• Qualcomm has bought hobby electronics board maker Arduino for an undisclosed sum.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Well, that's the end of that then.
  
  Sorry?
  
  Qualcomm poisons everything it touches.
  
  You're thinking of Broadcom.
  
  Oh.  You're right.
  
  
  
• The first announcement from the combined company is the Arduino Uno Q, a $44 development board featuring both a Qualcomm Dragonwing CPU running Linux and an STM32U585 microcontroller for real-time control tasks.  (Arduino)
  
  The Dragonwing is a traditional not-very-powerful Arm processor with four 2GHz A53 cores.
  
  The STM32U585 is a microcontroller with an Arm M33 running at 160MHz, 2MB of embedded flash storage, and 786kB of RAM.  (No, that's not a typo.)
  
  The board includes 2GB of RAM and 16GB of eMMC flash storage for the Dragonwing, as well as WiFi 5 and a whole slew of low-level I/O functions.

• Minisforum also has a NAS.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It features 5Gb and 10Gb network ports, five 3.5" drive bays, three M.2 slots (convertible to one M.2 slot and two U.2 bays), RAM expandable up to 128GB, and a Ryzen 370 CPU.
  
  That's a 28W part with 12 Zen 5 cores and 16 graphics cores, and it's AMD's current fastest mainstream APU, six times as fast as the N150 found in certain low-end NASes we just bought.
  
  On the other hand, it costs $1019 without any memory or drives, vs. a current price of $204 for the Beelink Me Mini, so you definitely pay for what you get.
  
  
  
• The 16GB RAM model of the Beelink Me Mini is now available for $284 with a 1TB Crucial SSD bundled in.  (Beelink)
  
  Well, it's available for pre-order, but so was the model I have and it was on my doorstep in rural Australia in about five days.
  
  
  
• Let the bubbles roll: Spending on datacenters and information processing generally contributed about 90% of US GDP growth in the first half of 2025.  (Fortune)
  
  The author notes that this spending did contribute to higher energy prices and continued high interest rates, and estimates that without all of these GDP would still have grown at around 2%:

  Our economy might just be three AI data centers in a trench coat.

  
  
  
• OpenAI has signed $1 trillion worth of deals for computing hardware and services so far this year.  (MSN)
  
  A trillion here, a trillion there...

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, October 08 2025 07:30 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Frank at Thursday, October 09 2025 04:39 AM (amxkj)

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, October 09 2025 01:05 PM (XWgGM)

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