GoKawiil
Tech News
Microsoft has branded its developer-optimized Windows configuration Project Zenith, targeting new devices with 64GB or more of unified memory. AMD introduced the first such device at IFA, a compact PC built on Ryzen AI Halo chips, with more machines using other silicon expected in coming months.
Nvidia used IFA to confirm that PCs built around its RTX Spark Arm-based SoC will ship starting in October, with partners now including Lenovo and Acer alongside previously announced Microsoft, HP, Dell, Asus and MSI machines. The lineup includes a flagship 6,144-CUDA-core, 20-core Grace configuration with up to 128GB of unified memory, plus a lower-tier laptop-only chip with 5,120 CUDA cores and 18 CPU cores.
Microsoft announced it will end unlimited Xbox Cloud Gaming access, replacing it with monthly hour caps tied to subscription level: 15 hours for Ultimate, 10 for Premium, and 5 for Essential, beginning in November. The company says rising cloud gaming costs are driving the change, and about 4% of subscribers will be affected, with an option to buy extra hours—also available to non-subscribers.
Microsoft will impose monthly streaming time limits on Xbox Cloud Gaming beginning in November, with Game Pass Essential, Premium, and Ultimate subscribers getting 5, 10, and 15 hours respectively. Both subscribers and non-subscribers will be able to purchase extra streaming hours, though exact pricing hasn't been announced. Microsoft says only about 4% of subscribers will be affected, attributing the change to rising infrastructure costs.
Microsoft will end unlimited Xbox Cloud Gaming access for Game Pass subscribers, introducing monthly streaming caps of 15 hours for Ultimate, 10 hours for Premium, and 5 hours for Essential tiers. Subscribers who exceed their limit can purchase additional streaming time, though pricing hasn't been disclosed, while downloadable game access remains unaffected.
Microsoft will begin limiting Xbox Cloud Gaming to monthly hour caps in November: 15 hours for Game Pass Ultimate, 10 for Premium, and 5 for Essential subscribers, after which users must purchase extra playtime. The company says only about 4% of Game Pass subscribers will be affected, and it will also let non-subscribers buy cloud hours to stream eligible owned games.
A new Madrona Venture Group survey of 150 enterprise IT professionals finds that most companies review their AI vendor choices twice a year or continuously, rather than locking into multi-year deals as they did with traditional SaaS. The report also shows fewer than half of enterprise AI pilots reach full production, though that marks an improvement over MIT's earlier finding of a 95% failure rate.
Microsoft plans to reorganize its financial reporting starting next fiscal quarter, dropping its existing three segments—Productivity and Business Processes, Intelligent Cloud, and More Personal Computing—in favor of two new categories: Devices and Consumer, and Agents and Infra. The change, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, is meant to better reflect how the company's business now revolves around AI agents and infrastructure.
An opinion piece critiques a recent open letter from over 100 tech firms—including OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft and Google—warning that AI will make cyberattacks cheaper and more frequent. The author praises the letter's factual basis, citing a real August incident where federal agencies found AI-generated exploit scripts targeting Siemens industrial controllers, but argues the letter fails to address who is actually responsible for defense. A think tank's counterpoint is cited: criminals adopt new tools mainly when old revenue streams dry up, not simply because new technology exists.
Microsoft announced it will cap monthly cloud streaming hours for Xbox Game Pass tiers, ending years of unlimited access. Ultimate subscribers get 15 hours, Premium gets 10, and Essential gets 5, with an option to buy additional hours once limits are reached. The change takes effect in November, and non-subscribers will also be able to purchase cloud streaming time for games they already own.
On September 2, Microsoft's Safe Links feature within Defender for Office 365 began misidentifying Google Search URLs shared in emails and Teams messages as malicious, blocking users from opening them. The outage, tracked internally as MO1465962, lasted about seven and a half hours before Microsoft resolved the faulty detection logic, though some users may have experienced lingering effects.
Microsoft AI launched MAI-Transcribe-2, a speech-to-text model it says beats OpenAI, Google and ElevenLabs on speed, accuracy and cost, pricing it at 10 cents per audio hour—a 72% cut from the $0.36 rate it charged for its first model just five months ago. The new version supports 60 languages, up from 43, and adds built-in speaker diarization and word-level timestamps, targeting noisy real-world business audio rather than clean recordings.