GoKawiil
Tech News
Microsoft has restructured its Xbox game studios, placing Halo Studios (formerly 343 Industries), Rare and Age of Empires developer World's Edge under Activision's control. The move accompanies 268 additional layoffs, with the remaining Halo team reduced to a small community-support unit while Activision assembles a new team to lead the franchise's future.
ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) announced at the 2026 World Manufacturing Convention that it has begun mass production of its fifth-generation DRAM platform, called G5. The company says the platform uses new self-aligned quadruple patterning with an 11.95nm active-area half-pitch, a 45:1 capacitor aspect ratio, and a high-k metal gate process, delivering roughly 50% more die per wafer than prior generations.
Analyst Kurnal Insights calculated that at current AI-driven memory prices, the revenue value of DRAM per square millimeter of silicon now surpasses the nominal wafer processing cost of TSMC's advanced N2 and N3 logic nodes. Using an assumed DRAM price of $1.50 per gigabit, the newest 1b DRAM generation works out to about $0.654 per mm², compared to roughly $0.424 per mm² for an N3 wafer.
Chinese memory maker CXMT has started mass-producing chips built on its new G5 process, which shrinks the DRAM active-area half-pitch to 11.95nm through quadruple-patterning lithography and uses storage capacitors with a 45:1 depth-to-width ratio. The first products, 24Gb LPDDR5X chips offering 50% more capacity than CXMT's prior generation, are already shipping in two package formats and appearing in mainstream Chinese flagship smartphones.
Acer CEO Jason Chen told DigiTimes that RAM-driven PC price increases could start reversing by the end of 2027, a far shorter timeline than rival memory executives have forecast. He argues that supply of most RAM and SSD types has already caught up with demand, with real shortages now confined to high-end components like top-tier DDR5 modules and certain CPUs.
Samsung Electronics is planning to more than double production of its sixth-generation HBM4 and seventh-generation HBM4E memory chips next year, industry sources say. To support this, the company will raise outsourced cleaning of glass carriers—supports used to stabilize wafers during thinning—from 20,000 sheets monthly this year to 50,000 sheets monthly in 2025, continuing a trend that saw volumes double from 10,000 sheets last year.
Tom's Hardware Premium's weekly roundup covered Valve's release of the Steam Frame VR headset with an interview of its engineers, an investigation into worsening DRAM and NAND shortages now hitting SLC and NOR Flash, and PieceMakers' Taiwan stock debut pitching hybrid-bonded chips as an alternative to HBM for AI inference. The issue also detailed a public dispute among AI leaders after a former OpenAI and Anthropic employee warned advanced AI could threaten humanity by 2030, prompting rebuttals from Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen Huang.
An engineering leader argues that as companies route entry-level coding tasks to AI agents, fewer juniors get the hands-on experience needed to become senior engineers. He compares the looming shortage of experienced engineers to the recent DRAM chip shortage, where demand outpaced supply that couldn't be scaled quickly. He says senior engineers themselves now bear responsibility for deliberately training replacements rather than letting AI erase the bottom of the career ladder.
According to Reuters sources, Chinese DRAM maker CXMT is considering building an experimental 3D NAND production line at its planned second facility near Beijing, which has yet to break ground. The company has also set up a Beijing research institute reportedly working on NAND flash development, and has discussed potential NAND supply with at least one prospective customer targeting AI storage products. CXMT has not officially confirmed any of these NAND ambitions.
PieceMakers, a DRAM designer majority-owned by Nanya Technology, began trading on Taiwan's Emerging Stock Board at a NT$740 reference price and closed its first session up 23.6% at NT$915, valuing the company near $1.4 billion. Rather than competing in HBM, the firm is pursuing custom memory designs that bond DRAM directly to processors via hybrid bonding, positioning the technology between SRAM-only chips like Nvidia's Groq LPU and traditional HBM for AI inference workloads.
D-Matrix introduced Raptor, a new accelerator that stacks compute logic directly on top of DRAM dies to tackle memory bottlenecks in generative AI inference. The design aims to bridge the gap between SRAM's speed but tiny capacity and HBM's larger capacity but bandwidth and power limitations, following the company's earlier Corsair and JetStream products.
OpenAI announced Tuesday that a swarm of 10,000 AI agents, run for 88 hours at a cost of millions of dollars, had found a scenario where the Navier-Stokes equations describe fluids reaching infinite velocity, effectively breaking the famous equations. NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster then publicly accused the company of producing a solution suspiciously similar to unpublished work he had been developing for years and was close to finishing.