• Valve has followed up on its very popular Steam Deck gaming handheld with a desktop Steam Machine and a wireless Steam Controller.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Like the Steam Deck, the 6" black cube called the Steam Machine is at its heart a PC built on AMD components.  It has a six core Zen 4 CPU, and a 28 core RDNA3 GPU.
  
  It comes with 16GB of RAM in two DDR5 SODIMMs, 8GB of GGDR6 RAM for the graphics card, and 512GB or 2TB of SSD in an M.2 2230 slot.  There's a vacant M.2 2280 slot to add storage of your own.
  
  On the I/O front it has HDMI, DisplayPort, one USB-C port, four USB-A ports, and somewhat disappointingly, gigabit Ethernet.
  
  It also has four built-in antennas for wifi, Bluetooth, and the Steam Controller, and a built-in 300W power supply so you don't need an external brick.  It's cooled by a single 120mm fan.
  
  And most importantly it comes running SteamOS rather than Windows.
  
  Give how determined Microsoft is to drive its own users away, I am looking forward to this little device.  It's literally half the speed of my current desktop (which has a 12 core Zen 4 CPU and an RDNA3 graphics card with twice the graphics cores and RAM) but for something that sits quietly in the living room attached to the TV it looks ideal.
  
  No prices yet.  Shipping "early 2026".

• Trying out the latest Framework 16 laptop with the RTX 5070 graphics option.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's a Framework 16 laptop with RTX 5070 graphics - which on this particular laptop are upgradeable.
  
  The one surprise is that the graphics upgrade somehow upgraded the display from 100% sRGB to 100% DCI-P3, which is probably really just a colour profile switch.
  
  
  
• Microsoft really wants you to use their Edge browser.  (PC Magazine)
  
  For something other than downloading Chrome.
  
  
  
• A study commission by Apple says that when Apple cut its commissions charged to developers, the developers mostly kept the savings rather than reducing prices to customers.  (Mac Rumors)
  
  Well, yes.  And?
  
  
  
• Need a faster CPU?  How about 1024 cores at 6GHz, with 24 channels of DDR5-17600 RAM and 128 lanes of PCIe 7.0?  (WCCFTech)
  
  Oh, and it runs both x86 and Arm instructions.
  
  One small problem: It uses 1600W of power.
  
  Oh, and it's not expected to ship before 2027.
  
  They have shipped FPGA-based emulators to developers, so it's not entirely vaporware.  Other than that, wake me in a couple of years.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 14 2025 01:13 AM (d+Z9G)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 14 2025 02:11 AM (d+Z9G)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, November 14 2025 04:50 PM (PiXy!)

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