's LinkedIn profile.

While Staples was under the impression that Nexus could not be accessed from beyond its own network, hackers found that not to be the case. They then "performed multiple heap dump requests," a process that captures all of the data held in an app's memory. That information gave the hackers the tools they needed to hijack logged-in sessions of Staples customer service employees. From there, they were able to issue gift cards at will.

Once the gift cards had been issued, the crime group sent runners to physical retail stores to spend them before they were identified and canceled. Target found that 35 gift cards were used at a New Hampshire store, with high-value products from Apple, Bose, and Beats all bought. All 35 cards were used within a period of just a single hour, although not all of them were obtained via this hack.

In total, Target told investigators that 3,850 gift cards worth over $140,000 were used across 85 different stores in just two days. Sephora was hit for $58,600 worth of sales, while Lowe's saw $226,000 spent across online and in-store purchases. In total, 4,630 stolen gift cards were used with a value of around $425,000.

This hack was just the tip of the iceberg, too. Last April, a Department of Justice announcement confirmed that three Chinese nationals had been sentenced for their part in a gift card fraud conspiracy. Including the Staples hack, the crime group stole more than $100 million worth of gift cards.

Chinese organized crime groups often pop up on the radar of U.S.-based law enforcement. Earlier this year, a Chinese phishing service that was used to generate scam websites using AI was dismantled. The service was linked to almost $2 billion in losses.

Right now, you can grab a budget-friendly, entry-level gaming PC at Best Buy for a very low price, especially given the current economic climate for anything gaming PC-related. On sale at Best Buy is the iBuypower Slate Gaming PC with Intel Arc B570 graphics for just $899. With $300 off its $1,199.99 list price, this is a superb deal for a 1080p gaming machine with DDR5 memory and 10GB of graphics VRAM.

● Check out this deal at Best Buy

This iBuypower's Slate gaming PC comes with a 10-core, 10-thread Intel Core Ultra 5 225F processor, an Intel Arc B570 graphics card with 10GB of VRAM, 16GB of DDR5 memory, and a 1TB NVMe SSD for storage. You will be able to play games in 1440p also with this rig, but you will have to tune individual game settings to get the best frame rates and performance. Ideally, this configuration supports 1080p gaming on higher settings.

The graphics card used in this prebuilt iBuypower gaming PC is the Intel B570 graphics card, which comes with a generous amount of VRAM considering the card's price. 10GB of VRAM is fantastic for 1080p gaming; it is more than ample to handle the textures and shaders on high and ultra settings, offering a great gaming experience at this resolution.

At 1440p resolutions with higher settings, this GPU may begin to struggle when that 10GB of VRAM gets used up and starts to rely on the CPU to compensate. The B570 is a budget graphics card from Intel and has come a long way since its launch performance, thanks to driver optimizations and compatibility with more game titles.

In the chart below, the B570 sits in the middle of the pack, competing with the Nvidia RTX 3060 12GB. You can also check out our Intel Arc B570 review for more detailed information on this GPU's performance.

This prebuilt gaming PC deal from Best Buy is one of the easiest ways to currently jump into the world of desktop PC gaming. The prices of individual components are very high currently, and with that comes the stress and added risk of messing something up trying to build the rig yourself. If you're not confident or familiar with building your own PC, buying a prebuilt comes with the added bonus of an easier warranty situation. Should anything go wrong with your computer, the whole system is covered, and you don't have to troubleshoot individual parts and manufacturers for an RMA.

There's no point upgrading your internet connection if you've got a bad Wi-Fi router slowing you down. If the ISP-provided router isn't up to the task, and you're ready to banish the lag, you'll want to pick up this TP-Link router, on sale for a limited time only. The TP-Link Archer BE9700, also known as the BE600, is down to $189.98 right now, giving you a 24% saving on its list price.

● Check out this TP-Link router deal on Amazon

With the BE9700, you're getting a tri-band Wi-Fi 7 router with six external antennas, enough to give you coverage for up to 2,600 sq. ft. with up to 120 different devices connecting to it. TP-Link reckons you can expect to see speeds of up to 5,765 Mbps on the fastest 6 GHz band, with 2,882 Mbps at 5 GHz, and 1,032 Mbps at 2.4 GHz. MLO, or Multi-Link Operation, support means you're able to connect using these different bands at the same time, giving you even faster speeds and better protection against congestion.

Our TP-Link BE9700 review shows this is a serious option for your network. This is a good value router with solid Wi-Fi 7 support, with speeds that make it a competitive option, especially at this price point. Our review shows that it comes with class-leading 6 GHz performance, with decent enough speeds at 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz. It's the top choice in our best Wi-Fi router shortlist, too.

While Wi-Fi 7 support is the big deal here, the wired connections aren't bad, either. You get a 10Gb WAN port to hook this router up to your super-fast modem, giving you max speeds. You also get four 2.5Gb Ethernet ports for your home devices, including your PC, laptop, NAS drives, game consoles, and more.

Aside from the speeds, you get a USB 3.0 port on the side, which you could use to hook up a printer or external hard drive as a basic NAS. EasyMesh support, meanwhile, means you can use this as a wireless node in a mesh network. It also has Quality of Service controls to help you prioritize traffic for your core devices, such as your gaming PC, so you don't lose out when you're gaming.

The $189.98 sale price for this TP-Link Archer BE9700 router is a good one, even if it has yo-yo'd in price over recent months. That said, this is a solid discount off the $249.99 list price that it was at a few weeks ago, and one that'll give you an ultra-fast upgrade to your local network.

The game of Minecraft is no match for a team of four Gemini 4 Argon agents, as they were able to defeat it in 27 hours with 2,783 self-written programs, a paper from Google DeepMind reveals. The agents did die 605 times, even on Easy, and about half the run was spent fighting the Ender Dragon, the final boss of the game. The run finally came to completion when the End was solved by stacking dirt to reach the boss’s crystals, at an estimated cost of around $520 in tokens.

The experimental run was designed from the get-go with one goal: kill the Ender Dragon. The playthrough involved a random, shared survival world on Easy with four agents — a fifth agent existed only for reporting — from Gemini 4 Argon, Google’s latest frontier model. Each agent had its own player through the open-source Mineflayer JavaScript library for Minecraft bots, but they were able to coordinate through in-game chat and shared notes. Every program used in the run was written by the agents themselves, and the emphasis is on coding and teamwork rather than game-playing.

The authors say this is the “first end-to-end autonomous completion of Minecraft by AI agents,” at least “to our knowledge,” qualified by the use of Mineflayer “without pre-scouted seeds or other game-specific tools written by humans.” Mineflayer tells the agents where blocks and creatures are, with a pathfinding plugin to plan routes. There was “no human input during the run” and “no one assigned roles or wrote game logic.” The run, starting with the first program and ending with the dragon's death, took 27 hours and 14 minutes.

Although the agents were not given roles, within about 10 minutes a division of labor was proposed in chat by bot janesick. Bot Auratian offered an alternative plan while Bot Gyldenia acknowledged it. The roles ended up being: Gyldenia for food, beds, and flint; Bulicame for diamonds; Janesick for iron and tools; Auratian for the Nether portal. Moments of losses, such as a Ghast fireball destroying dropped items, led the team to diagnose the cause and write rules to prevent it in the future.

Finding the stronghold involved janesick, who threw two Eyes of Ender from different spots and sampled each eye’s flight once every 50 ms, triangulating the location. Carrying the eyes involved its own dire moment when Auratian drowned during the task, but the spot was noted, and the eyes were rescued.

The eventual fight with the dragon led to 69 deaths, and the ten crystals kept regenerating the boss until Auratian discovered they could use dirt pillars to reach the crystals. Four hours and 40 minutes later, all ten crystals were downed, and the dragon was dead 39 minutes after that.

The agents operated by writing short JavaScript programs, almost 2,800 in total, with 42 helper functions kept alive between programs, while a Mineflayer bot ran them in the shared world. Text was returned with status data, not pictures. This is a shared approach to the non-screenshot GPT-6 Astra clear of the Orc starting zone in World of Warcraft earlier this month. AI agents playing games is an ongoing trend, with Pokémon Red probably being the most popular, a game defeated in multiple ways, including with a Jev decision model layer.

Minecraft has also been a popular target, and the authors admit this, highlighting two earlier community dragon kills: a planner with an action-selection model on a fixed speedrun seed in Peaceful mode, and a single Claude Opus 5 agent that used 37 ready-made, high-level tools on Normal, versus Mineflayer alone for the Gemini team. AI Bengineering’s Claude run, relying mostly on Opus 5 at high effort, took 3 hours and 56 minutes from start — “no human input after the prompt” — to kill with 388 tool calls and only one death. The cost in that case, at API-equivalent rates, was about $93.

Google’s Minecraft run, using Gemini 4 Argon’s 50% introductory pricing, which runs from initial API access that followed the model announcement through Nov. 30, cost more than half a grand; at normal pricing, that’s more than a grand. A GPT-6 Astra Portal run last month, which took about 24 hours, came in at $571 in tokens.

Google’s run took about 1.35 billion input tokens with 91% served from cache. About 24,000 model calls involved around 16 million output tokens, a quarter of them thinking. In total, if we’re also including the observer agent, the session would be estimated at $810, or $1,620 after the promotion, at list prices.

Each player is driven by a “general-purpose Gemini 4 Argon coding agent,” which is a fancy way of saying that it’s not specialized for Minecraft. Gemini 4 Argon itself is a frontier model for “real-world software engineering, enterprise knowledge work like legal and finance, and cybersecurity defense,” according to a company blog. With Minecraft, 22% of the agents’ programs ended in an error, with more than 600 deaths.

Although the model was used for a game here, the run was designed to show that Argon is capable of “complex, long-horizon workflows” for complex real-world tasks and agent coordination. Such long projects can involve decompiling a game back into source code, as we covered recently with a Modern Warfare 2 rebuild that now has 83% of its functions matching the original byte for byte.

The Ukrainian military is claiming a world’s first after using an unmanned drone to rescue an injured soldier on the eastern Kharkiv front. Ukraine’s United24 news shared a video of the historic first. It also explained that the wounded infantryman was stuck in a heavily mined area, guarded by Russian kamikaze drones.

The above video starts with the Ukrainian drone locating the soldier, callsign ‘Kostya,’ in enemy territory. Various media reports suggest he was 11 miles (18km) behind enemy lines, at the mercy of Russian kamikaze drones, and perilously located in a minefield. Traditional land-based rescue was therefore not possible, but Kostya bravely agreed to be part of the first-ever human drone-lift rescue plan.

After being located, the injured infantryman clipped himself into a harness. He said, “That’s it, we can take off,” when he was fully buckled into the rudimentary-looking harness. UAV operator, callsign ‘Black’ from the 20th Mechanized Battalion, 30th Infantry Brigade, then appeared in the video and explained: “We were constantly in touch with him."

Ukrainian drone rescue key facts:

• Drone used: Gurzuf Defense hexacopter
• Drone capable of carrying 130kg (~287 pounds)
• Drone’s known range: it has previously transported 90kg (~198 pounds) loads up to 25km (16 miles)
• Infantryman weight: 80kg (~176 pounds)
• Rescue distance: 8km (11 miles)
• Hazards: enemy kamikaze drones, mines, gravity, many more

Being in constant touch with the operations HQ would have been reassuring. However, the surrounding presence of a fleet of Ukrainian support drones, both kamikaze devices and UAVs with anti-drone nets, was probably most comforting.

Eventually dropping back into safe(r) territory, after what must have been an arduous, nerve-wracking journey, control said, “Congratulations, you’re on the ground,” to Kostya, as he touched down in a field. Then the control room erupted into applause. They got their man back safely, and he is now being treated and is in recovery.

UAV operator ‘Black’ was delighted with the concerted efforts that brought back this wounded soldier. “A lot of people were involved, and everything worked out for us,” he said. Importantly, this may be the start of a whole new system of personnel evacuations for wounded and/or stranded soldiers using drone technology, indicated brigade leader ‘Napalm’ toward the end of the video.

Panchovix on GitHub recently released a VBIOS configurator for RTX 30-to 50-series cards that doesn’t require flashing. The loader provides a UI for easy configuration and lowers the risk of bricking your GPU by avoiding a risky flash process, and it's available for Linux, too.

Software like MSI Afterburner or ASUS GPU Tweak is often the go-to tool for quickly changing your graphics card’s settings; however, those tools have hard limits to how much you can push the graphics card. If you want to tweak your GPU beyond the firmware’s set limits, you can change it by tweaking the parameters in the VBIOS. Configuring VBIOS is similar to changing BIOS settings in the BOOT menu. With the VBIOS loader, you can change settings beyond the firmware’s hard limits.

The way it works is by storing the modified VBIOS image in the GPU’s register key; as the Nvidia driver looks for a VBIOS override on startup, it finds the VBIOS image and restarts, applying the override settings. The flash chip on the graphics card is not overwritten, reducing the risk of bricking your GPU. However, this does not protect the card from any extreme settings that could destroy electrical components; it merely provides a safer and more convenient way to adjust and apply VBIOS settings, including a way to roll back to the default VBIOS settings should you face any instability.

Bricking a flash chip isn’t as catastrophic as it seems, however. As long as you have a backed-up version of the VBIOS, you can easily buy an SPI flash chip programmer or even build your own using a cheap Raspberry Pi Pico and its many clones; sometimes programming the flash chip may not even require desoldering. Programming a flash chip is very tedious and inconvenient, though, which is why avoiding the risk of a botched flash process altogether is so appealing.

Unless you’re familiar with power delivery, voltage tables, and the patience required to test for hours, we wouldn’t recommend jumping into this unless you’re prepared to risk your GPU. However, you can still safely take advantage of this software by tweaking the fan curves and other settings you’ve applied and tested in software like MSI Afterburner if, for some reason, the startup settings don’t stick. This software will give your GPU new default settings that override at every startup, so long as Nvidia doesn’t remove the registry key that allows the VBIOS override.

A Chinese-speaking hacker has been observed using artificial intelligence (AI) agents to probe and then gain unauthorized access to more than 100 websites belonging to some extremely well-known companies. From Deere, the farming equipment manufacturer, to SharkNinja, the company behind beloved kitchen appliances, the agents were able to leverage exposed instances of Carin, an open-source AI-powered problem-solving platform that has proven popular among hackers, a Reuters report explains.

This is just the latest example of hackers turning to AI agents in an attempt to level up their attacks on unsuspecting companies and services. Snorre Fagerland, principal threat researcher at the cybersecurity company NorForge, spotted the hacker's antics when observing Carin instances that had been inadvertently exposed.

Fagerland was able to watch multiple hackers go about their business, but the Chinese-speaking hacker was the most prolific, the report says. They targeted businesses based in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Japanese e-commerce sites. Notably, the hacker didn't get into detail when commanding their legion of AI agents. Fewer than 100 Chinese characters were used, yet the agents had attempted ot break into more than 1,200 different websites as of the week ending October 18, 2026.

These agents weren't simply throwing everything at a wall and hoping it stuck, either. Security researcher Fagerland was "impressed" by some of the tactics that had been used. In one case, the AI agents scoured digital records to find infrastructure associated with their target, located a public-facing control panel, identified a weakness, and then leveraged it to force the execution of malicious commands, the Reuters report detailed. "It's ⁠not straightforward to come up with solutions like that," Fagerland told Reuters. "It's not script kiddie stuff."

Vitally, the approach of using AI agents in this way means that they can be given instructions and then left to their own devices. With no supervision required, those commanding the agents are free to turn their attention elsewhere. While SharkNinja told Reuters that the attack only impacted a site used for product support information, the rest of the AI-aided hackers had more luck. One of the hackers monitored by Gargerland stole credit card data, while another tried to steal from a cryptocurrency exchange — although it isn't clear whether they were successful.