
Nvidia’s retro driver hype cools
Core 2 meets cold, hard reality
Earlier this week, a driver update from Nvidia had retro-PC fans frothing with excitement. Thanks to the removal of a pesky POPCNT instruction requirement, GeForce drivers suddenly played nice with ancient Intel CPUs all the way back to the Core 2 era.

Boffins fling something against the wall and it sticks
MIT boffins have emerged from their smoke-filled labs with a new form of chip that behaves like pasta.

Xiaomi flexes silicon muscles with XRing chip
China’s phone makers race to dump Qualcomm
Xiaomi is sharpening its knives for Qualcomm and MediaTek with its own in-house silicon, the XRing 01, and if leaks are anything to go by, it might just have the grunt to pull it off.

Refreshed upgraded laptops
Acer turned up to Computex 2025 with a wheelbarrow full of refreshed laptops, hurling upgrades at nearly every model it sells. It’s the usual story of faster chips, louder acronyms and shinier graphics, but this time there’s real polish, especially in the Swift range.

BTF-style tricks without the cable Zen
Maxsun’s new Terminator B850BKB WIFI board is doing something funky with PCIe slots.