11-month old Russian outfit claims it has developed 16-core and 32-core chips, flaunts Cyrillic-badged chips — chips appear to be sanctions-swerving rebadged Chinese Loongson processors

The Hot Take: Looks like we're going back to tech silos globally. We still have to address the unfair competition we have domestically more I think anyway.

Russia-based Tramplin Electronics obtains samples of Loongson's LS3C6000 processors with Cyrillic inscriptions, claims these are its own CPUs.

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Microsoft: Removing some Copilots will improve Windows 11

The Hot Take: Finally listening to the customers? Nah, this is to quiet them just enough to continue moving to their goals.

'Doze boss admits quality is down, promises smaller memory footprint and fixes for many well-known issues Microsoft has acknowledged that it needs to improve the quality of Windows 11 and outlined its plan to get the job done.…

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Arm Is Now Making Its Own Chips

The Hot Take: ARM wants a piece of that Ai cash pie for sure. I'm wondering how their licensing partners are going to take this.

The chip design firm says Meta, OpenAI, Cerebras, and Cloudflare are among the first customers of its new artificial intelligence hardware.

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US senators want to suspend Nvidia AI chip export licenses to China and its intermediaries — bipartisan letter to Commerce Dept says that Huang’s claims of no chip diversion ‘were contradicted by reporting available’

The Hot Take: Uh oh, Ai king looks to be in trouble.

U.S. senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Jim Banks (R-Ind.) told Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick that he should suspend all active export licenses to China for Nvidia AI chips, saying that Nvidia's most advanced AI GPUs are being diverted into the country despite Jensen Huang's assurances.

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Wine 11 Rewrites How Linux Runs Windows Games At the Kernel Level

The Hot Take: Linux is coming for Windows Gamers for sure!

Linux gamers are seeing massive performance gains with Wine's new NTSYNC support, "which is a feature that has been years in the making and rewrites how Wine handles one of the most performance-sensitive operations in modern gaming," reports XDA Developers. Not every game will see a night-and-day difference, but for the games that do benefit from these changes, "the improvements range from noticeable to absurd." Combined with improvements to Wayland, graphics, and compatibility, as well as a major WoW64 architecture overhaul, the release looks less like an incremental update and more like one of Wine's most important upgrades in years. From the report: The numbers are wild. In developer benchmarks, Dirt 3 went from 110.6 FPS to 860.7 FPS, which is an impressive 678% improvement. Resident Evil 2 jumped from 26 FPS to 77 FPS. Call of Juarez went from 99.8 FPS to 224.1 FPS. Tiny Tina's Wonderlands saw gains from 130 FPS to 360 FPS. As well, Call of Duty: Black Ops I is now actually playable on Linux, too. Those benchmarks compare Wine NTSYNC against upstream vanilla Wine, which means there's no fsync or esync either. Gamers who use fsync are not going to see such a leap in performance in most games. The games that benefit most from NTSYNC are the ones that were struggling before, such as titles with heavy multi-threaded workloads where the synchronization overhead was a genuine bottleneck. For those games, the difference is night and day. And unlike fsync, NTSYNC is in the mainline kernel, meaning you don't need any custom patches or out-of-tree modules for it work. Any distro shipping kernel 6.14 or later, which at this point includes Fedora 42, Ubuntu 25.04, and more recent releases, will support it. Valve has already added the NTSYNC kernel driver to SteamOS 3.7.20 beta, loading the module by default, and an unofficial Proton fork, Proton GE, already has it enabled. When Valve's official Proton rebases on Wine 11, every Steam Deck owner gets this for free. All of this is what makes NTSYNC such a big deal, as it's not simply a run-of-the-mill performance patch. Instead, it's something much bigger: this is the first time Wine's synchronization has been correct at the kernel level, implemented in the mainline Linux kernel, and available to everyone without jumping through hoops. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Elon Musk Announces $20B 'Terafab' Chip Plant in Texas To Supply His Companies

The Hot Take: US domestic chip manufacturing appears to be exploding. That's an insane goal, but to bad it's just for his companies.

"Billionaire Elon Musk has announced plans to build a $20 billion chip plant in Austin, Texas" reports a local news station: Musk announced on Saturday night during a livestream on his social media platform X that the plant, called "Terafab," will be built near Tesla's campus and gigafactory in eastern Travis County. The long-anticipated project is a joint venture between Musk-owned properties Tesla, SpaceX and xAI... The Terafab plant is expected to begin production in 2027. Musk "has said the semiconductor industry is moving too slow to keep up with the supply of chips he expects to need," writes Bloomberg — quoting Musk as saying "We either build the Terafab or we don't have the chips, and we need the chips, so we build the Terafab." Musk detailed some specific plans, including producing chips that can support 100 to 200 gigawatts a year of computing power on Earth, and chips that can support a terawatt in space, but gave no timelines for the facility or its output... The facility is expected to make two types of chips, one of which will be optimized for edge and inference, primarily for his vehicle, robotaxi and Optimus humanoid robots. The other will be a high-power chip, designed for space that could be used by SpaceX and xAI... Musk said he expects xAI to use the vast majority of the chips. During the presentation, Musk also unveiled a speculative rendering of a future "mini" AI data center satellite, one piece of a much larger satellite system that he wants SpaceX to build to do complex computing in space. In January, SpaceX requested a license from the Federal Communications Commission to launch one million data center satellites into orbit around Earth. Musk said that the mini satellite he revealed would have the capacity for 100 kilowatts of power. "We expect future satellites to probably go to the megawatt range," Musk said. Raising money to build and launch AI data centers in space is one of the driving forces behind SpaceX's planned IPO later this year. SpaceX is expected to raise as much as $50 billion in a record-setting IPO this summer which could value it at more than $1.75 trillion, Bloomberg News reported earlier. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft and Nvidia launch AI partnership to speed up nuclear power plant permitting and construction — simulation tools and generative models could hasten historically lengthy processes

The Hot Take: Green New agenda doesn't fit in with Ai replacement of the plebes for sure. So they push us to Solar & Wind while they get viable power options for a bot?

Microsoft and Nvidia are joining forces to accelerate the construction of nuclear power plants for power-hungry AI data centers. The partnership combines generative AI, digital twin simulation, and Nvidia's Omniverse platform to streamline the nuclear lifecycle from permitting through operations.

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