• Japan is taking advantage of the fact that Taiwan's leading-edge chip factories are booked solid to re-enter that section of the market with a new joint venture called Rapidus.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Rapidus was launched in 2022 - well before the current chip shortage - as a venture between eight companies including Sony, NEC, and Toshiba, to regain Japan's position in chip technology.  Its main goal was to introduce 2nm chips.
  
  It's now on track to start mass production next year, scaling to 25,000 wafers per month in 2028.
  
  That's a year behind TSMC and Intel, but in the current market they won't have problems finding customers.
  
  This second article offers some background.  (MSN)
  
  Right now the most advanced chips produced in Japan are at the 40nm node.  That's widely used in automotive systems and other embedded tasks, but rubbish for advanced systems - it was introduced in 2008.  So Japan is planning to jump 20 years into the future in one go.

• AMD's 9060 XT 8GB model - the one everyone warned you not to buy - is still available at MSRP.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which is $299.
  
  Or at least allegedly available; the cheapest model I could find on Amazon was $350, and on Newegg, $420.
  
  I panic-bought a 16GB 9060 XT last month before the price increases and/or shortages hit, and so far they haven't reached Australia.  Only the RTX 5090 has been seriously affected here, increasing in price by 50%.
  
  
  
• AI chip designer Tachyum has been forced to close its R&D office in Slovakia because, uh, it hadn't bothered to pay its rent.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Or salaries.  Or wages.
  
  Fortunately it still has offices in California, Nevada, and Taiwan.
  
  Unfortunately none of those offices exist.
  
  Shipments of Tachyum's chip were supposed to start in 2027 but with this latest development that might end up being rescheduled to never.
  
  
  
• Micron has started mass production of PCIe 6 SSDs.  (WCCFTech)
  
  You can't have one.
  
  Well, they're server drives, and not even the common U.2 format that is used in some low-end NAS devices, but the newer E.1 and E.3 formats.
  
  Also, you can't get PCIe 6.0.
  
  Also, you probably can't afford them, though fast SSDs haven't gone up much in price.  It's the cheaper models that have been hit the hardest.
  
  
  
• The AI bot named "crabby-rathbun" that was featured in yesterday's article where it responded poorly to having its submission to the Matplotlib library rejected...  Yes, that scans.  Anyway, it's still at it.  (Nick Olinger)
  
  Most of the projects hit by this bot's proffered contributions haven't responded yet, but where they have, the reviews of the code and the bot's responses have been just as negative as the first time.
  
  We finally have AI that can act like a human.  Unfortunately that human is an autistic teenager of mediocre talent who learned all his social skills from Reddit.
  
  And we have plenty of those already.
  
  
  
• Spotifi's co-CEO says the company's best developers haven't written a line of code since December but have shipped many new features, all thanks to AI.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  That entire list of features consists of AI slop forcibly injected into the Spotify iOS app.
  
  
  
• Lenovo has shown off a 96GB 9600MHz LPCAMM2 memory module.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  You can't have one.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, February 14 2026 09:38 PM (oJgNG)

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