Samsung just shot down internet chatter claiming the company would stop making SATA SSDs. A spokesperson told reporters the whole thing was bogus after people started freaking out about losing another major SSD supplier.
The panic made sense since Micron already bailed on consumer storage. Memory and NAND shortages have gotten pretty wild because AI companies are hoovering up everything manufacturers can produce. Samsung remains a massive player in the SSD game, and consumers were worried they'd pivot hard toward AI infrastructure instead of keeping retail products stocked.
The supply crunch is real, though. PC makers like Dell are already hiking prices because general-purpose DRAM and consumer storage are getting squeezed. SK hynix...
Ubisoft grabbed the MOBA March of Giants from Amazon and folded the Montreal team into its studio when the deal wrapped. Creative director Xavier Marquis used to helm Rainbow Six Siege at Ubisoft before, and senior production lead Alexandre Parizeau ran the Toronto office back in the day. Amazon will still push marketing through Twitch even though it handed over the keys.
This went down right after Amazon axed over 14,000 workers and shut down a bunch of game projects like New World: Aeternum and that second Lord of the Rings MMO. The company seems to be backing away from original IPs and focusing harder on adaptations and established franchises instead.
Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot thinks the game has legs in the MOBA space, and...
Some creator called Aillusory dropped an AI-enhanced version of The Witcher 3 that makes the whole thing look photorealistic while keeping the original vibe mostly intact. The project regenerated basically everything from scenery to character models using footage from the base game, and people are losing their minds over how good it looks despite the creator joking about it being slop.
Comments are rolling in saying AI might end up being the ultimate visual filter before it gets used to actually build games from scratch. CD Projekt Red probably will not touch a proper remake for years since the original still holds up pretty well, and modders keep pumping out upgrades anyway.
Geralt will show up again when Fool's Theory finishes their...
NVIDIA scooped up SchedMD, the crew behind Slurm workload management software that handles job scheduling for more than half the systems on the TOP500 supercomputer rankings. The chipmaker promised to keep the project open source and vendor-neutral while throwing resources at development to help AI labs and research clusters run more efficiently.
Slurm gets used by foundation model developers to wrangle training runs and inference jobs across massive GPU farms. SchedMD CEO Danny Auble said teaming up with NVIDIA validates how critical the scheduler has become for cutting-edge compute infrastructure. The companies have already worked together for over a decade.
NVIDIA plans to give SchedMD faster access to new hardware while...
ASUS dropped some slimmer graphics cards under their DUAL EVO branding that squeeze down to 2.1 slots instead of the usual 2.5-slot chunkers. The trimmed versions cover both factory overclocked and stock speed RTX 5060 Ti 16GB and RTX 5060 8GB models, which all use twin axial fans to keep temps in check. The power connector got shuffled closer to the bracket because of the shrinkage.
The EVO label actually first appeared on RTX 5050 cards that measured a true 2.0 slots, but ASUS apparently decided to stretch the name across slightly thicker midrange options this time around. Length and height stayed basically the same between EVO and regular DUAL variants.
Thunderobot and Machenike are bringing a 1.6kg gaming laptop called ZERO Air to CES that apparently pairs Intel's fresh Panther Lake chips with RTX 5000-series mobile graphics. The 16-inch machine gets marketed as having dual full-power performance, though nobody really knows what that means yet, since the promo stuff stays pretty vague about it.
MSI already showed off its Prestige refresh with Core Ultra 300 processors back in late fall, and ASUS teased a super-light Zenbook DUO with dual batteries. Looks like a bunch of Intel partners are lining up to drop new hardware with these chips when the show kicks off next month.
India just rolled out DHRUV64, a homegrown chip from C-DAC that runs on RISC-V architecture and targets everything from 5G gear to IoT devices. The processor joins earlier domestic efforts like SHAKTI from IIT Madras and VIKRAM from ISRO, and it pushes the country closer to ditching foreign silicon for critical infrastructure. The government backed this through the Digital India RISC-V program, which skips licensing fees by using open standards.
DHRUV64 marks the third fabricated chip under the initiative after THEJAS32 got made in Malaysia, and THEJAS64 was built at a local fab in Mohali. The designers are already cooking up DHANUSH64 variants as follow-ups.
Programs like the India Semiconductor Mission and Chips to Startup have been...
KIOXIA just announced the Exceria G3 lineup that pairs PCIe 5.0 bandwidth with QLC flash to undercut the expensive TLC drives everyone else is pushing. The M.2 sticks hit 10,000 MB/s reads and 9,600 MB/s writes on the 2TB model while using eighth-gen BiCS FLASH memory, and they launch later this year in 1TB and 2TB flavors.
The bigger version actually beats their own Exceria Plus G4 TLC drive on sequential writes and random operations, pumping out 1.6 million read IOPS and 1.45 million write IOPS thanks to architectural tweaks. Endurance ratings sit at 600 TBW for the smaller capacity and 1,200 TBW for the larger one, which basically matches what modern TLC offerings deliver.
No pricing yet, but the whole point is making Gen5 storage...
GSC Game World dropped a free expansion for STALKER 2 that throws players into a weird mystery about a radio signal messing with stalkers near Malachite. Professor Medulin and some radio geek named Banzai got caught up investigating why people were getting headaches and hallucinations from the transmission, and things went sideways in the Red Forest area. The pack adds eight quests that can eat up hours, seven spots to check out, six NPCs with backstories, and a silenced GP37V2 rifle for tactical players who like burst fire.
The storyline can lead to a whole new hub spawning in Burnt Forest with vendors and safe storage if you make the right calls. Players will revisit places like Car Dump and Army Warehouses that are now populated...
