HarmonyOS laptops get serious

Huawei is gearing up to drop its first proper in-house silicon for desktop-class machines with the Kirin X90, and if the tipsters are right, it’s a winner.

Strong CPU and datacentre wins 

AMD has just posted the strongest first quarter in its history, pulling in $7.438 billion in revenue for Q1 2025. That’s a 36 per cent surge year-on-year, driven by robust sales of high-margin Ryzen client CPUs, booming datacentre demand for its EPYC server chips, and growing adoption of its Instinct MI300-series AI accelerators.

Nvidia, Google, and Microsoft sniff around Intel’s foundry comeback

Troubled Chipzilla might finally be catching a break. After years of being flattened by TSMC’s relentless march and its own comically late roadmap slips, Intel’s foundry arm may have stumbled onto its redemption arc with the 18A process.

It’s not a price hike, just a price “clarification”

Software King of the World Microsoft has quietly booted the 256GB versions of last year’s 13.8-inch Surface Laptop 7 and 13-inch Surface Pro 11 off its store, leaving only pricier 512GB and 1TB options starting at $1,199.

Torvalds flushes ancient x86 silicon down the kernel loo

The Linux kernel is finally putting the 486 processor out of its misery, ending decades of backward compatibility that even Microsoft ditched with Windows XP back in 2001.

Stimulus and stockpiling drive gains, but hangover looms

China’s top foundry, SMIC has seen its quarterly net profit more than double to $188 million, thanks to a mix of Beijing’s largesse and geopolitical panic buying.

Nvidia happy for now

The Trump administration has torched the Biden-era “AI Diffusion Rule” just days before it was set to take effect on 15 May. The rule, described by a Commerce Department official as “overly complex, bureaucratic, and would stymie American innovation,” carved up the globe into chip access tiers.

Licence holders told to uninstall updates or face audits, lawsuits

The ever-so-popular Broadcom has attempted to make itself even more popular with its VMWare perpetual license holders by firing off cease-and-desist letters demanding they yank any updates installed after their support contracts expired even if they paid for the software in full.

Will be replaced by tech that Apple can’t do

Fruity Cargo Cult Apple's senior vice president of services, Eddy Cue, warned that the iPhone could be obsolete in a decade and will be replaced by something that Jobs’ Mob is light years behind its competition.

Sound United gets snapped up by Samsung’s HARMAN 

Masimo, better known for sticking sensors on sick people than flogging headphones, has finally offloaded its Sound United consumer audio unit to HARMAN International for $350 million in cash.