devtake.dev

Hiro Tanaka

Hardware and silicon reporter. Covers CPUs, GPUs, AI accelerators, panel tech, and the gaming peripherals that ride the same supply chain.

A Renault electric powertrain unit, the kind that uses a wound-rotor motor with no rare-earth magnets
Hardware·

Renault ditched rare-earth magnets in its EVs in 2012. China's export squeeze made that look smart

A Renault explainer on rare-earth-free EV motors hit Hacker News. Here's how electric cars run without the magnets China controls, and who's shipping them.

An Xbox wireless controller, the face of Microsoft's gaming division
Gaming·

Xbox is planning major layoffs in July as new CEO Asha Sharma overhauls the unit

Bloomberg's Jason Schreier reports Xbox plans significant job cuts after June 30, as new CEO Asha Sharma tells staff a 3% margin can't continue. Microsoft hasn't confirmed.

A GM battery cell test line at the company's development center near Detroit
Hardware·

GM is spending $900 million on a battery bet that could cut $6,000 off an EV truck

GM is pouring $900M into a new LMR battery plan, betting a cheaper chemistry gets its EVs to price parity with gas trucks by 2028. Here's the play.

Illustration of open-source game development tools beyond the engine
Gaming·

Beyond the engine: six open-source tools that shape how games get made

Godot, Unity and Unreal get the headlines, but six open-source tools quietly do the art, levels, and dialogue work that real games ship on.

Nvidia RTX Spark laptop shown at the Windows AI PC announcement
Hardware·

Nvidia's RTX Spark laptops run 120-billion-parameter models locally, no cloud needed

Nvidia's RTX Spark laptops put a Grace Blackwell superchip and 128GB of unified memory in a notebook, aimed at running 120B-parameter models offline.

Minecraft promotional artwork accompanying coverage of the WeedHack malware campaign
Gaming·

116,000 Minecraft PCs got infected by fake mods. The 'WeedHack' stealer is free to anyone.

McAfee says a free malware-as-a-service stealer called WeedHack has hit 116,000+ Minecraft systems via fake mods and cheats. Here's what it grabs and how to clean up.

A massive fireball engulfs Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral at night.
Hardware·

Blue Origin lost a fully fueled New Glenn in a pad fireball a week before its Amazon launch

A static fire test destroyed a fully fueled New Glenn at Cape Canaveral on May 28. Nobody was hurt, but the launch manifest just slipped.

The Oura Ring 5 shown in multiple metal finishes against a neutral background
Hardware·

Oura shrank the Ring 5 by 40% and raised the price $50 to $399

Oura's Ring 5 is 40% smaller than the Ring 4, adds live workout tracking and an AI Advisor, and costs $50 more. Here's what's new and whether it's worth it.

An Adapteva Parallella development board with an AMD/Xilinx Zynq FPGA SoC, representative of the hobbyist hardware the Vivado free tier targets.
Hardware·

AMD walled off Linux Vivado behind a paid tier. The free FPGA tier is now Windows only.

Vivado 2026.1 introduces a five-tier licensing model. The free BASIC tier supports Windows only; Linux requires the paid CORE tier. FPGA hobbyists are pushing back.

Wi-Wi STAMP prototype hardware module at the NAB show.
Hardware·

Japan's NICT shrank picosecond time sync into a phone-sized box. They call it Wi-Wi.

NICT's Wi-Wi prototype hit 30 ns time sync with 20 ps jitter at 900 MHz. It isn't Wi-Fi. Jeff Geerling found a working demo at the NAB show.

Promotional artwork from Bungie's Destiny franchise, the live-service game whose content support is ending in June 2026.
Gaming·

Destiny 3 isn't in production. Bungie is heading for significant layoffs after Destiny 2 wraps in June.

Bloomberg's Jason Schreier reports Bungie has no follow-up project for the Destiny 2 team. Sony is taking tighter management control and Marathon hasn't recovered.

An Alibaba booth at a Chinese technology trade expo, with the company's logo above a display floor.
Hardware·

Alibaba's new Zhenwu M890 chip is 3x faster and aimed straight at agent workloads

Alibaba showed the Zhenwu M890 at its Cloud Summit on May 19. 144 GB of memory, 800 GB/s interchip bandwidth, and Qwen3.7-Max riding on top.

A header image for The Android Show: XR Edition with the Android logo and an XR headset silhouette.
Hardware·

Google and Samsung set Fall 2026 for Android XR glasses. Gentle Monster and Warby Parker are doing the frames.

The Android Show confirmed Fall 2026 for Google and Samsung's first AR glasses, plus three new features for the Galaxy XR headset that launched in October.

Marvel's Wolverine key art from Insomniac Games.
Gaming·

Sony killed its PC port pipeline. Ghost of Yotei, Saros, and Marvel's Wolverine stay on PlayStation.

PlayStation Studios CEO Hermen Hulst told staff on May 18 that single-player first-party games will stay console-exclusive. Multiplayer titles keep multi-platform.

Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins speaking on stage.
Hardware·

Cisco cut 4,000 jobs on its record revenue day. AI infrastructure orders jumped to $9 billion.

Cisco posted $15.8B in Q3 FY26 revenue on May 14, up 12% YoY, then sent layoff notices to 4,000 staff the same day. AI orders are now tracking to $9B for the fiscal year.

Cerebras corporate site Open Graph card.
Hardware·

Cerebras priced its IPO at $185 and closed at $311. Andrew Feldman and Sean Lie became billionaires.

Cerebras raised $5.55 billion on May 14 and closed its first day at a $95 billion market cap. The wafer-scale AI chip maker shipped the year's biggest tech IPO.

Jeff Geerling at his workbench with a 3D printer, from his Raspberry Pi magazine profile
Hardware·

The OrcaSlicer fork Bambu Lab killed has six mirrors. Jeff Geerling joined the boycott.

FULU-Foundation/OrcaSlicer-bambulab hit 1,700 stars on May 12. Geerling won't recommend a Bambu printer again, and Louis Rossmann pledged $10,000 toward Jarczak's defense.

Nintendo corporate social-share artwork used on the official news release announcing Switch 2 price revisions
Gaming·

Nintendo hiked the Switch 2 by $50. AI data center demand for memory chips drove it.

Nintendo confirmed a $50 Switch 2 price increase effective September 1 in the US, citing market conditions. The DRAM shortage caused by AI buildouts is the trigger.

Steam Controller hardware shown from above
Gaming·

Valve open-sourced the Steam Controller's shell. Dbrand had a skin ready in 48 hours.

Valve published STP and STL CAD files for the Steam Controller and Puck under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 on GitLab. Anyone with a 3D printer can now mod it.

Elon Musk speaking at an event, with Tesla and SpaceX branding behind him
Hardware·

SpaceX filed for a $55B Texas chip fab. Total Terafab spend could hit $119 billion.

SpaceX filed plans for a $55B Terafab semiconductor facility in Grimes County, Texas. Total spend could reach $119 billion across phases.

AMD CEO Lisa Su on stage at CES 2026, presenting AI accelerator products
Hardware·

AMD's data center revenue jumped 57% to $5.8 billion in Q1. Its stock closed up 18%.

AMD reported Q1 revenue of $10.25B, up 38% YoY. Data center hit $5.8B (+57%) and Q2 guidance midpoint of $11.2B beat consensus by roughly $700M.

Texas Instruments TI-84 Evo graphing calculator on a white background, showing the redesigned keypad and color graphing screen.
Hardware·

Texas Instruments shipped the TI-84 Evo. $160, USB-C, 3x faster, still exam-approved.

TI's first big redesign of the TI-84 in over a decade ships April 28 with a 156 MHz Cortex chip, a 50% larger graphing area, and Python on board. Exam boards still approve it.

Interior of a Mercedes-Benz GLC showing the redesigned steering wheel with physical rocker switches and rollers next to the wide curved Hyperscreen dashboard display.
Hardware·

'Physical buttons are better': Mercedes is retrofitting its steering wheels across the lineup.

Mercedes software chief Magnus Östberg confirms physical buttons return on the new GLC and CLA, citing software-defined vehicle telemetry from CLA drivers.

Composite image of a PC gaming setup with overlay text suggesting cracked DRM, accompanying a Tom's Hardware report on Denuvo's full bypass.
Gaming·

Denuvo's single-player DRM is fully cracked. 2K is forcing 14-day online check-ins to fight back.

Pirate trackers hit zero uncracked Denuvo titles for the first time in 12 years. 2K's response: a token that expires every fortnight and locks you out offline.

Render of an AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 495 'Gorgon Halo' APU package, surrounded by labels for the Radeon 8065S integrated GPU and the chip's memory configuration.
Hardware·

AMD's 'Gorgon Halo' refresh leaks with 192GB memory. Strix Halo tops out at 128GB.

A leaked Geekbench listing puts AMD's Ryzen AI Max+ 495 on a 192GB platform with a Radeon 8065S iGPU. The Strix Halo chip it replaces capped at 128GB.

Panic Playdate handheld console with crank, branded social-card image
Gaming·

Panic banned generative-AI art and audio from the Playdate Catalog. Code assistance still gets a pass.

The Playdate Catalog will no longer accept titles that use ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, or Suno output for art, audio, text, or dialog. Existing titles get a label.

Bambu Lab 3D printer printing a part on its bed
Hardware·

Bambu Lab killed an OrcaSlicer fork by lawyer letter. The fork was based on Bambu's own AGPL code.

Pawel Jarczak pulled OrcaSlicer-bambulab off GitHub on May 1 after Bambu Lab's legal team accused him of impersonating Bambu Studio and bypassing authorization.

Close-up of integrated-circuit packages on a circuit board, illustrating the memory and SoC products driving Samsung's chip results.
Hardware·

Samsung Q1 profit hit 57.2 trillion won. Memory chips for Nvidia drove 93% of it.

Samsung Electronics posted record Q1 2026 results on April 30: 133.9 trillion won revenue and 57.2 trillion won operating profit. Semiconductors did 93% of the work.

AMD EPYC server processor in cinematic studio lighting.
Hardware·

AMD Zen 7 'Florence' leak: 288 cores, a separate cache die, and a 25% IPC swing

Leaked slides describe Zen 7 EPYC scaling to 288 cores per socket, with all L3 moved off the CCD onto a stacked cache die. Tape-out is October 2026, launch late 2028.

Render of Anker's Thus chip alongside a pair of Soundcore earbuds.
Hardware·

Anker built its own AI chip. It runs neural nets inside flash memory cells.

Anker's Thus chip embeds compute inside NOR flash, claims 150x more on-device AI for noise cancellation, and ships in Soundcore earbuds on May 21. Here's why it matters.

Steam Controller hardware press image.
Gaming·

$99 Steam Controller leak: a YouTuber broke embargo and Reddit thinks it's too much

Tech YouTuber Techy Talk pulled an early Steam Controller review minutes after posting. The leaked $99 price, gyro, and magnetic TMR sticks have already split fans.

Cerebras Systems brand image from the Cerebras website.
Hardware·

Cerebras files for an IPO again, this time with $510M in revenue and a $10B OpenAI deal in its pocket

Cerebras filed an S-1 on April 17 listing as 'CBRS,' targeting roughly $23B at the prior private mark. The OpenAI inference deal is the line item that changed the story.

NASA Artemis II mission image showing the Orion spacecraft's lunar trajectory and Earth communication concept
Hardware·

Artemis II beamed 4K video from the Moon over a laser. The backup station was a $5M Australian kit.

NASA's Orion O2O terminal hit 260 Mbps from lunar orbit to White Sands, Table Mountain, and a sub-$5M Australian station. Crewed lasercom cleared its first real test.

Intel corporate newsroom image showing Intel branding
Hardware·

Intel's foundry finally has a whale: Musk says Tesla's Terafab will run on 14A

Elon Musk said Tesla plans to manufacture at Terafab in Austin on Intel's 14A process. It's the first major external customer Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan needs to keep the foundry alive.

Two Google TPU 8 chips, the 8t training and 8i inference variants, rendered side by side with the Axion branding
Hardware·

Google splits its AI chip: the TPU 8t trains, the TPU 8i serves, and Axion handles the rest

At Cloud Next 2026, Google unveiled TPU 8t and TPU 8i, an 8th-generation split that matches Nvidia on agentic inference. Ironwood hit GA the same day.

Framework Laptop 13 Pro product hero image showing the new aluminum chassis
Hardware·

Framework's Laptop 13 Pro is a ground-up redesign: aluminum, 20-hour battery, $1,199 DIY

Framework opened pre-orders for the Laptop 13 Pro on April 21. Panther Lake or Ryzen AI 300, LPCAMM2, a 74Wh battery, and Framework's first touch display.

TrendForce chart showing Q1 2026 memory contract price increases across DRAM and NAND
Hardware·

Why your next RAM kit costs double: the AI memory crunch, explained

DDR5 contract prices jumped 100% since 2025, HBM is eating 23% of DRAM wafers, and the fabs that could fix it don't come online until 2028. Here's the shape of the crunch.

Amazon Fire TV home screen on a television
Hardware·

Amazon is done with Android on Fire TV. Vega OS is the only future.

Amazon's new Fire TV Stick HD ships with Vega OS, no sideloading allowed. Sources say every future Fire TV will follow. Here's what changes for users and devs.

GitHub repository page for the PLFM_RADAR Aeris-10 project
Hardware·

A $5,000 open-source radar that sees 20 km, built by one engineer in Morocco

Nawfal Motii's Aeris-10 phased-array radar beats $250,000 commercial systems at 3% of the cost. Hardware, firmware, and FPGA bitstream are all on GitHub.

Meta and Broadcom partnership announcement header showing custom AI silicon
Hardware·

Meta just committed 1 gigawatt of custom AI chips with Broadcom through 2029

Meta and Broadcom expanded their partnership to co-develop four generations of MTIA chips on a 2nm process. Here's what the deal includes and why Nvidia should care.