Microsoft said in a statement Monday it remains committed to developing first-party Xbox consoles. The reassurance came after rumors circulated suggesting the gaming division might abandon hardware manufacturing. The speculation gained traction following a 50% price increase for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and retailers including Costco removing Xbox products from their shelves.

Microsoft said it is "actively investing in our future first-party consoles and devices designed, engineered and built by Xbox." The company's multi-year partnership with AMD for next-generation hardware also continues. Devices in development include the Xbox Ally range under codenames Omni and Horseman, according to Windows Central. Xbox Series X and Series S production has also not stopped, the report added.

OpenAI and AMD announced a multibillion-dollar partnership on Monday for AI data centers running on AMD processors. OpenAI committed to purchasing 6 gigawatts worth of AMD's MI450 chips starting next year through direct purchases or through its cloud computing partners. AMD chief Lisa Su said the deal will result in tens of billions of dollars in new revenue over the next half-decade.

OpenAI will receive warrants for up to 160 million AMD shares at 1 cent per share, representing roughly 10% of the chip company. The warrants will be awarded in phases if OpenAI hits certain deployment milestones. The partnership marks AMD's biggest win in its quest to disrupt Nvidia's dominance among AI semiconductor companies. Mizuho Securities estimates that Nvidia controls more than 70% of the market for AI chips.

"Microsoft buys a lot of GPUs from both Nvidia and AMD," writes the Register. "But moving forward, Redmond's leaders want to shift the majority of its AI workloads from GPUs to its own homegrown accelerators..." Driving the transition is a focus on performance per dollar, which for a hyperscale cloud provider is arguably the only metric that really matters. Speaking during a fireside chat moderated by CNBC on Wednesday, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott said that up to this point, Nvidia has offered the best price-performance, but he's willing to entertain anything in order to meet demand.

Going forward, Scott suggested Microsoft hopes to use its homegrown chips for the majority of its datacenter workloads. When asked, "Is the longer term idea to have mainly Microsoft silicon in the data center?" Scott responded, "Yeah, absolutely...

Microsoft is reportedly in the process of bringing a second-generation Maia accelerator to market next year that will no doubt offer more competitive compute, memory, and interconnect performance... It should be noted that AI accelerators aren't the only custom chips Microsoft has been working on. Redmond also has its own CPU called Cobalt and a whole host of platform security silicon designed to accelerate cryptography and safeguard key exchanges across its vast datacenter domains.

"Your AMD chips may have Intel Inside soon," writes longtime Slashdot reader DesScorp. "Discussions are underway between the two companies to move an undisclosed amount of AMD's chip business to Intel foundries. (AMD currently does their production through TSMC.) The talks come hot on the heels of a flurry of other Intel investments." Tom's Hardware reports: In the past several weeks, Intel has seen a flurry of activity and investments. The United States announced a 9.9% ownership stake in Intel, while Softbank bought $2 billion worth of shares. Alongside Nvidia, Intel announced new x86 chips using Nvidia graphics technology, with the graphics giant also purchasing $5 billion in Intel shares. There have also been reports that Intel and Apple have been exploring ways to work together. The article notes that there is a trade/political dimension to an AMD-Intel deal as well: It makes sense for Intel's former rivals -- especially American companies -- to consider coming to the table. The White House is pushing for 50% of chips bound for America to be built domestically, and tariffs on chips aren't off the table. Additionally, doing business with Intel could make the US government, Intel's largest shareholder, happy, which can be good for business. AMD faced export restrictions on its GPUs earlier this year as the US attempted to throttle China's AI business.

Researchers have unveiled two new hardware-based attacks, Battering RAM and Wiretap, that break Intel SGX and AMD SEV-SNP trusted enclaves by exploiting deterministic encryption and physical interposers. Ars Technica reports: In the age of cloud computing, protections baked into chips from Intel, AMD, and others are essential for ensuring confidential data and sensitive operations can't be viewed or manipulated by attackers who manage to compromise servers running inside a data center. In many cases, these protections -- which work by storing certain data and processes inside encrypted enclaves known as TEEs (Trusted Execution Enclaves) -- are essential for safeguarding secrets stored in the cloud by the likes of Signal Messenger and WhatsApp. All major cloud providers recommend that customers use it. Intel calls its protection SGX, and AMD has named it SEV-SNP.

Over the years, researchers have repeatedly broken the security and privacy promises that Intel and AMD have made about their respective protections. On Tuesday, researchers independently published two papers laying out separate attacks that further demonstrate the limitations of SGX and SEV-SNP. One attack, dubbed Battering RAM, defeats both protections and allows attackers to not only view encrypted data but also to actively manipulate it to introduce software backdoors or to corrupt data. A separate attack known as Wiretap is able to passively decrypt sensitive data protected by SGX and remain invisible at all times.

Intel's long-time Xeon chief architect Ronak Singhal is leaving the company after nearly 30 years, marking yet another high-profile departure amid Intel's leadership churn and intensifying competition from AMD and Arm-based cloud CPUs. The Register reports: The Carnegie Mellon alum holds degrees in electrical and computer engineering, along with at least 30 patents involving CPUs. Singhal joined Intel in 1997 after spending the previous summer as an intern at Cyrix. After a year in Intel's Rotation Engineers Program, he spent the remainder of his tenure helping to develop some of the chipmaker's most consequential and, at times, controversial processors. Most notably, Singhal oversaw the core development of Intel's 22nm Haswell and 14nm Broadwell processor architectures. His innovations aren't limited to the datacenter either, with his architectural contributions playing a significant role in the success of Intel's Core and Atom processor families as well. [...]

Singhal is only the latest Xeon lead to jump ship since the start of the year. In January, Sailesh Kottapalli, another senior fellow, left for Qualcomm barely a month after former CEO Pat Gelsinger's unceremonious "retirement." Even before Gelsinger's eviction, Intel's datacenter group has been something of a revolving door. Last summer Singhal's long-time colleague Lisa Spelman departed the company, eventually landing a spot as CEO of HPC interconnect vendor Cornelis Networks. Her replacement, Ryan Tabrah, lasted seven months in the role, about half as long as Intel datacenter boss Justin Hotard, who defected for the forests of Finland to lead Nokia as its new President and CEO back in April.

In fact, the churn now extends all the way to the top. On Monday, Intel announced its CEO of Products, Michelle Johnston Holthaus, would be leaving the business. The move is part of a broader executive shakeup that will see former Arm engineer Kevork Kechichian take over as head of Intel's datacenter engineering group. Jim Johnson, meanwhile, will take over as head of the chipmaker's client computing group while Srinivasan (Srini) Iyengar will head up a new central engineering division.

According to the Financial Times (paywalled), OpenAI is preparing to launch its first in-house AI chip in 2026 through a partnership with Broadcom. From a report: OpenAI plans to put the chip to use internally rather than make it available to external customers [...]. Last year, Reuters reported that OpenAI was working with Broadcom and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co to develop its first in-house chip to power its artificial intelligence systems, while also incorporating AMD chips alongside Nvidia chips to meet the surge in infrastructure demands. At the time, OpenAI had examined a range of options to diversify chip supply and reduce costs.

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said on Thursday that the company expects artificial intelligence revenue growth for fiscal 2026 to "improve significantly," after securing more than $10 billion in AI infrastructure orders from new customer, without naming it. A new prospect placed a firm order last quarter, making it into a qualified customer, Tan said on an earnings call.

Intel shelled out $16.5 billion on R&D in 2024, outspending Nvidia by 28% and AMD by 156%, with much of the cash going into chip design, fabrication tech, and the upcoming Nova Lake architecture. "When you compare the R&D expenditures to the amount of revenue, though, the story takes on a very different look," notes PC Gamer. "Intel spent 31% of its net revenue, and 26% for AMD, but Nvidia and Samsung got by on just 10% and 4%, respectively." From the report: An analysis of research and development expenditure by TechInsights was reported by Korea JoongAng Daily, but you can get the numbers yourself by pulling up each company's 2024 financial results. For example, AMD declared that it spent $6.456 billion last year (pdf, page 1) on R&D, whereas Nvidia forked out $12.914 billion. It's worth noting that Nvidia's financial statements are numbered one year ahead of the actual period (FY 2026 is 2025 and so on).

Anyway, those figures pale in comparison to how much cash Intel burned through in 2024 to research and develop chip, fabrication technologies, software, and all kinds of tech stuffâ"a staggering $16.546 billion (pdf, page 25). That's 28% more than Nvidia and a frankly unbelievable 156% more than AMD. The nearest non-US semiconductor firm is Samsung Electronics, which spent a reported $9.5 billion on R&D. That would place third, comfortably ahead of AMD, and it strongly suggests that if you have your own foundries for making chips, you need to spend a lot of cash on finding ways to make better processors.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The total number of GPUs sold for the second quarter of 2025 hit 11.6 million units, while desktop PC CPUs went up to 21.7 million units, according to a Jon Peddie Research report. This is a 27% increase in graphics card shipments and a 21.6% jump in CPU shipments from the last quarter, which is a change from the usual drop in deliveries we've seen in recent years.

"AIB prices dropped for midrange and entry-level, while high-end AIB prices increased, and most retail suppliers ran out of stock. This is very unusual for the second quarter," said Jon Peddie Research president Dr. Jon Peddie. "We think it is a continuation of higher prices expected due to the tariffs and buyers trying to get ahead of that."

As for the three major GPU manufacturers, Nvidia still has the lead, taking in 94% of the market -- an increase of 2.1% over the previous quarter -- while AMD is at a distant second place with 6%. This is still a much better position than Intel, though, whose market share is so small it did not even register on the chart.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AMD's X3D-series Ryzen chips have become popular with PC gamers because games in particular happen to benefit disproportionately from the chips' extra 64MB of L3 cache memory. But that extra memory occasionally comes with extra headaches. Not long after they were released earlier this year, some early adopters started having problems with their CPUs, ranging from failure to boot to actual physical scorching and burnout -- the problems were particularly common for users of the 9800X3D processor in ASRock motherboards, and one Reddit thread currently records 157 incidents of failure for that CPU model across various ASRock boards.

In an interview with the Korean language website Quasar Zone (via Tom's Hardware), AMD executives David McAfee and Travis Kirsch acknowledged the problems and pointed to the most likely culprit: motherboard makers who don't follow AMD's recommended specifications. Some manufacturers have historically shipped their AMD and Intel motherboards with elevated default power settings in the interest of squeezing a bit more performance out of the chips -- but those adjustments can also cause problems in some cases, especially for higher-end CPUs.

Gaming handhelds are becoming the industry's new battleground as Microsoft launches its ROG Xbox Ally devices October 16, chasing Nintendo Switch 2's record-breaking 5.8 million units sold in seven weeks. The ASUS-manufactured handhelds run full Windows 11 with a gaming-optimized interface, accessing Xbox Game Pass, Steam, Battle.net, and other PC storefronts without platform lockdown.

Two models arrive at launch: the standard Xbox Ally with AMD Ryzen Z2 A processor and the premium Xbox Ally X featuring Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme, 24GB RAM, 1TB storage, and 80Wh battery. Microsoft's Handheld Compatibility Program pre-verifies thousands of PC games for portable play. Pricing remains unannounced.

A Chinese storage manufacturer has developed a solid-state drive smaller than a U.S. penny that delivers sequential read speeds of 3,700 megabytes per second, according to The Verge.

The "Mini SSD" by Biwin measures 15mm x 17mm x 1.4mm thick and connects via PCIe 4x2, offering 512GB to 2TB capacities. The drive inserts into devices using a SIM card-style tray mechanism and claims IP68 water resistance plus three-meter drop protection. Two gaming portables announced at ChinaJoy will include slots for the drives: GPD's Win 5 handheld and OneNetbook's OneXPlayer Super X hybrid laptop/tablet, both powered by AMD's Strix Halo processors. The Mini SSD outpaces MicroSD Express cards used in Nintendo Switch 2 by nearly four times, though full-size M.2 drives remain faster at up to 14,000MB/s.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Beijing has urged local companies to avoid using Nvidia's H20 processors, particularly for government-related purposes, complicating the chipmaker's return to China after the Trump administration reversed an effective US ban on such sales. Over the past few weeks, Chinese authorities have sent notices to a range of firms discouraging use of the less-advanced semiconductors, people familiar with the matter said. The guidance was particularly strong against the use of H20s for any government or national security-related work by state enterprises or private companies, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information is sensitive. The letters didn't, however, constitute an outright ban on H20 use, according to the people. Industry analysts broadly agree that Chinese companies still covet those chips, which perform quite well in certain crucial AI applications. President Donald Trump said Monday that the processor "still has a market" in the Asian country despite also calling it "obsolete."

Beijing's stance could limit Trump's ability to turn his export control about-face into a windfall for government coffers, a deal that highlighted his administration's transactional approach to national security policies long treated as nonnegotiable. Still, Chinese companies may not be ready to jump ship to local semiconductors. "Chips from domestic manufacturers are improving dramatically in quality, but they might not be as versatile for specific workloads that China's domestic AI industry hopes to focus on," said Homin Lee, a senior macro strategist at Lombard Odier in Singapore. Lee added that he anticipates "strong" demand for the chips the Trump administration is allowing Nvidia and AMD to sell.

Rosenblatt Securities analyst Kevin Cassidy said he doesn't anticipate that Nvidia's processor sales to China will be affected because "Chinese companies are going to want to use the best chips available." Nvidia and AMD's chips are superior to local alternatives, he said. Beijing asked companies about that issue in some of its letters, according to one of the people, posing questions such as why they buy Nvidia H20 chips over local versions, whether that's a necessary choice given domestic options, and whether they've found any security concerns in the Nvidia hardware. The notices coincide with state media reports that cast doubt on the security and reliability of H20 processors. Chinese regulators have raised those concerns directly with Nvidia, which has repeatedly denied that its chips contain such vulnerabilities.

The Financial Times reported that some Chinese companies are planning to decrease orders of Nvidia chips in response to the letters. Right now, the people said, China's most stringent chip guidance is limited to sensitive applications, a situation that bears similarities to the way Beijing restricted Tesla vehicles and Apple iPhones in certain institutions and locations over security concerns. China's government also at one point barred the use of Micron Technology Inc. chips in critical infrastructure. It's possible that Beijing may extend its heavier-handed Nvidia and AMD guidance to a wider range of settings, according to one person with direct knowledge of the deliberations, who said that those conversations are in early stages.

In an unusual arrangement to secure export licenses, Nvidia and AMD have agreed to give the U.S. government 15% of revenue from certain chip sales to China. The Associated Press reports: The Trump administration halted the sale of advanced computer chips to China in April over national security concerns, but Nvidia and AMD revealed in July that Washington would allow them to resume sales of the H20 and MI308 chips, which are used in artificial intelligence development. President Trump confirmed the terms of the unusual arrangement in a Monday press conference while noting that he originally wanted 20% of the sales revenue when Nvidia asked to sell the "obsolete" H20 chip to China. The president credited Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang for negotiating him down to 15%. "So we negotiated a little deal. So he's selling a essentially old chip," Trump said.

Nvidia did not comment about the specific details of the agreement or its quid pro quo nature, but said they would adhere to the export rules laid out by the administration. "We follow rules the U.S. government sets for our participation in worldwide markets. While we haven't shipped H20 to China for months, we hope export control rules will let America compete in China and worldwide," Nvidia wrote in a statement to the AP. "America cannot repeat 5G and lose telecommunication leadership. America's AI tech stack can be the world's standard if we race."

Google will discontinue Steam for Chromebook Beta on January 1, 2026, removing all installed games from devices after that date. The beta launched in March 2022 as an alpha before expanding to beta status in November 2022 with reduced hardware requirements of Intel Core i3 or AMD Ryzen 3 processors and 8GB RAM. The program never progressed beyond beta testing despite supporting 99 compatible Linux-based titles through its three-year run.

ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols shares his list of "what's new and improved" in the latest Linux 6.16 kernel. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: First, the Rust language is continuing to become more well-integrated into the kernel. At the top of my list is that the kernel now boasts Rust bindings for the driver core and PCI device subsystem. This approach will make it easier to add new Rust-based hardware drivers to Linux. Additionally, new Rust abstractions have been integrated into the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM), particularly for ioctl handling, file/GEM memory management, and driver/device infrastructure for major GPU vendors, such as AMD, Nvidia, and Intel. These changes should reduce vulnerabilities and optimize graphics performance. This will make gamers and AI/ML developers happier.

Linux 6.16 also brings general improvements to Rust crate support. Crate is Rust's packaging format. This will make it easier to build, maintain, and integrate Rust kernel modules into the kernel. For those of you who still love C, don't worry. The vast majority of kernel code remains in C, and Rust is unlikely to replace C soon. In a decade, we may be telling another story. Beyond Rust, this latest release also comes with several major file system improvements. For starters, the XFS filesystem now supports large atomic writes. This capability means that large multi-block write operations are 'atomic,' meaning all blocks are updated or none. This enhances data integrity and prevents data write errors. This move is significant for companies that use XFS for databases and large-scale storage.

Perhaps the most popular Linux file system, Ext4, is also getting many improvements. These boosts include faster commit paths, large folio support, and atomic multi-fsblock writes for bigalloc filesystems. What these improvements mean, if you're not a file-system nerd, is that we should see speedups of up to 37% for sequential I/O workloads. If your Linux laptop doubles as a music player, another nice new feature is that you can now stream your audio over USB even while the rest of your system is asleep. That capability's been available in Android for a while, but now it's part of mainline Linux.

If security is a top priority for you, the 6.16 kernel now supports Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) and Intel Trusted Domain Extensions (TDX). This addition, along with Linux's improved support for AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization and Secure Memory Encryption (SEV-SNP), enables you to encrypt your software's memory in what's known as confidential computing. This feature improves cloud security by encrypting a user's virtual machine memory, meaning someone who cracks a cloud can't access your data. Linux 6.16 also delivers several chip-related upgrades. It introduces support for Intel's Advanced Performance Extensions (APX), doubling x86 general-purpose registers from 16 to 32 and boosting performance on next-gen CPUs like Lunar Lake and Granite Rapids Xeon. Additionally, the new CONFIG_X86_NATIVE_CPU option allows users to build processor-optimized kernels for greater efficiency.

Support for Nvidia's AI-focused Blackwell GPUs has also been improved, and updates to TCP/IP with DMABUF help offload networking tasks to GPUs and accelerators. While these changes may go unnoticed by everyday users, high-performance systems will see gains and OpenVPN users may finally experience speeds that challenge WireGuard.

AMD CEO Lisa Su said that chips produced at TSMC's new Arizona plant will cost 5-20% more than those made in Taiwan, but emphasized that the premium is worth it for supply chain resilience. Bloomberg reports: AMD expects its first chips from TSMC's Arizona facilities by the end of the year, Su said. The extra expense is worth it because the company is diversifying the crucial supply of chips, Su said in an interview with Bloomberg Television following her onstage appearance. That will make the industry less prone to the type of disruptions experienced during the pandemic. "We have to consider resiliency in the supply chain," she said. "We learned that in the pandemic."

TSMC's new Arizona plant is already comparable with those in Taiwan when it comes to the measure of yield -- the amount of good chips a production run produces per batch -- Su told the audience at the forum.

AMD is warning users of a newly discovered form of side-channel attack affecting a broad range of its chips that could lead to information disclosure. Register: Akin to Meltdown and Spectre, the Transient Scheduler Attack (TSA) comprises four vulnerabilities that AMD said it discovered while looking into a Microsoft report about microarchitectural leaks.

The four bugs do not appear too venomous at face value -- two have medium-severity ratings while the other two are rated "low." However, the low-level nature of the exploit's impact has nonetheless led Trend Micro and CrowdStrike to assess the threat as "critical."

The reasons for the low severity scores are the high degree of complexity involved in a successful attack -- AMD said it could only be carried out by an attacker able to run arbitrary code on a target machine. It affects AMD processors (desktop, mobile and datacenter models), including 3rd gen and 4th gen EPYC chips -- the full list is here.

Longtime Slashdot reader walterbyrd shares news that Texas Instruments has announced plans to invest more than $60 billion to expand its U.S. manufacturing operations in the United States. From a report: The funds will be used to build or expand seven chip-making facilities in Texas as well as Utah, and will create 60,000 jobs, TI said on Wednesday, calling it the "largest investment in foundational semiconductor manufacturing in U.S. history." The company did not give a timeline for the investment.

Unlike AI chip firms Nvidia and AMD, TI makes analog or foundational chips used in everyday devices such as smartphones, cars and medical devices, giving it a large client base that includes Apple, SpaceX and Ford Motor. The spending pledge follows similar announcements from others in the semiconductor industry, including Micron, which said last week that it would expand its U.S. investment by $30 billion, taking its planned spending to $200 billion. [...]

Like other companies unveiling such spending commitments, TI's announcement includes funds already allocated to facilities that are either under construction or ramping up. It will build two additional plants in Sherman, Texas, based on future demand. "TI is building dependable, low-cost 300 millimeter capacity at scale to deliver the analog and embedded processing chips that are vital for nearly every type of electronic system," said CEO Haviv Ilan.

Microsoft is positioning Windows as the primary gaming platform for Xbox, according to Xbox president Sarah Bond. "We're working closely with the Windows team to ensure that Windows is the number one platform for gaming," Bond said in a video announcing a partnership with AMD for next-generation Xbox hardware spanning consoles and handhelds.

The statement, PCWorld points out, aligns with Microsoft's recent "This is an Xbox" marketing campaign, which promotes phones, PCs, televisions, and traditional consoles as Xbox devices. The company's newly announced Xbox Ally X handheld runs Windows beneath its Xbox interface, allowing access to multiple game stores unlike Valve's Steam Deck.

Microsoft has shifted strategy following weak Xbox console sales compared to PlayStation, spending billions to acquire publishers including Bethesda and Activision Blizzard while expanding Xbox Cloud Gaming services across multiple device types.