Blu-ray is fading after 20 years in the market, with Sony Japan finally discontinuing its last dedicated Blu-ray player. According to FlatpanelsHD, Sony Japan has finally marked the UBP-X700/K player as “Discontinued,” meaning customers in the country can no longer purchase a new standalone Blu-ray player from the company. This should not come as a surprise, as Sony stopped shipping the players in February of this year, suggesting that Sony only relied on existing inventory for its remaining Blu-ray player sales.

The PlayStation 5 is the only remaining Sony device that can play Blu-ray discs, but the company has also announced that it will end physical game disc production by January 2028. Because of this, some people fear that the upcoming PlayStation 6 will no longer have an optical drive. This move follows in the footsteps of LG, which ended Blu-ray player production in 2024. Japanese electronics companies Elecom and Buffalo have also ended production of Blu-ray drives for PCs this year, although Buffalo Americas says that it is “fully committed to supplying optical drives to the American market, and our DVD/Blu-ray drive products are anticipated to remain available for the near future.”

This move away from physical media and focus on streaming is worrying, especially to those who are concerned that we are moving towards a world where people no longer own anything. Because of this, sales of “retro media,” including CDs and vinyl, went up by 59% and 18% respectively. While you could still purchase a Blu-ray player from other manufacturers like Panasonic, Sony is one of the bigger companies that built and supported the standard, and its move to end the production and sale of Blu-ray players will leave this niche market even smaller. The audiophile market is facing the same dilemma, as some Hi-Fi player manufacturers ended production of selected products because optical drive makers have stopped making the components needed to read SACDs.

Ultra HD Blu-ray is facing the same upheaval that VHS and DVDs went through with the introduction of new formats. But while the older technologies were replaced by higher-quality formats, Blu-ray is being replaced not by more pixels, but by the convenience of streaming. However, it also comes with the caveat that people would no longer own physical media; a trend that worries data archivists.

TSMC, the world's largest contract chip manufacturer, is seeking alternative machinery without rare-earth components to reduce its dependence on China-dominated materials and avoid disruptions to factory operations caused by the country's export controls. According to a Reuters report on October 22 citing people familiar with the matter, the Taiwanese company has begun approaching its equipment suppliers to explore whether they can provide factory automation equipment equipped with motors that don't require rare-earth materials.

TSMC supplies the extremely powerful Nvidia chips that are facilitating the AI boom. It also manufactures chips for Apple, Broadcom, Qualcomm, and numerous other tech and automotive companies. The company operates enormous, highly automated semiconductor fabrication plants. These factories use industrial machinery that relies on electric motors with powerful permanent magnets made from rare-earth elements such as neodymium, dysprosium, and terbium.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), China accounts for roughly 70% of global rare earth mining. The International Energy Agency (IEA) says China also controls around 90% of refining and approximately 95% of the finished permanent magnets found in TSMC’s machines, giving Beijing a quasi-absolute monopoly over one of the most critical technology supply chains. In April 2025, the country placed seven medium and heavy rare earths and the magnets made from them under export controls, requiring exporters to seek case-by-case approval and export licenses, thereby choking shipments to manufacturers across the U.S., Europe, and Asia, including TSMC.

China expanded the controls on October 9, 2025, to include five additional rare earths, processing technology and equipment, and even products manufactured outside the country that contain more than 0.1% Chinese-origin rare earths, or are made using Chinese processing technology. It later suspended the October expansion for one year, until November 10, 2026. This has now been extended for an additional 90 days.

TSMC’s moves aim to reduce the risk that these controls will hinder production at its factories. Even with all other raw materials and machinery required to manufacture its chips, shortages of specialized motor components could complicate the maintenance, repair, or expansion of its production equipment. Several technological approaches allow motors to avoid rare earth magnets. Conventional induction motors, for example, generate torque using electromagnetic induction rather than permanent magnets. Switched-reluctance motors are another option, while some permanent-magnet motors can use ferrite magnets instead of rare-earth magnets. However, these technologies typically involve different trade-offs in efficiency, size, power density, precision, and control requirements.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world is undertaking the painstaking, drawn-out task of building a rare-earth supply chain outside China. Taiwan is reportedly pursuing domestic rare-earth production capabilities in collaboration with the United States, with both countries confirming their intent to reduce reliance on Chinese rare-earth and critical-mineral supply chains.

Taiwan's government is supporting the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) in establishing a pilot production line within three years that could supply about 50% of Taiwan's domestic rare-earth demand. Meanwhile, the U.S. is “working with Taiwan and other partners to develop alternative sources of supply, expand processing capacity and build more resilient supply chains,” according to the report. In February 2026, the Trump administration announced plans to create a $12 billion critical minerals stockpile to offset supply chain risks from China.

Nvidia's RTX Spark platform puts local AI inference and content creation first, but Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra really wants to game, too. The vented keyboard keeps the critical WASD keys cool under load by design, the smooth 120Hz screen can get as bright as 2000 nits with HDR games, and the built-in speakers may be the best I've ever heard on a laptop, period.

There's just one problem: that 3270x2180 screen asks a lot of DLSS upscaling. The computation that DLSS performs doesn't come for free, and the load increases with higher output resolutions. This is especially relevant with the Surface Laptop Ultra's high-density panel, which has just 14% fewer pixels than a 16:9 4K display.

The Surface's unusual 3:2 aspect ratio (at least compared to the average gaming laptop) also means that scaling content up to fill the screen isn't straightforward in many games. 16:9 and 16:10 content gets stretched vertically, causing obvious distortion of character models and objects like tires. And if you use windowed mode instead, playing in a 16:9 or 16:10 window on a relatively small screen like this quickly tires the eyes.

The thing is, all this is easy to solve—easy enough, in fact, that I'm surprised I had to do it myself at all.

Microsoft seems aware that lower 3:2 resolutions are useful for this system, as it put a 1600x1024 custom resolution in the list of display modes that's slightly less than half of native on both axes. But at roughly 1.6 megapixels in total, that image offers less resolution than even a 1920x1080 display does. Scaling up from such a low-res baseline on the Surface screen results in a noticeably soft image even before we dial in DLSS.

What we really want, for reasons of both performance and adequate sharpness, is a 3:2 resolution that comes close to the 2.07 megapixels that 1920x1080 yields. Some quick math and rounding to whole numbers gives us 1764x1176 as an optimal target.

With those ideal dimensions in hand, the next step was to create a custom resolution to match. The Nvidia Control Panel doesn't work on Windows on Arm, but we can still use the Nvidia App to set custom resolutions.

After diving into the System tab and expanding the Display Properties pane, I found the "Customize Resolution" button to open an editor to that end and added 1764x1176 at 120Hz. I then tested it and confirmed that it worked as a supported display mode. (If you want to match the 3.7 MP of 2560x1440, set up a 2352x1568 resolution while you’re at it.)

If for some reason you don't want non-3:2 content to fit the entire Surface Laptop Ultra screen, there is a Scaling pane in the Nvidia App that lets you control that behavior. The "Aspect Ratio" scaling mode will letterbox 16:9 and 16:10 material if you set the display resolution accordingly. But if you're paying $5899 for this system, I presume you want to use every one of its pricey pixels rather than leaving some of them dark.

So what does that bit of tweaking buy us compared to our initial gaming results with Control Resonant?

As someone who primarily games on our Ryzen 7 9800X3D GPU testing system and not a laptop, I wanted to make sure I wasn't setting unreasonable expectations for the Surface Laptop for input latency or CPU performance. So I hauled out an older 17" gaming laptop with a Core i9-11980HK and an RTX 3080 Mobile 16GB inside to get some perspective.

To level the playing field with the Surface Laptop Ultra and its native support for frame generation, I modded Optiscaler into Control Resonant on that system to enable Intel's Xe Frame Generation and Xe Low Latency features.

I conducted my testing with Control Resonant's High raster preset and medium RT preset, which gets you a noticeable boost in image quality thanks in part to DLSS Ray Reconstruction.

You can see that with these settings, trying to upscale Control Resonant to the Surface Laptop Ultra's native resolution is too much to ask for a smooth or responsive gaming experience. Even with DLSS Ultra Performance (an input resolution of 1090x727) and 2X frame generation, we only just break 60 FPS, and latency is at an unacceptable 87 ms average. There's no latency budget left to turn up MFG without turning down other image quality settings.

With our 1764x1176 custom resolution, however, we're off to a great start with DLSS Quality upscaling (an input resolution of 1176x874). The resulting 83.4 FPS average, 42.9 1% low FPS, and an average input latency of 67.8 ms is a fine experience. We still have room to dial in MFG 3X, leading to a 123 FPS average and 55 FPS 1% lows while keeping latency a reasonable 71 ms.

The RTX 3080 Mobile system with XeFG and XeLL, meanwhile, turns in an 87.1 FPS average, 53 FPS 1% lows, and a 69 ms average input latency at 1920x1080 with the same image quality settings. Its key advantage is in 1% lows, but that win comes with significant trade-offs.

Plugged into our Watts Up meter, the RTX 3080 system draws 250 W from the wall to deliver the experience it does, but according to a USB-C power meter, the Surface Laptop Ultra pulls between 110 W and 120 W under load. Silicon has come a long way since Tiger Lake and Ampere.

The RTX 3080 system and its enormous power adapter together also weigh over nine pounds (4.1 kg). It's technically portable but practically a pain to haul around. The Surface Laptop Ultra and its 140W adapter weigh just 5.3 lb (2.39 kg), which isn't featherweight but won't break your back.

And the Surface will actually fit on a tray table or your lap, with enough battery life that you can use it through a transcontinental U.S. flight, say, and still have plenty of juice left for either side of the trip.

So at least in Control Resonant, the Surface Laptop Ultra is delivering largely the same gaming experience as that high-end RTX 3080 Mobile system, but in a much smaller and lighter total package that draws less than half the wall power. And if you want to stretch frame rates further with MFG 3X, the Surface has MFG support that the older system doesn't. Just add in the 1764x1176 intermediate resolution that Microsoft forgot, and you’ll be well on your way to a better gaming experience.

Most everyone in the tech space has been living in interesting times, but this week isn't done yet, and it's already quite special for systems administrators worldwide. They already had to deal with the critical PHP RCE vulnerability, but they also have to update untold amounts of machines and software, thanks to eight insecure intermediate CA certificates that can allow attackers to impersonate any domain and/or pretend their malware is from a legitimate source.

An attacker anywhere in the path of your network traffic, like, say, in a company or government network, public Wi-Fi, your ISP, or one of any number of government entities, can intercept your connection and pretend that they're any website, like apple.com, amazon.com, or bankofamerica.com. If not updated, your operating system and installed software would be none the wiser. Additionally, with the code signing certificates, an application you download can be shown as completely legitimate from, say, Microsoft or Google.

The way that software checks a certificate is legitimate is by verifying its "chain." For example, a website like tomshardware.com has a certificate, issued and signed by an intermediate Certification Authority (or CA, a certificate-selling company), and whose certificate, in turn, is trusted and signed by root certificates — whose exceedingly precious keys are kept offline in safes. In this week's event, Indian CA firm eMudhra issued six TLS and two code-signing intermediate certificates with easily guessable keys.

Your operating system and potentially tens of different applications on your machine all keep a list of which root certificates and CAs are trusted. Browsers also keep a list of those not to trust, called a revocation list. These lists are updated periodically as screw-ups happen, just like the one that took place this week. And now they all need to be updated again, by revoking the eight CAs, removing the one affected root certificate, or just hard-coding a rejection of all eight affected keys.

There's a silver lining: recent versions of Chrome, Brave, Firefox, and Safari all enforce a feature called Certificate Transparency that consults a public read-only log of certificate issuances, and blocks any that aren't mentioned. Google reports that no certificates signed by the six affected intermediate CAs were logged, so if regular web browsing is all you did, you should be safe — but still check all your software for updates nonetheless.

The problem here is the sheer amount of machines and software that needs updating: PCs, servers, operating systems, phones, tablets, routers, web browsers, web browsers wrapped in apps, virtual servers, virtual machines, Docker and other containers, programming languages like Python, Go, Node.js, Rust, standalone download utilities like curl, and probably tens or hundreds of other categories. Additionally, we discussed things that are expected and likely to get updates. Old routers, smart and IoT appliances, and old computers could eventually present a problem.

As for the technical details, eMudhra issued six intermediate CA certificates and two intermediate code-signing certs with rather unadvisable private keys. The private key is the secret half of the two parts of a certificate, and for some reason, those of the aforementioned certs were only 1 byte long — thus a number from 0 to 255, trivial to brute-force in a split second. How the heck that happened is still under investigation.

We often criticise companies for misleading marketing, which typically falls in the direction of deceitful overpromising. With the Ryzen 5 5500F, we have the opposite problem. Its name and branding undersell what AMD is offering here. It’s a marked improvement over the base Ryzen 5 5500, giving AMD better standing among the best budget CPUs.

The 5500F is a Zen 3 CPU from the Vermeer family of chips, packing six cores, 12 threads, and a boost clock of 4.4 GHz. It’s modest by the standards of the best CPUs for gaming, but it also comes in at a suggested retail price of just $100. Those prices have drifted up toward $120, though hopefully they’ll settle down around list price before long.

Along with a 200 MHz jump in boost clock speeds over the 5500, the 5500F critically comes with access to PCIe 4.0. The original 5500 came from the Cezanne family of APUs, which all use monolithic dies and are limited to PCIe 3.0. Although the 5500F lives in the Vermeer family alongside the main Zen 3 stack, it’s still limited to the 16 MB of L3 cache that characterizes Cezanne (Vermeer chips have access to 32 MB of L3 otherwise).

The chip squarely targets Intel’s Core i3-14100F, a quad-core CPU available for around $100 that offers 11% better gaming performance at 1080p on average compared to the base 5500. The new 5500F tightens that gap to just 2.9%, and it manages to outclass Intel in multithreaded performance while offering a 10% average jump over the base 5500.

AMD Ryzen 5 5500F specifications and pricing

AMD gave the Ryzen 5 5500F a bad name. The “F” suffix across both AMD and Intel is typically used to note chips that lack integrated graphics. And indeed, the Ryzen 5 5500F does lack integrated graphics. But so does the Ryzen 5 5500. In reality, the Ryzen 5 5500F isn’t a re-released CPU with the iGPU sliced off, as F-series processors usually are, but rather an updated Ryzen 5 5500 that comes with better specs and, in turn, better performance.

If there’s any chip that falls in the bucket of a re-released CPU with the iGPU cut off, it’s the original Ryzen 5 5500, not this new F-suffix variant. The Ryzen 5 5500 comes from the Cezanne family of Zen 3 CPUs. These chips use the Zen 3 microarchitecture, but they have only 16MB of L3 cache and are limited to PCIe 3.0. Out of the full Cezanne family, the Ryzen 5 5500 is the only chip that isn’t either an APU like the Ryzen 5 5600G, or a laptop chip.

The newer Ryzen 5 5500F is from the Vermeer family, the same as other Zen 3-based desktop CPUs like the Ryzen 5 5600X. That brings with it an update to PCIe 4.0, which is a huge boon for GPU and storage performance, as well as a bump from a maximum boost of 4.2 GHz on the 5500 to 4.4 GHz on the 5500F.

Although the Ryzen 5 5500F falls in the Vermeer family, it still carries some Cezanne DNA. It’s the only Vermeer chip to have 16 MB of shared L3; all other Vermeer chips have 32 MB of L3, at least, with X3D options scaling higher. Both families retain the same L1/L2 setup, naturally, as they share the Zen 3 microarchitecture.

Otherwise, the Ryzen 5 5500F retains the 65W TDP, and 88W platform maximum, and it comes bundled with AMD’s Wraith Stealth cooler. The Wraith Stealth cooler is plenty to keep the Ryzen 5 5500F cool under load, saving you some money on an aftermarket CPU cooler.

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The Ryzen 5 5500F is AMD’s best budget gaming CPU right now, at least assuming you don’t already have a kit of DDR5 laying around. That was also true of the 5500, though begrudgingly. Deals on CPUs like the Ryzen 5 7600X are common, but the exorbitant cost of a kit of DDR5 right now nullifies any real savings there. Although the 5500F is still second chair to Intel’s Core i3-14100F, the battle between the two is much closer now. Plus, the 5500F has access to PCIe 4.0, solving a big sticking point with the original 5500 and its PCIe 3.0 limit.

With the Core i5-14400 and Core i3-14100 in the charts below, we tested both with DDR4 and DDR5. As we saw in our Raptor Lake Refresh DDR4 comparison recently, the newer memory standard brings about a 15% improvement in average gaming performance at 1080p. The DDR5 numbers are mainly here for context. The true battle is between DDR4 platforms, given the high cost of DDR5.

We followed the same testing procedure for this review as we do with any other. We have full platform details at the end of this review. For gaming, we used the RTX 5090 FE and tested at 1080p with a mixture of High and Ultra settings. Undoubtedly, some of our readers will have feedback about the decision to use such a high-performance GPU with such inexpensive CPUs, but this is our standard process for all CPU testing, and the choice to use the RTX 5090 is less impactful than you might think.

As you can see from our $100 CPU shootout, where we tested the 5500 and 14100F with an RTX 5090 and with an RTX 4060, average scaling was largely the same between the two GPUs, with only the baseline performance moving down on the RTX 4060. You’re going to remain CPU-bound with these chips and just about any modern gaming graphics card. Using the RTX 5090 allows us to take these results and compare them all the way up the stack rather than throw them in the bin.

With an extra boost in clock speed and access to PCIe 4.0, the Ryzen 5 5500F comes out 8.6% ahead of the 5500 in our 16-game geomean at 1080p. It’s now just 2.8% behind the Core i3-14100F, though. As we’ll see throughout some of the individual game tests, the four-core setup of the Core i3-14100F is a real limitation. 1% low performance jumped 11.7% from the 5500 to 5500F, as well, resulting in smoother performance.

The Ryzen 5 5500 occupies the bottom of our chart, and that’s mainly due to availability. There aren’t a ton of CPUs available around $100, unless you’re interested in spending $98 on a brand new FX-8300 (don’t). It’s a battle between the Core i3-14100F and Ryzen 5 5500F at this price. In order to step up to that next tier of performance, you need to spend around $150, which is a hotly contested area between DDR4 options like the Core i5-14400F (we only had the more expensive, non-F version on hand) and Ryzen 5 5600, and DDR5 options like the Ryzen 5 7600X.

AMD has brought 3D V-Cache down the Zen 3 product stack, all the way down to the Ryzen 5 5500X3D, though you’ll spend about twice as much on that CPU as the Ryzen 5 5500F or Core i3-14100F.

Still, both of these chips play a great role in a new budget gaming build right now if you have future upgrade aspirations. Compared to the Ryzen 7 5800X3D and Core i7-14700K — our recommendations for gaming on these platforms — you can save around $200 up front and put it toward a nicer graphics card. Intel’s platform has the additional flexibility of a future DDR5 upgrade with a new motherboard, as well.

Between the Core i3-14100F and Ryzen 5 5500F, Intel still holds a small edge in performance. Given how CPU-bound we are, that edge isn’t big enough to sway a buying decision, but the price is. The Ryzen 5 5500F has a recommended price of $100, but we haven’t seen it sold for less than $120. Neither the slightly higher price nor slight performance disadvantage are enough to sway things on their own, but together, they hurt the Ryzen 5 5500F’s place in the $100 CPU bracket.

That comes through clearly in our value geomean, where the Ryzen 5 5500 actually provides a better value than the new 5500F, due to the fact that it’s held onto its $90 price. The Core i5-14400 looks unsurprisingly bad here due to its $208 price tag. The Core i5-14400F is available closer to around $150 though, and it should provide identical performance with a discrete GPU.

With temperature and power, you can see the Ryzen 5 5500F takes better advantage of the 65W thermal design than the original 5500, climbing up to a 61W average in our test suite. Higher power draw is actually better in this case. We’re dealing with relatively low-power desktop chips, so if peak performance is the goal, we want every watt the thermal design can handle being used.

Given that the 5500F ramps up power, it’s less efficient as a result. Perhaps efficiency is important if you plan on using one of these CPUs around the clock in areas with high electricity prices, but in the context of gaming, the power difference isn’t big. It’s less than what a phone consumes with fast charging.

007 First Light benchmarks

007 First Light kicks off our individual game tests, and it happens to be one of the stranger results in our test pool. There was virtually no movement between the Ryzen 5 5500 and Ryzen 5 5500F, despite a jump in power with the 5500F. This is clearly an outlier in our suite, which will become clear as we go through the other games.

Baldur’s Gate 3 benchmarks

Baldur’s Gate 3 aligns more closely with our geomean, with the 5500F outpacing the 5500 by 7.2%. Intel still leads, however, with the Core i3-14100F beating out the 5500F by 5.9% and 5500 by 13.6%.

Cities Skylines 2 benchmarks

Cities Skylines 2 showcases an aspect of gaming performance that’s often overlooked, which is raw CPU compute. Here, we have a fully built city with a population of over one million people, stressing core count, clock speed, and memory capabilities. Although we only have a handful of chips here, the Core i5-14400 with DDR5 provides some important context for how this benchmark stresses different aspects of the system.

Crimson Desert benchmarks

Crimson Desert and its proprietary engine are remarkably well optimized, enough so to allow every CPU in our test suite to maintain a playable frame rate, even with Ultra settings. The 5500F is 7.8% faster than the 5500, though the Core i3-14100F still leads in performance, even when paired with DDR4.

Counter-Strike 2 benchmarks

Counter-Strike 2 shows the first major upset of our test suite, with the Ryzen 5 5500F winning out over the other CPUs we’re focused on; once again, the Core i5-14400 is mostly included for context. Although the 5500F beats out even the Core i3-14100F paired with DDR5, it suffers in the 1% lows, with even the Core i3-14100F paired with DDR4 offering better 1% low performance.

Cyberpunk 2077 benchmarks

One of the better showcases of the Ryzen 5 5500F, Cyberpunk 2077 shows the CPU up 9.2% compared to the base 5500. Intel still leads with the Core i3-14100F, though with a smaller 4.1% margin. Compared to the base 5500, the Core i3-14100F is 13.8% ahead.

The Blood of Dawnwalker benchmarks

The newest addition to our test suite is the UE5-based The Blood of Dawnwalker, and in particular a trot through a dense city in the middle of the game’s map, notorious for ramping CPU usage and introducing stuttering. The 5500F comes out on top by over 8% compared to the base 5500, but once again Intel leads with the Core i3-14100F.

F1 2024 benchmarks

With more modern CPUs, F1 2024 is normally a benchmark that skews heavily toward AMD, but this far down the stack, the opposite is true. Intel leads, even with a solid gain from the 5500F.

Final Fantasy XIV benchmarks

Final Fantasy XIV is balanced between AMD and Intel, though it heavily favors X3D CPUs. Without any of those in the mix here, the Ryzen 5 5500F falls behind the Core i3-14100F by 15%. There’s also little gained from moving to DDR5 with the Core i3-14100F.

Flight Simulator 24 benchmarks

Gaining a few frames in Flight Simulator 24 is nothing to sneeze at, and that’s exactly what the 5500F pulls off with a 9.6% lead over the 5500. Unfortunately for AMD, the Core i3-14100F is much faster in this title, with the 5500F trailing it by 18.9%.

Forza Horizon 6 benchmarks

Forza Horizon 6 shows more movement. The Ryzen 5 5500 already matched the Core i3-14100F in performance, allowing the 5500F to swoop in with a 7.8% lead. The Core i3-14100F with DDR5 unsurprisingly still leads, but this is a big feather in the 5500F’s cap.

Marvel Rivals

Marvel Rivals is an important benchmark, not only because the game is wildly popular, but also because it showcases exactly what AMD wanted to accomplish with the 5500F. The 14100F leads the base 5500 by over 12%, but the 5500F changes that story, leading the 14100F by 6.3%. This is presumably the target AMD set with the 5500, attempting to gain a performance advantage over the 14100F where the base 5500 originally struggled. And it hit that target in this case.

Onimusha: Way of the Sword benchmarks

Onimusha: Way of the Sword is the latest game sporting Capcom’s storied RE Engine, and it’s a title where the base 5500 and Core i3-14100F are in lockstep. The 5500F steps in to take the lead once again, beating the Core i3-14100F out by 6.9%.

Spider-Man 2 benchmarks

The notoriously CPU-heavy Spider-Man 2 jumps back to the pattern established by other titles in our test suite. The 14100F is over 20% ahead of the base 5500, and although the 5500F makes the battle closer, Intel still leads by 11%.

Starfield benchmarks

Starfield shows the Ryzen 5 5500F ahead of the 14100F, though only marginally, and with Intel coming out ahead with slightly better 1% lows. Still, this is another game where the 5500F successfully changes the power dynamic between Intel and AMD’s budget CPU offerings.

Warhammer 40K Space Marine 2 benchmarks

Finally, Warhammer 40K Space Marine 2 shows the 5500F matching the 14100F, whereas the base 5500 trailed by nearly 7%.

MORE: CPU Benchmark Hierarchy

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The Ryzen 5 5500F is primarily a gaming CPU, clocked fairly low at a 4.4 GHz boost and packing just six Zen 3 cores. The six-core floor that AMD has maintained for several generations gives the 5500F a significant edge over the Core i3-14100F, which uses a true quad-core design, bypassing the hybrid design that Intel has used on its past several generations of desktop CPUs.

There aren’t a lot of quad-core chips on the market today, so it’s no surprise to see the Core i3-14100F at the bottom of the chart here, regardless of whether it’s paired with DDR4 or DDR5. The Ryzen 5500 already led Intel by 12.8% in our multi-threaded geomean, but the 5500F nearly doubles that lead to 24.2%. Compared to the 5500, the new 5500F is a clean 10% ahead in our multithreaded geomean.

The scales unsurprisingly flip looking at single-threaded performance. Intel usually leads in single-threaded performance anyway, but some context is important here. Zen 3 is much older than Raptor Lake, and those microarchitectural differences really show up in our single-threaded testing.

On microarchitecture, the Ryzen 5 5500F is 5% ahead of the 5500 in our single-threaded geomean, aligning almost perfectly with the 5% boost in turbo clock speed that the 5500F has. That’s a welcome bump, though keep in mind that a 4.4 GHz boost is still relatively low, and the 5500F only has access to 16 MB of L3. Other Vermeer CPUs, such as the 5700X, have 32 MB.

Rendering Benchmarks

CPU rendering workloads are intense, sustained tasks often pinning either an individual core, or all of the cores, at full utilization. Because they’re sustained and demanding, many of our rendering tests factor into the geomean above, and that’s a major driving force behind why tests like Cinebench are such a staple when measuring CPU performance.

For the headline tests like POV-Ray and Cinebench, the results fall as you’d expect. AMD leads in multi-threaded work, Intel in single-threaded work, and the 5500F ends up between 5% and 10% faster than the 5500, depending on the benchmark.

Encoding Benchmarks

Encoding workloads are similarly all-out for the CPU cores, and in heavy, multi-threaded video encoding via HandBrake, the 5500F is only marginally faster than the 5500. Particularly in these heavy video encodes, the fact that the 5500F has access to six cores matters more than anything else. That slight boost in clock speed helps it squeeze out an advantage; however, with any of these workloads, you’ll notice the 5500F struggles to get along, just like the Core i3-14100 and base 5500.

Single-threaded encoding via LAME shows an advantage for Intel, unsurprisingly, but the multi-threaded workloads are what matter here. As a demonstration, look at our VP9 HandBrake results. The 5500 actually ended up faster than the 5500F here, though by just 1 FPS, when the standard for these chips is managing just 4 FPS for this encode.

Creator App Benchmarks

The main CPUs we’re focused on — 5500, 5500F, and 14100F — aren’t the best choice when it comes to modern creative applications, particularly when it comes to the more demanding workloads in nonlinear video editors like Resolve and Premiere, as well as visual effects in After Effects. In Photoshop, the three ~$100 CPUs all hit a performance wall, though likely for different reasons, as you can see the DDR5-equipped 14100F run into the same bottleneck as the DDR4 version.

Web and Office Benchmarks

Web and office workloads are par for the course when it comes to the Ryzen 5 5500F. Although Intel retains a lead in our web and office benchmarks, the 5500F does a lot to close the gap compared to the 5500, at least in some tests. Looking at general web workloads through WebXPRT and Procyon, there isn’t much of a difference between the main chips we’re focused on.

However, the 5500F gains some ground in Excel with a 9.7% jump over the 5500. It was a massive 35% faster in Word, finally closing in on the 14100F, and it was 6.7% faster in PowerPoint. Even by the standards of budget CPUs, the Ryzen 5 5500 didn’t perform well in these applications. The 5500F puts AMD’s budget offering back in contention.

Chess Engines, Compilation, Compression, AVX, and Other Benchmarks

We run hundreds of tests on every CPU that comes across our benches, and not all of them are relevant to every chip. Here, we have a collection of more specialised workloads that don’t factor into our overall geomean. The tests are greatly varied here, including code compilation, compression performance, Java, chess engines, and cryptography, among other tests. We won’t be able to highlight all of them.

The most recognizable is Geekbench, showing a broader view of single-threaded and multi-threaded performance in a machine-gun-style benchmark suite that rips through different workloads in just a few minutes. What’s interesting is that Geekbench multi-thread shows the 14100F paired with DDR5 on top, likely taking into account the memory standard that isn’t represented in tests like Cinebench.

Another interesting test to highlight is memory throughput via WinSAT. This built-in Windows benchmark shows a clear performance wall for the DDR4 chips in our test suite. Of course, DDR5 provides much more throughput, but the interesting bit here is just how bottlenecked the throughput is with these late-stage DDR4 CPUs.

Elsewhere, there are a few broad trends that emerge. In security and cryptography workloads, AMD rules the roost. However, in many scientific workloads, Intel holds an edge. Again, these workloads aren’t particularly relevant for these CPUs, so we’d recommend placing more emphasis on the benchmarks in the sections above.

SPEC Workstation benchmarks

We run SPEC Workstation as part of every CPU pass, and although workstation application performance isn’t relevant to these budget desktop chips, it’s still interesting to see how these applications push against the limitations of such restricted CPU designs. Feel free to peruse, but don’t put too much stock in the actual rankings. These are unrealistic workloads for this class of CPU.

MORE: CPU Benchmark Hierarchy

MORE: AMD vs. Intel

MORE: Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus review

MORE: AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D review

In games, we saw the Ryzen 5 5500F consume more power than the base 5500, actually reaching toward its 65W thermal design. In applications, the opposite is true. The 5500F actually consumed slightly less power than the base 5500, particularly in all-core workloads where the 5500 pushes past its 65W thermal design.

In y-cruncher multi-thread with AVX enabled, the 5500F drew 14.6% less power on average compared to the base 5500 and Core i3-14100F. In Linpack, the 5500F shaved more than 20% of the wattage of the 5500, and in Handbrake using VP9, it cut 12%. We don’t use software monitoring for our power measurements. Results are gathered from the EPS cables themselves.

Looking at idle and active idle power measurements, the 5500F maintains Zen 3 low-power idle state, sipping just 7 watts during YouTube playback, dropping down to 6 watts at true idle. The 7600X provides a hint at where idle power draw has gone in the Zen 4/5 era.

As a result of lower power draw in some tests, it’s no surprise that the 5500F ends up more efficient than the 5500 in y-cruncher and Linpack. In Cinebench and Blender, however, the two CPUs are closely aligned in efficiency, with the 5500F actually coming out slightly less efficient in the Junkshop scene.

Our scatterplots are a good way to visualize efficiency. In Handbrake, you can see the 5500F provided better performance than the 5500 while consuming less power. In Blender, however, the two CPUs consumed roughly the same power, while the 5500F provided better performance.

Across all of our efficiency tests, the comparison for Intel isn’t great. Not only does the 14100F struggle in all-core workloads, it does so with higher power consumption, occasionally pushing above 80W.

Test Setup

As with all of our CPU reviews, we used as close to identical test setups as possible to isolate CPU performance. There are several steps we take with hardware to normalize results, such as using the same fan speed across each test bench, as well as tweaks we make to the software stack to represent true performance.

Our test images are based on Windows 24H2. We use the same Nvidia driver across both the RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 5090. Additionally, our test images never cross platforms, so chipset drivers on an Intel platform never see an AMD chip, or vice versa. Application versions are pinned where possible. For games, where pinning isn’t possible, we do regression testing in the event of an update, and if required, retest the pool of chips if the performance profile has changed.

Finally, we tweak the BIOS. Every system has access to EXPO/XMP, as well as ReBAR. Virtualization-Based Security (VBS) is disabled. For Intel systems, we use the default power profile, not more extreme power profiles that aren’t covered under warranty. Similarly, we disable AMD’s Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO), as it can push the processor outside warrantied specifications.

MORE: CPU Benchmark Hierarchy

MORE: AMD vs. Intel

MORE: Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus review

MORE: AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D review

The Ryzen 5 5500F is a compelling chip right now. When memory, storage, and GPU prices are at an all-time high, it offers a simple entry point into the AM4 platform, which remains relevant for midrange gaming rigs, on the heels of AMD re-releasing the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. The 5500F solves the major issues with AMD’s previous budget offering, upgrading the PCIe standard to Gen 4 and offering gaming performance that can rival the Core i3-14100F.

Price is the only issue. As is the case with many lower-end SKUs, availability of the Ryzen 5 5500F has been spotty at MSRP. It’s sold north of $120 in many cases, while the Core i3-14100F is available for around $100. AMD has the upside of a 5800X3D upgrade in the future; Intel has the Raptor Lake Refresh stack and DDR5 options. The right choice between them largely comes down to what your future upgrade plans are, especially if inflated RAM and storage prices persist.

Gaming is a major focal point here. You can buy a much better CPU for $150 or $200, but going with a $100 chip such as the 5500F gives you that much more money to spend on a graphics card. Intel still leads in our 1080p geomean with the Core i3-14100F paired with DDR4, though only by 2.9%. That’s enough of a lead to still call it a lead, but we’re not far off noise levels.

Intel comes out ahead overall, but as you can see from our gaming benchmarks, the 14100F and 5500F swap places for the top slot between them from title to title. What was consistent was the uplift the 5500F showed over the 5500, often running ahead by around 7%, and by as much as 10%.

Although the modern dynamic between Intel and AMD shows Team Red ahead in games and Team Blue ahead in applications, the opposite is true here. The lowly quad-core Core i3-14100F can’t muster better multi-threaded performance than the Ryzen 5 5500, and certainly not the 5500F.

That’s despite the fact that the single-threaded performance of the Core i3-14100F is superior. The extra cores on the Ryzen 5 5500F pull their weight in threaded applications, though neither chip is built for much beyond basic office and web productivity. As a host CPU for a server, the nT performance of the Ryzen 5 5500F is a safer bet.

It’s a toss-up between recommending the Core i3-14100F or Ryzen 5 5500F; as mentioned, both have their advantages when it comes time to upgrade. Hopefully the price on the 5500F will come down. As it stands, the extra $20 is an annoyance more so than a dealbreaker, but it would nice to see the 5500F on level footing with the 14100F when it comes to price.

MORE: CPU Benchmark Hierarchy

MORE: AMD vs. Intel

MORE: Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus review

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DRAM featuring 4F² memory cells has long been considered one of the holy grails of the DRAM industry, as they promise to reduce cell area by 33% compared with conventional 6F² designs and therefore enable building DRAMs with more memory cells in the same area. However, after working on 4F² memory cells for a couple of decades, Micron has concluded that the architecture offers no meaningful density advantages, increases manufacturing complexity and costs, and has fundamental scaling limitations. This has a dramatic impact on Micron's future plans.

"Micron invented 4F² DRAM," said Scott DeBoer, president and chief technology and products officer at Micron, during the company's event on Wednesday. "The path with 4F² DRAM is always been an option through time, and we have evaluated it and not pursued it due to increased complexity and cost through this past two-decade period of time."

Interestingly, both Samsung and SK hynix still have 4F² memory cells in their roadmaps (according to TechInsights), so Micron's rejection of the technology puts the company on a unique trajectory. Several years ago, the company delayed integration of EUV lithography into its manufacturing flow, contrary to what its rivals did, and still managed to retain competitive positions both in terms of costs and in terms of performance. Therefore, skipping 4F² memory cells is not completely surprising.

4F² is not the future of Micron's DRAM

The main attraction of 4F² DRAM is its theoretically smaller memory cell. The 4F² naming refers to a cell area equivalent to four times the square of the minimum lithographic feature size (F), compared with six times F² for conventional DRAM.

At identical feature dimensions, a 4F² cell occupies approximately 33% less area than a 6F² cell, which could theoretically increase the number of memory cells per wafer by 50%. Such an improvement would reduce manufacturing costs per bit and increase per-device memory capacity even without an equivalent reduction in feature dimensions. However, to make these advantages possible, DRAM makers must develop a suitable transistor architecture and a sufficiently compact capacitor arrangement. This is not easy at all.

The CTO of Micron says that the theoretical advantages of 4F² DRAM do not necessarily translate into higher memory density in practice. DeBoer explained that dimensions and pitch of DRAM capacitors, rather than the nominal area of DRAM transistors, ultimately determine how many memory cells can fit on a wafer. Both 4F² and 6F² transistor structures must fit beneath the capacitors, which means that reducing transistor area alone does not guarantee a corresponding reduction in overall cell size because transistors need a capacitor. Furthermore, Micron believes that 4F² introduces additional manufacturing steps and complexity that increase costs without delivering sufficient benefits.

"It is important to understand the capacitor pitch, the capacitor size, and dimensions, is what sets the DRAM bit density, not whether it is 6F², 4F², 8F²," DeBoer said. "From our investigation of this technology over the past couple of decades, it is a bit of a myth that 4F² actually provides anything versus 6F². It is capacitor pitch that defines the DRAM. You can build the cells, the transistors underlying them in different ways, but they still have to fit under the capacitor pitch, which sets the DRAM [cell size]. So, some of that is just smoke and mirrors in terms of talking about 6F² versus 4F²."

4F² memory cells may curb new process technologies

Instead of adopting the 4F² DRAM cell architecture, Micron plans to continue scaling conventional 6F² DRAM. The company believes it can increase bit density by reducing capacitor pitch and shrinking process technologies even without introducing a fundamentally different transistor architecture.

Advanced lithography, new materials, and wafer bonding should allow Micron to extend planar DRAM scaling for several more generations, according to the company. For example, its upcoming 1δ process technology, scheduled to enter volume production in the second half of 2027, promises a mid-20% improvement in bit density compared with its predecessor. Micron also plans to adopt High-NA EUV lithography for future DRAM generations.

Interestingly, DeBoer fully acknowledges that 4F² DRAM is technically feasible and that Micron itself has manufactured experimental devices based on the architecture. However, its manufacturing complexity and costs become increasingly problematic as feature dimensions shrink, so essentially Micron claims that it can either adopt 4F² or use more sophisticated process technologies, a claim that perhaps implies why China-based CXMT recently praised 4F². Although DeBoer did not identify any specific physical limitations involved, he stated that 4F² has no sustainable scaling path beyond a certain point. This suggests that Micron sees little value in introducing an intermediate architecture that would eventually require another major transition.

"When you look at a scaling path, you can go back a few nodes and absolutely, 4F² can be built back a few nodes, no question about it," DeBoer noted. "It is more complicated, it is more complex, it is more costly, but you can do that. When we look at scaling 4F² beyond where we are sitting today, there it is; it is physics. There are fundamental problems with 4F² scaling that ultimately will lead to 3D DRAM coming in instead of 4F²."

3D DRAM is the future

Indeed, Micron's preferred long-term solution is 3D DRAM, which would increase memory density by stacking memory cells vertically rather than relying exclusively on reductions in their lateral dimensions. Alongside development of multiple next-generation planar DRAM process technologies, the company is already developing multiple generations of 3D DRAM production nodes (which is not surprising, as 3D NAND nodes will rely on fundamental innovations developed for planar processes), although it has not disclosed when the new architecture will enter commercial production. DeBoer indicated that Micron will make the transition when 3D DRAM offers the right combination of density, manufacturing complexity, and cost.

Although both Samsung and SK hynix have 4F² DRAM products in their roadmaps, Micron believes that the assumption that reducing the nominal footprint of DRAM cells improves manufacturing economics is wrong and that extending 6F² scaling and eventually adopting 3D DRAM offers a better long-term strategy.

After years of delays, Atari released its reimagined hybrid VCS console-PC in mid-2021. Now the modern Linux-based AMD APU-powered device is being officially retired with the firm’s decision to shut down the Atari VCS software store early next year (scroll to the end of the page to see the October 21-dated announcement). It isn’t all bad news; the machine already had a PC mode users could take advantage of. But after the store closes, Atari says it will “make an OS update available that allows you to migrate all functionality to your local machine, removing any dependencies on Atari infrastructure for authentication and software.” All players will also get access to an Atari Homebrew App to let users build and add new games independently.

Via the above link and the lengthier statement by the moderator of the Atari Club Discord channel, you can see a few important dates broadcast to those who still cherish their VCS machines. You will still be able to add software to your library via the official store until January 31, 2027. The store will finally be closed on February 1, 2027. Then “After the store closes, our plan is to make an OS update available that allows you to migrate all functionality to your local machine, removing any dependencies on Atari infrastructure for authentication and software,” wrote an Atari Club mod. “Once that transition is complete, we will end support for the platform.”

Importantly, the Atari Home Brew app is being pushed to all players during the above transition period. This will allow anyone to add games to their console and devs to continue to build apps for the VCS and share with the community. If this affects you, it looks like it will be worthwhile joining the Discord community for walkthroughs of OS migration and using the Homebrew app, and more.

What was the Atari VCS (2021)?

The modern VCS shared the same chassis styling as the venerable Atari 2600 (the 1977 console was originally called the Atari Video Computer System, hence VCS). However, under the hood it was a far different beast. It came packing an AMD Ryzen Embedded R1606 APU with 2C/4T CPU and Vega 3 iGPU, 8GB of DDR4 RAM, and 32GB of eMMC storage. However, both RAM and storage were upgradable. The DDR4 could be upgraded using a SODIMM, and there was an M.2 (SATA) SSD slot. Completing the hardware spec, there was also Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n 2.4/5GHz, Bluetooth 4.0, HDMI 2.0, Gigabit Ethernet, and 4x USB 3.1 (2x front, 2x rear).

Even when it was launched, it was possible to run a mainstream OS like Linux, Windows, or Chrome OS on the VCS 2021. But Atari sold the machine with the Atari Custom Linux OS (Debian-based). This enabled a custom UI featuring 100 classic games, its retro-inspired store, and the ability to install popular streaming apps, like Netflix, Disney+, and HBO Max, among other things.

We reviewed the Atari VCS in July 2021, after it had become available to folks who weren’t crowdfunding backers. However, our editor’s nostalgia-tinted glasses were soon shattered by the price ($399), necessity for a keyboard and mouse for streaming apps, poor responsiveness, and its clunky PC mode. An unforgivably noisy fan didn’t help, either. The conclusion at the time was most would be better served by buying a budget mini PC or Raspberry Pi and making their own retro system with a joystick/controller of their choice. Even in 2026, with the component price crunch, there are still mini PC systems with far more grunt and RAM/storage pre-installed than the VCS, for under $400.

Electronic Arts (EA) is closing BioWare and its Edmonton studio, according to a recent letter to employees, which confirms that early development on the next Mass Effect game has also been canceled. The studio was behind Mass Effect and other popular franchises such as Dragon Age, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Neverwinter Nights, and Baldur’s Gate during its 31-year history. EA is focusing on Battlefield, Iron Man, and a Fight Night revival instead.

BioWare, a “legendary studio,” in EA’s words, had a small team working on early development of the next Mass Effect game, but the company “made the decision not to move forward with this development.” BioWare was acquired by EA in 2008, and EA itself went private in August. The next game in the series was first announced in November 2020 and teased that December with an official trailer on EA’s Mass Effect YouTube channel. In 2021, the Mass Effect Legendary Edition remaster of the original trilogy was released. Since then, the studio has been relatively quiet except for Dragon Age: The Veilguard in 2024.

EA spared only a few lines for BioWare, instead focusing on three priorities: Deepen Our Core, Expand Our Reach, and Transform Our Business. Battlefield 6 is touted as “a great success” as the company is focusing on Apex Legends modes, Marvel’s Iron Man, and the next Star Wars Jedi game. “Project Gridiron” falls under the EA Sports heading as a social-first, open-world experience from EA’s American football team, with a Fight Night revival currently in pre-production. The company hasn’t forgotten about The Sims, either, and intends to “prioritize [its] efforts on ‘Project Evergreen.’”

Those impacted will be supported “in exploring other opportunities within EA.” EA did not give a job count, and neither the Mass Effect nor the Dragon Age series was declared dead. BioWare’s released games were also not mentioned.

Veilguard, as EA described it early last year, engaged only about “1.5 million players during the quarter,” which was “down nearly 50% from the company’s expectations.” That reception may have played a partial role in the decision, though EA did not say so. Around the same time, BioWare general manager Gary McKay said that only “a core team” was working on the next Mass Effect game and didn’t “require support from the full studio,” as colleagues were matched “with other teams at EA.”

The move is not entirely unexpected, with job cuts being common in the industry, for example, with Microsoft announcing 3,200 Xbox job cuts in July, citing low margins.

EA did not reveal any dates for major titles, but it plans to discuss its direction and the work ahead with staff at its Global Town Hall in November. For now, it looks like EA is doubling down on its core franchises and dropping the studio to refocus on what’s been working.

Moscow is apparently using commercial fishing trawlers to map undersea cables connecting the U.S. and Europe. According to The Telegraph, it has uncovered over 500 incidents where Russian fishing boats loitered above critical communications cables over a span of four and a half years. All the data came from Global Fishing Watch, which uses satellite data to track vessels over the open ocean. The satellite tracks of these suspicious Russian ships are then cross-referenced over nautical charts that marked the locations of undersea cables.

While the general location of most undersea cables is clearly marked on nautical charts so ships can avoid them, any operation involving undersea cables requires more accurate positioning data. The Telegraph gave three examples of Russian trawlers seemingly surveying critical infrastructure. One ship followed the track of nine separate cables under the Atlantic, including the Atlantic Crossing 1 telecommunications cable and the decommissioned TAT-14 undersea cable owned by Sprint Corporation. Another ship loitered near the trans-Atlantic Hibernia Express cable and then followed the route of the Shefa-2 cable that connects Shetland to the Faroe Islands, while a third partially followed the tracks of the Amitie and Grace Hopper undersea cables, which connects the UK, France, and Spain to the U.S.

These ships have slowed multiple times, sometimes traveling at speeds between two and three knots. A senior naval officer said that the ships suspected of conducting these intelligence activities are large enough to house an uncrewed surface vehicle (USV) or remotely operated vehicle (ROV), and that they could deploy tethered units at very low speeds. “If you put a sonar-equipped ROV 100 meters above a feature of interest, you can map it with millimeter precision,” one naval officer said. A NATO representative also told the publication, “We’re absolutely aware of what Russian civilian fishing ships are up to and where ... Some of these ships have never seen a single fish on their deck.”

Undersea cables are the backbone of the modern interconnected world, and they carry economic activity worth billions, if not trillions of dollars. It’s estimated that around $87 billion worth of economic activity passes through this undersea infrastructure, and that they would be one of the first targets if ever a conflict between NATO and Russia erupts. These trawlers are part of Russia’s “gray-zone” warfare, where the actions of these commercial vessels cannot easily be traced back to the Kremlin.

There have already been multiple incidents of undersea cables getting disrupted across the world. Two undersea cables, one connecting Finland to Germany, and the other to Estonia, were disrupted one after the other in a span of a couple of months in 2024. Taiwan has also detained a Chinese freighter after it was suspected of severing an undersea cable connecting its Penghu Islands to the nation’s main islands, while another Chinese ship has been suspected of cutting an undersea cable connecting it to the U.S. More recently, NATO uncovered a Russian plot to sabotage the two largest undersea cables on Earth, while a cable connecting Australia and New Zealand to Indonesia and Singapore have also been damaged. Iran even threatened to sever undersea cables going through the Strait of Hormuz.

Even though undersea cables are considered critical infrastructure, the distances that they cover make it quite difficult, if not impossible, for nations to conduct constant patrols to protect them. The majority of their length also often sits in international waters, meaning vessels should be able to freely pass over and map undersea cables. While navies shadow these questionable vessels, their suspicious operation is generally not grounds for boarding, detention, or seizure.

In a world where SSDs with up to 256TB capacity are about to enter the scene to compete against hard disk drives that store over 40TB, magnetic tape storage may seem archaic. However, the 25-year-old Linear Tape-Open (LTO) format continues to evolve at a rather impressive pace.

The current LTO-10 generation stores up to 40TB of uncompressed data per cartridge, while HPE, IBM, and Quantum — the companies behind the LTO Program — now envision LTO-14 cartridges with up to 365TB of native capacity. But capacity is not the only advantage of LTO. In fact, the consortium has deliberately slowed its capacity roadmap in a bid to prioritize reliability, cost per terabyte, and manageable backup and recovery times over the previous goal of doubling capacity with every generation.

LTO began in 2000 with the LTO-1 format, which stored just 100GB of data natively and transferred it at 20 MB/s. Since then, capacity increased to 200GB with LTO-2, 400GB with LTO-3, 800GB with LTO-4, 1.5TB with LTO-5, 2.5TB with LTO-6, 6TB with LTO-7, 12TB with LTO-8, and 18TB with LTO-9.

The original LTO-10 media introduced in 2025 increased native capacity to 30TB, whereas an extended-length LTO-10 cartridge announced later increased it further to 40TB.

LTO cartridge capacity has increased by a factor of 400 in about 25 years without changing the form-factor itself. For comparison, the capacity of 3.5-inch hard drives increased by roughly 585 times over the same period, from around 75GB in 2000 to as much as 44 TB today, so tape has evolved at a slower pace. However, LTO has evolved without dramatic changes in internal complexity.

Two scaling vectors

The 40TB LTO-10 cartridge is noteworthy because its additional capacity is enabled by higher recording density and literally longer tape. The LTO-10 format uses 15,104 data tracks (enabled by the new barium ferrite recording layer), up 68.5% from 8,960 tracks with LTO-9, and combines them with higher linear density. To make this possible, LTO-10 uses a redesigned high-bandwidth servo system with a low-mass mechanism that enables the head to follow increasingly narrow tracks accurately, including in environments subject to shock and vibration.

Both 30TB and 40TB LTO-10 media use a strontium-doped barium ferrite (BaFe) recording layer, but the 40TB version uses a new Aramid base film that is thinner and smoother and therefore enables manufacturers to put more tape into the same cartridge. According to MagStor, the thinner substrate increases tape length from approximately 1,035 meters with the 30TB cartridge to around 1,335 meters with the 40TB version. Meanwhile, the 40TB cartridge works with the same LTO-10 drives as the existing 30TB media.

Therefore, modern LTO has at least two major scaling vectors: manufacturers can record more bits on a given area of tape, and can put more tape into a cartridge. Meanwhile, with LTO-10, the consortium had to drop backwards compatibility, which we will detail further within this article.

There appears to be plenty of room left on the tape front. Back in 2020, IBM and Fujifilm demonstrated a strontium ferrite tape technology with an areal density of 317 Gb/in², which they said could theoretically enable a cartridge capable of storing 580TB. The prototype used tracks only 56.2nm wide and a 29nm TMR read sensor, which proved that magnetic tape could reach capacities vastly beyond commercially available LTO products.

Capacity is not everything

Ironically, despite considerable technological headroom, the LTO Program has recently made its roadmap considerably less aggressive.

When HPE, IBM, and Quantum extended the roadmap through LTO-14 in 2022, they expected capacity to roughly double every generation. The plan envisioned 72TB for LTO-11, 144TB for LTO-12, 288TB for LTO-13, and a whopping 576TB native — or 1.44PB compressed — for LTO-14. But that changed in November 2025, when the three companies introduced the new roadmap for LTO that significantly slows down capacity scaling. The current roadmap targets 70TB native for LTO-11, 120TB for LTO-12, 210TB for LTO-13, and 365TB for LTO-14.

While the new roadmap is somewhat less impressive, it does not necessarily indicate that tape technology has encountered a physical scaling wall. The developers claim the revised targets are intended to prioritize reliability, affordability, efficiency, and cost per terabyte. The consortium also specifically says that lowering maximum cartridge capacities should help reduce the amount of time required to store and recover data, which is a legitimate argument even though it looks like an attempt to make a 'feature' out of a limitation.

"AI has turned archives into strategic assets," said Stephen Bacon, Vice President, Data Protection Solutions Product Management, HPE. "The new 40 TB LTO-10 cartridge will help enterprise-class organizations — across healthcare, financial services, media, research, manufacturing, the public sector and beyond — consolidate petabytes efficiently, strengthen cyber resiliency with true offline air-gapping, and keep long-term retention affordable and sustainable."

Bandwidth is becoming one of tape's more obvious limitations. LTO-8 offered 360 MB/s of native bandwidth, LTO-9 increased this to 400 MB/s, and LTO-10 remains at 400 MB/s, although hardware compression can boost effective throughput to as much as 1,200 MB/s when data can achieve the assumed 2.5:1 compression ratio.

As a result, while maximum native cartridge capacity increased from 12TB with LTO-8 to 40TB with LTO-10 — a 3.33X increase — native transfer performance improved by only around 11%. At 400 MB/s, writing 40TB sequentially would theoretically take around 28 hours (without the overheads). Future LTO generations will likely increase performance, but the consortium has not yet published transfer rate targets for LTO-11 and its successors.

No backwards compatibility

One thing to note about LTO-10 is that it has broken a long-standing LTO tradition, which is backward compatibility. Up until LTO-7, new drives could generally read cartridges from two generations earlier and write media from one generation earlier. LTO-8 and LTO-9 reduced compatibility to one previous generation. However, because LTO-10 redesigns its head, its backwards compatibility disappears completely: an LTO-10 drive reads and writes only LTO-10 media, although the 30TB and 40TB cartridges are of course interchangeable.

This creates a natural problem for operators that need to maintain archives for decades. Once they adopt LTO-10, they either must migrate all their archives to the new format from LTO-8 or LTO-9 cartridges, or keep the old drives in their fleet, which may be increasingly difficult.

Demand remains strong

Perhaps counterintuitively, the AI boom could strengthen demand for tape. AI infrastructure produces enormous datasets, but not every training dataset, checkpoint, model, log, or generated asset needs to remain indefinitely on expensive SSDs or HDDs.

LTO capacity shipments reached 160.3 exabytes in 2025, down 9% year-over-year. However, shipments in the first quarter of 2026 jumped 57% YoY, according to figures reported by the LTO consortium. The organization attributed the increase to AI-related data growth, traditional archival demand, cyber-resilient backups, continued LTO-9 adoption, and the beginning of the LTO-10 transition.

"We are seeing unprecedented data growth combined with increasing cost, energy, and cyber resilience pressures across the industry," said Hugues Meyrath, CEO, Quantum. "As organizations adapt to this new reality, tape is increasingly viewed as a strategic component of modern data infrastructure, delivering predictable economics and resilient long-term data retention at scale."

Indeed, tape has a number of fundamental advantages that are not going to disappear any time soon. Tape provides vast capacities at a low cost per terabyte, cartridges consume virtually no power while sitting offline, hardware encryption protects data, and physically removing a cartridge from a drive provides a genuine air gap against network-based attacks. LTO also supports the LTFS file system, which maintains indexing information on tape and makes archived files considerably easier to manage.

Meanwhile, tape's disadvantages are equally fundamental and are not going away: tape is sequential and therefore cannot provide anything resembling the random-access performance of HDDs or SSDs. Although nobody expects something similar from it.

LTO isn't going anywhere

25 years after LTO-1 offered 100GB per cartridge, LTO-10 can store as much as 40TB, and the roadmap calls for 365TB with LTO-14 several years down the road. Perhaps more importantly, laboratory demonstrations indicate that magnetic tape itself has considerable scaling potential beyond today's commercial products. Meanwhile, instead of pushing capacity as quickly as technologically possible, the LTO consortium is now deliberately balancing density with reliability, performance, and cost.

For a storage technology which demise has been predicted repeatedly for decades, LTO not only continues to evolve at a predictable pace, but its adoption is growing, while its relevance remains on a high level. Only time will tell whether it remains relevant for another quarter of a century, but its steady progress certainly increases this possibility.

There are a host of great laptop deals at Best Buy at the moment, but one of my favorites today is this fantastic $950 saving on an RTX 5070-powered Alienware 16X Aurora gaming laptop with OLED display for $1,949.99. A significant drop in price from the original $2,899.99 list price. A great choice for a gaming laptop that also doubles as a competent computer for work and studying. The combination of powerful graphics, CPU, and gorgeous display will bring your games and media to life.

● Grab this SSD deal at Best Buy

The Alienware 16X Aurora is a premium gaming laptop with a Core Ultra 9 290HX processor, a high-performance CPU featuring 24 cores and a boost clock speed of up to 5.5GHz. This is one of Intel's top laptop processors and an excellent gaming CPU. For the graphics, this model of the 16X Aurora uses Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5070 Laptop GPU, which is an excellent choice not only for powering your games to life, but also for getting the most out of the Aurora’s crisp 16-inch OLED 2560x1600-pixel display.

Having an OLED screen means the 16X Aurora will have an insanely low gray-to-gray response time of just 0.03ms, excellent for super smooth motion when gaming, plus the display sports a rapid refresh rate of 240Hz and a maximum screen brightness of 500 nits. Oh, and of course, amazing contrast, inky blacks, and eye-popping color representation.

Finishing up on what major components are inside this model of the Alienware 16X Aurora, we have 16GB of DDR5-5600 MT/s memory and a spacious 1TB SSD for storage, ample room for your favorite games.

We reviewed the Alienware 16X Aurora gaming laptop back in September of this year, praising the excellent 16-inch OLED display, solid gaming and productivity performance, sturdy, understated design, broad port selection, and good upgrade prospects. Making it an easy decision to award the laptop 4 out of 5 stars.

We tested the less powerful variant of the 16X Aurora, in its entry-level configuration, featuring a Core Ultra 7 270HX Plus processor, a GeForce RTX 5060 GPU, and 16GB of dual-channel DDR5-5600 RAM. It performed well against its peers, as you can see from the chart below, but bear in mind that the performance of this model will be higher due to the more powerful CPU and GPU combination.

So if you're looking for a powerful and well-built gaming laptop that also comes with a gorgeous 16-inch OLED display, this could be the option for you. With a price drop of $950, this is a great moment to snag a deal on a new gaming laptop.

Building a new gaming PC, especially one fit for 4K gameplay, isn't cheap at the moment. PC hardware prices have shot up over the last year, with RAM, SSDs, and new graphics cards all becoming extremely expensive. Still, if you're thinking about building a new rig or upgrading your existing one, you'll want to consider this Newegg combo deal that combines the formidable AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D with 32GB DDR5 and a Gigabyte X870E motherboard for just $1,029.99 right now.

● Check out this deal at Newegg

This kit means you'll save $238.99 by buying these components together compared to picking them up separately. That doesn't include the freebies you get with this deal, either, with a Cooler Master Elite Liquid Cooler 240 CPU AIO included for free, worth $79.99, along with a copy of Onimusha: Way of the Sword, worth $69.99.

This kit gives you the bare bones you'll need for your next 4K gaming PC. The extra savings, whether it's the $238.99 on the three parts here, or the full $388.97 if you include the freebies, will give you spare cash that you can put towards other parts for your build, whether that's a GPU, case, or any peripherals you need.

The AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D is the real showstopper in this bundle. This is one of our favorite gaming CPUs, and one of the fastest, as our CPU benchmark data will confirm. You won't find better options for gaming than an X3D chip from AMD; the tech has allowed AMD to dominate the market in recent years, with the extra 3D V-Cache giving the total L3 cache a boost to 96MB. That'll have a noticeable impact on gaming performance, with your PC needing to drop down and rely on the slower system RAM less.

This is a Zen 5 CPU with eight cores, and all eight are able to take full advantage of that increased 96MB L3 cache. It has a standard clock speed of 4.7 GHz, which can boost up to 5.2 GHz. As the benchmarks show, the end result for gamers is higher, more stable frame rates compared to any non-X3D rivals.

The 9800X3D needs an AM5 motherboard to power it, which is what you're getting with the Gigabyte X870E Aorus Elite Wi-Fi 7 Ice. This is a mid-tier offering from Gigabyte, with Ice referring to its fully white colorway, that comes with a range of gaming-friendly features. It has no less than 12 USB ports at the back, including two USB-C ports that are rated for speeds of 40 Gbps.

You also get four M.2 sockets for a whole set of SSDs, with three of them rated for PCIe 5.0 speeds over four lanes with this 9800X3D installed. One further slot is rated for PCIe 4.0 SSDs, too. Fast networking is included here, with 2.5G Ethernet and Wi-Fi 7 support as standard. You also get the ability to install a whopping 256GB of DDR5 RAM over four DIMM slots, with speeds of up to 8,200 MT/s.

While this deal doesn’t quite stretch to 256GB (sky-high RAM prices make that impossible at the moment), you’re still getting a fast set of 32GB memory from G.Skill. This G.Skill Trident Z5 DDR5 RAM is white to match the motherboard, with two 16GB modules offering speeds of 6,000 MT/s. It's RGB, too, which you can configure at the top. It has CAS and memory timings of 36-36-36-76.

Newegg combo deals come and go, but the $1,029.99 sale price for this 9800X3D bundle with a Gigabyte motherboard and 32GB of DDR5 RAM makes it one you'll want to pick up while you can. You've got a core set of parts here to start building out a 4K rig, especially with the Cooler Master AIO for free on top, as long as you get a GPU to match. Expect to see a deal like this sell out quickly.

OpenAI announced in a press release on Oct. 21 that researchers working under its “Patch the Planet” cybersecurity initiative used its AI model GPT-5.6 Sol to uncover critical security vulnerabilities in PHP (an open-source programming language that runs an estimated 70% of the internet). After the discovery, the company says it coordinated a coalition of researchers, PHP maintainers, security providers, and government cybersecurity agencies to fix the issues over two months. The company attributed the lengthy timeline to the task's complexity, which required major changes to the PHP engine.

The PHP Foundation has released patched versions PHP 8.2.35, 8.3.36, 8.4.27, and 8.5.12 to fix the vulnerabilities. PHP 8.1 and older versions will not receive official fixes. The coordinated release was originally scheduled for Oct. 22, but was brought forward to Oct. 21 following premature disclosures on Oct. 20, which led to public outcry.

OpenAI says every site using PHP can now safely upgrade its version to stay secure. The company highlights the incident — which it considers one of the biggest cybersecurity discoveries of 2026, given PHP’s ubiquity — as an example of the Defender's Window concept in action. OpenAI introduced the concept after its models hacked Hugging Face; it describes a critical, narrow timeframe during which organizations can use advanced frontier AI models to find, patch, and strengthen their cybersecurity defenses before those same AI-driven attack capabilities become widely available to malicious threat actors.

Operating as part of the Patch the Planet program, researchers from Calif, a California-based cybersecurity firm and the program's founding partner, began auditing PHP with OpenAI tools on July 30, 2026, at the PHP Foundation's request. The Foundation had known about the underlying flaw since 2024 but couldn't identify an exploitation method or a fix. Calif researcher Ryan A. first identified the exploitable vulnerability on Aug. 11, followed by OpenAI researchers that same day. Subsequently, another cybersecurity firm, Wiz, independently identified an additional vulnerability.

The two vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, involve flaws in how PHP manages computer memory and handles errors. The first occurs when PHP runs out of allocated memory while processing a request, potentially leaving behind incomplete internal data that the engine may later mistakenly treat as valid. The second involves a related problem in which a fatal error leaves PHP pointing to memory that has already been freed, allowing subsequent requests to access or corrupt it. Under certain conditions, attackers can exploit these weaknesses remotely — without needing login credentials — to execute malicious code on affected servers, potentially taking control of websites.

Using AI, the researchers also demonstrated that the flaws could expose sensitive information stored in server memory, including passwords, authentication tokens, and API keys. Most concerning, the vulnerabilities exist in PHP's core engine, meaning websites can be affected even if their application code has no security flaws. Both vulnerabilities received a critical severity score of 9.2 out of 10.

OpenAI says human developers and security teams examined the underlying code but couldn't fully resolve the flaws, allowing them to persist for two years after discovery. Meanwhile, AI-wielding researchers demonstrated practical ways to exploit it within two weeks. Conversely, one could argue that the flaws would never have been exploitable without AI, making them effectively harmless.

However, OpenAI is challenging this view with its Defender's Window concept. The company argues that powerful, revolutionary technology will inevitably be used by bad actors. It therefore maintains that it is a collective responsibility to act proactively to address any potential exploitable flaws. Anthropic's Claude Mythos recently identified 'thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities' in 'every major operating system and every major web browser.’

Google’s tensor processing units (TPUs) — its custom AI chips — now serve AI in production at Meta (creator of the widely used PyTorch AI framework) through a new PyTorch-native version of the SGLang inference engine, announced on Google’s developer blog. A matching version of vLLM, another widely used inference engine, was also announced as open source.

Previously, both engines used Google’s own JAX AI framework to run on TPUs. The new versions allow the hardware to be a native option for PyTorch, mostly without rewriting.

“SGLang-TorchTPU is running in production at Meta today” after “a close three-way collaboration between Meta, Google, and the SGLang team,” said Meta’s PyTorch-TPU lead Zongwei Zhou. That team works at RadixArk, a startup founded by SGLang’s creators, which built the engine with Google and Meta. The engine, he said, gives Meta “a remarkably mature, PyTorch-native serving stack.”

Jana van Greunen, director of PyTorch engineering at Meta, added in Google’s TorchTPU post that Meta “cannot be constrained by a single hardware architecture” and that TorchTPU “enables us to deploy our PyTorch workloads to Google TPUs.” Google said it co-developed TorchTPU with Meta’s PyTorch team.

This is not Meta’s first attempt at using TPUs. Google calls PyTorch/XLA, the older bridge from PyTorch to TPUs, a "predecessor" to the new TorchTPU, and SemiAnalysis reported last year that Meta research teams used TPUs through this bridge from 2020 to 2023 before Meta canceled those contracts. Google’s PyTorch-on-TPU push was aimed mainly at Meta, which did not want to migrate to JAX.

Although it is unclear where Meta’s production TPUs sit, talks last year reportedly included Google Cloud TPU rentals in 2026 with purchases in 2027, and Meta later reportedly signed a multi-year rental agreement.

The announcement came one day after Amazon said it was open-sourcing TorchNeuron, its own native PyTorch backend for its Trainium2 and Trainium3 chips, at the same PyTorch Conference. Both moves appear to be aimed at loosening Nvidia’s software lock-in.

On performance, a tuned vLLM setup serving Moonshot AI’s open-weight, 2.8-trillion-parameter Kimi K3 model reportedly tops 700 tokens per second for a single user on the seventh-generation Ironwood TPU. That speed figure comes from Inferact, the startup founded by vLLM’s creators that helped Google build vLLM-TorchTPU. Its test ran 16 Ironwood chips with speculative decoding, a method of speeding up large language model inference with a small draft model, against vLLM’s published setup on 16 Nvidia GB200s, which reached 452 tokens per second. Its kernels for Kimi K3 and Qwen 3.8 27B deliver roughly 1.4 to 2 times the GB200 baseline’s throughput at small batch sizes without speculative decoding.

SGLang-TorchTPU will keep adding models, starting with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and Reflection Beam. It's also working toward Day 0 TPU support for new open models, meaning support on release day, by the first quarter of 2027, according to RadixArk. Google, Meta and RadixArk plan to share more at SGLang Summit 2026, Nov. 12–13 in San Francisco.

A computer, found hidden behind a fridge in a Japanese hotel room, was responsible for sending around 480,000 phishing emails, Hackread reports. The computer was placed there by a Chinese couple who lived locally, and the pair have now been arrested for both the hidden phishing PC and a separate slew of purchases that were made using stolen credit card details. Ye Jiafeng, 39, and his wife, Shen Qi, 39, now face multiple charges including fraudulent obstruction of business and trespass as well as computer fraud.

The scam began on 15 May, 2025, when Ye connected the computer to hotel Wi-Fi and then hid it behind a fridge. There it stayed, sending around 480,000 emails. When it was discovered, the machine had around 2.4 million email addresses, presumably just waiting to be phished. The emails claimed to be from credit card companies and sent unsuspecting recipients to fake websites in an attempt to capture their credit card information. It's believed that the computer was administered remotely, allowing it to remain in situ without any in-person maintenance required.

Ultimately, the computer would likely have remained in place if the recipient of one of the phishing emails hadn't reached out to the hotel. The hotel's IP address was found in metadata linked to the messages, and staff discovered the computer before reporting it to the police. Police are still investigating whether the two scammers were the brains of the operation or simply working for someone else.

While phishing was the couple's chosen scam this time around, it isn't their first foray into using technology to part victims from their cash. Ye and Shen are claimed to have used credit card details stored on a smartphone to buy items in Kobe. But that wasn't the only phone that they had — media reports claim that police found 74 of them at their home, and the couple had spent 10 million yen (around $63,000) of other people's money using stolen card details since 2024. It's unknown whether the phones found by police account for all of those that were used, or if there were others that have yet to be identified.

Phishing has long been a lucrative option for criminals around the globe, but it has also spawned a spin-off industry recently. A China-based phishing-as-a-service operation was dismantled by the FBI earlier this year. The service made it easier for criminals to create scam sites using AI and is believed to have been responsible for almost $2 billion in losses and 3.87 million stolen credit cards.

Intel on Wednesday announced that it had started installing production tools at its Fab 62 in Arizona, and the fab is on track for mass production by late 2028. The company also reported progress on its Ohio One manufacturing complex and confirmed that it has integrated High-NA EUV lithography into high-volume manufacturing (HVM). Meanwhile, Intel continues to invest in its leading-edge process technology R&D, advanced packaging, and photomask production capabilities in the U.S., which puts the company ahead of the competition.

"There is an important difference between technologies made in America and technologies that are truly American-made," wrote Naga Chandrasekaran, executive vice president and chief technology and operations officer, Intel Foundry. "The difference lies in the research and development process that transforms ideas into manufacturable technologies."

Fab 62 to begin operations in 2028

Intel completed construction of its Fab 62 shell some time ago; now it is time for the company to begin installing production tools, which is what it is doing now. Intel expects the new facility to become operational before the end of 2028, although it has not disclosed when it intends to begin high-volume production or which nodes it will produce.

Intel has not officially assigned Intel 14A to Fab 62, although the facility has been discussed as a potential manufacturing site for the node. Meanwhile, there is an important distinction between Intel's original plans for Fab 62 and its current commitments. When Intel announced Fab 52 and Fab 62 in Arizona, it said the two facilities would manufacture its most advanced process technologies, including Intel 20A (2nm-class) and 18A (1.8nm-class). Intel subsequently designated Fab 52 for Intel 18A manufacturing. Yet, Fab 62 remains unassigned.

Given Intel's manufacturing process roadmap disclosed earlier this year, Fab 62 will be able to make chips on 18A, 18A-P, and 14A nodes. Intel currently manufactures Intel 18A chips at the neighboring Fab 52, whereas Fab 62 could potentially accommodate either additional Intel 18A capacity or the company’s next-generation Intel 14A process technology. However, Intel has yet to confirm its plans for the facility.

The facility will become Intel's Fab 62, the sixth high-volume semiconductor manufacturing fab at its Ocotillo campus, which has served as one of the company’s primary production sites for decades.

Intel has also not revealed Fab 62's planned wafer processing capacity, or the amount of capital expenditures required to complete the facility. Nevertheless, the installation of production equipment indicates that the project has progressed beyond construction of the building itself. The new fab will expand Intel’s manufacturing footprint in Arizona, where the company already produces leading-edge processors and operates advanced packaging, assembly, and testing facilities.

Intel confirms High-NA EUV insertion into mass production

Another noteworthy disclosure concerns Intel's deployment of High-NA EUV lithography. Intel was the first chipmaker to install a commercial High-NA EUV scanner at its D1X fab near Hillsboro, Oregon, and subsequently integrated the tool into high-volume manufacturing to produce its Panther Lake and other chips.

The Gordon Moore Park at Ronler Acres in Oregon is where Intel develops its most advanced logic process technologies and initiates volume production of the latest processors. Usage of High-NA EUV to produce select tiles for Panther Lake CPUs at D1X is a natural fit for the development fab, as it helps Intel to better understand how these lithography systems work. Meanwhile, it seems (though Intel has not explicitly confirmed) that, for now, High-NA EUV scanners are used to produce the same circuits as Low-NA EUV machines, so the use of next-generation lithography systems does not necessarily provide significant advantages over existing litho scanners.

Ohio One reaches another construction milestone

Intel has also made progress with its 'Ohio One' manufacturing complex in New Albany, Ohio. Construction workers recently installed the first major structural truss at the site's first semiconductor fab, which represents a milestone in the development of the company's manufacturing operations in the state. The project is clearly an important part of Intel's long-term strategy to expand domestic production of chips using leading-edge process technologies for years to come.

Unfortunately, Intel did not provide an updated construction schedule for Ohio One or disclose when the first fab is expected to begin operations. Intel also did not reveal which process technology the facility will eventually use or the estimated manufacturing capacity it will provide. Therefore, while construction continues, which is good news, the announcement does not clarify exactly when Ohio One will contribute to Intel's output.

Other investments across the U.S.

In addition to leading-edge manufacturing capacity in the U.S., Intel continues to invest in advanced packaging technologies. Oregon serves as the company's main research and development center for advanced logic and 3D interconnect technologies, while Arizona hosts advanced packaging R&D, assembly, and testing operations. Intel uses its site in New Mexico to produce its complex multi-chiplet processors relying on advanced packaging methods — starting with modest EMIB and all the way to next-generation EMIB-T and Foveros technologies.

Also, Intel recently broke ground on a new photomask manufacturing facility in Santa Clara, California. The new facility will be an important part of Intel's supply chain in the U.S., as the company will be the only chipmaker in America to develop and produce chips using leading-edge nodes completely in the U.S. (both Samsung and TSMC currently lack leading-edge process R&D in America; they do not run their own photomask shops in the U.S., and Samsung has abandoned its plan to build an advanced packaging facility in Texas). Of course, Intel critically depends on tools from Europe and materials from Japan, but even as its major rivals invest hundreds of billions in their U.S. production capacity, Intel remains ahead.

To highlight its American supply chain, Intel disclosed that its U.S. operations involve more than 4,500 suppliers across 49 states, as its annual domestic expenditures exceed $29 billion. The company stressed that domestic semiconductor leadership requires not only wafer fabrication capacity but also research, process development, advanced packaging, and a comprehensive supply chain.

At one point in time, it was the fastest PCIe Gen 4 drive you could buy. Now, the next generation of PCIe 5.0 drives is available, but the 4TB Samsung 990 Pro still offers extremely fast performance and whopping amounts of capacity in a single-sided M.2 2280 form factor. The main issue at the moment is price. Thanks to the AI boom driving up the prices of memory and storage, SSDs have reached insane highs, so to be able to take advantage of a large 27% discount in these times is nothing to be sniffed at. The 4TB Samsung 990 Pro has fallen from $1,099 to this new price of $799.90, a saving of over $300. This works out as roughly 20 cents per Gigabyte of storage capacity.

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Having reviewed the Samsung 990 Pro 4TB when it was released, we found it to be one of the best 4TB SSDs on the market and among the best SSDs overall. The 990 Pro boasts maximum sequential reads of 7,450 MB/s and sequential writes of 6,900 MB/s, with random reads/writes coming in at 1.6 million and 1.55 million IOPS, respectively, while endurance is rated for 2,400 TBW.

Samsung uses 236-layer TLC V-NAND to achieve its 4TB capacity, while also using a single-sided design, making the 990 Pro ideal for use in computers where space is a finite resource. When we tested the Samsung 990 Pro 4TB, we found it scored above the competition on almost every test. On 3DMark's storage test, it had the lowest latency result, a big plus for responsive load times in gaming.

The Samsung 990 Pro is also excellent at sustaining strong write performance. In our IOMeter sustained sequential write tests, the 4TB 990 Pro was able to maintain a speed of 6.2 GB/s for 75 seconds thanks to its generous 10GB of pSLC cache. Once the data spills over into the TLC, it operates at 1.6 GB/s. The Samsung 990 Pro is also a leader in power efficiency, delivering 421.1 MB/s per watt. That number puts it ahead of all competitors but the Addlink A93 4TB and Lexar NM790 4TB.

The Samsung 990 Pro is certainly nowhere near the all-time low prices of years gone by, and I'm not sure at the moment when, if at all, we'll ever see those low prices again on storage, certainly not for some considerable time. If you want 4TB of storage now, then the Samsung 990 Pro is a formidable choice; just try to grab it when there's as much of a discount as possible.