Tech

For about four years now, AMD has offered special “X3D” variants of its high-end desktop processors with an extra 64MB of L3 cache attached, an addition that disproportionately benefits games. AMD calls this “3D V-Cache” because it stacks the cache directly on top of (for Ryzen 5000 and 7000) or beneath (for Ryzen 9000) the CPU die.

Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren and Republican Senator Josh Hawley are urging the US’s central energy information agency to provide better information on how much electricity data centers actually use. In a joint letter sent to the Energy Information Administration Thursday morning, seen by WIRED, Hawley and Warren press the agency to publicly collect “comprehensive, annual energy-use disclosures” on data centers.

RV Tech, a joint venture between Volkswagen Group and Rivian, has completed a successful winter test program, it said this morning. The partnership was created in 2024 when VW Group announced it would invest $5.8 billion in the American electric vehicle maker to gain access to Rivian’s expertise in vehicle software and electronic architecture.

After more than a decade of flirting with the idea , Apple has finally discontinued the Mac Pro tower. The company confirmed to 9to5Mac that the latest Mac Pro iteration—an M2 Ultra model first released in mid-2023—would be its last, at least for the time being.

Most elements of a major NASA event this week that laid out spaceflight plans for the coming decade were well received: a Moon base, a focus on less talk and more action, and working with industry to streamline regulations so increased innovation can propel the United States further into space. However, one aspect of this event, named Ignition, has begun to run into serious turbulence.

Memory and storage shortages and price hikes that started hitting PC components late last year have steadily rippled outward across all kinds of consumer tech—some products have disappeared, gone out of stock, or been delayed , and others have undergone multiple rounds of price hikes. Today’s bad news comes from Sony, which is raising prices for PlayStation 5 consoles in the US just eight months after their last price hike .

Iran-linked hackers successfully broke into FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal email, the Department of Justice confirmed to Reuters on Friday. Reuters could not authenticate the leaked emails themselves but noted that the Gmail address matched an email account “linked to Patel in previous data breaches ⁠preserved by the dark web intelligence firm District 4 Labs.” The DOJ suggested the emails appeared to be authentic.

“Classic First Amendment retaliation.” That’s how US District Judge Rita Lin described the Department of War’s effort to blacklist Anthropic and designate it a supply-chain risk . By all appearances, “these measures appear designed to punish Anthropic,” Lin wrote in an order granting Anthropic’s request for a preliminary injunction.

AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) was invented by a group of technology companies to be an open, royalty-free alternative to other video codecs, like HEVC/H.265. But a lawsuit that Dolby Laboratories Inc.