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A 1936 control room built by Swedish firm Asean to manage electricity on the Southern Rail network survives in Woking, featuring an oval white-domed room with a central switchboard and ornate copper light fixtures. It operated until 1997, when a newer substation took over its functions, and is now Grade II listed, with offices in the building still in use.
Aaeon has launched the Up Xtreme PTL Edge Air, a compact industrial PC that replaces conventional fan-and-heatsink cooling with Frore Systems' AirJet solid-state airflow technology. The system can be configured with Intel Core Ultra X7 358H, Ultra 7 356H or Ultra 5 325 processors, with the top option including Arc B390 integrated graphics featuring 12 Xe cores. Aaeon says the unit runs under 21 dBA and is 35% thinner and 43% lighter than a comparable fan-cooled design.
Sonos has released the Ace Ultra headphones at $449, replacing the original $349 Ace as its flagship model. The new headphones retain the Ace's comfortable build and tactile controls while adding the ability to send audio from a broader Sonos speaker system to the headphones and back, a feature currently offered in "early access." Both ear cups and the battery are user-replaceable via separate accessory kits.
CD Projekt Red has released The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered as a free update for existing owners on PC and modern consoles, alongside a native Nintendo Switch 2 version. The remaster overhauls combat, rebalances the skill tree, and upgrades REDengine 3 to support ray tracing and path tracing, improved textures, foliage, lighting and a new photo mode. Reviewers have begun benchmarking GPU performance in the remaster, testing cards from Nvidia's RTX 5090 down to Intel's Arc B580 in the demanding Novigrad city area.
AMD's newly announced RX 9050 GPU exists in two very different versions sharing the same name: an 8GB retail card sold standalone in some markets, and a 4GB variant that can only be bought bundled inside prebuilt desktops. Testing found the 4GB model, discovered inside a $750 CyberPowerPC system from Best Buy, has half the memory bandwidth and significantly worse performance than the retail card most buyers would research online.
ReBarUEFI is a UEFI DXE driver that can be injected into a system's firmware to enable Resizable BAR on boards that don't officially support the feature. It works by patching the PCI resource allocation process during boot and is paired with a companion tool, ReBarState, to set the BAR size, with a separate project called NvStrapsReBar covering older NVIDIA Turing GPUs.
Circle has unveiled Arc, a new blockchain network designed for institutional finance, with USDC stablecoin functioning as its core settlement asset. The network is permissioned, meaning access is restricted, and is backed by major financial players including BlackRock, Visa, and Mastercard.
A GitHub user known as Uzbekunknown built a project called "dlss-nr-on-intel" that reimplements Nvidia's DLSS 5 71-block U-Net neural network to run on Intel's Xe2 architecture via the Vulkan cooperative matrix extension, rather than wrapping the original DLL. The code was largely written by AI assistants Claude and GPT-6 Astra, with the developer directing the process, and testing on Intel's Arc 140V graphics showed the technique working but extremely slow, around 10.5 fps at 360p in Tekken 7.
Leaker Jaykihn reports that Intel has cancelled a Nova Lake-S desktop chip variant pairing 4 P-cores, 8 E-cores, 4 LPE-cores with a 12 Xe3P integrated GPU. Instead, that high-graphics APU configuration is said to be delayed and reintroduced with Razor Lake, the architecture succeeding Nova Lake.
New cost-per-frame analysis across 10 countries shows Nvidia's GeForce cards have risen in price more sharply than AMD's Radeon or Intel's Arc lineups, eroding Nvidia's value proposition for gamers. At original MSRP, Intel's Arc B580 and AMD's Radeon RX 9060 XT offered the best value in the budget segment, while AMD's RX 9070 XT beat Nvidia's RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti on cost per frame in the mid-to-high end.
OpenAI has released GPT-6 Astra, a new flagship model arriving less than two months after its GPT-5.6 family, which the company calls its most intelligent and aligned system yet. Astra is built to handle multi-step computer-use tasks, coding, browsing and professional workflows simultaneously, and OpenAI backs the claims with strong scores on benchmarks like ARC-AGI-3, Terminal Bench 4.0, and the Agent's Last Exam.
OpenAI's unreleased GPT-6 Astra model scored 62.7% on the ARC-AGI-3 Semi-Private benchmark using a Standard harness for $26,000, and 99.9% using a Provider Adapter harness that preserves reasoning state between requests for $19,000. The model also beat the median human tester's action efficiency on 96% of the benchmark's levels, building compact symbolic world models and its own shorthand notation to track game states.