Retail point-of-sale systems today offer a wide range of options for peripherals and hardware. Their technical specifications play a major role in selection, and big retailers often choose multiple vendors to reduce a single point of failure. This gives them an advantage to negotiate price or support as well. Technically, these peripherals also require updating with new models and may have new feature sets. This necessitates the redevelopment of point-of-sale applications, increasing development costs.
On paper, Positron's next-gen Asimov accelerators, no doubt named for the beloved science fiction author, don't look like much of a match for Nvidia's Rubin GPUs. Yet, the Arm-backed AI startup boasts its inference chip will churn out five times as many tokens per dollar while using one-fifth the power of Nvidia's latest accelerators to do it. Those are certainly some bold claims, which the company contends are possible because the chip was designed to support large-scale inference workloads.
Sorano will be available with up to 84 Zen 5 cores - up from 64 on Siena - in a power envelope of just 225 watts. AMD isn't ready to spill all the beans on its latest Epyc just yet, but based on core count alone, we surmise the chip will either feature six density-optimized Zen 5c chiplets with 14 of 16 cores enabled or 12 of the frequency-optimized Zen 5 variety with one of the eight cores fused off.
What separates this from a standard Raspberry Pi build is the pair of breadboards soldered directly to the GPIO pins, seated inside the case, and accessible through a removable back panel. Connecting a sensor no longer means hunting for a separate breadboard and a tangle of jumper wires. PickentCode plugged in a temperature and humidity sensor and had it reading live data within minutes.
The Xeon 600 lineup spans the gamut between 12 and 86 performance cores (no cut-down efficiency cores here), with support for between four and eight channels of DDR5 and 80 to 128 lanes of PCIe 5.0 connectivity. Compared to its aging W-3500-series chips, Intel is claiming a 9 percent uplift in single threaded workloads and up to 61 percent higher performance in multithreaded jobs, thanks in no small part to an additional 22 processor cores this generation.
Mini PCs used to be defined by how invisible they could be, small black rectangles tucked behind monitors or under shelves. That made sense when they were just low-power desktops, but feels out of step now that these machines are running models, listening, watching, and routing data. If AI is going to sit on your desk, it might as well look like it belongs there instead of hiding like a piece of infrastructure.
AI-driven memory and storage price hikes have been the defining feature of the PC industry in 2026, and hobbyists have been hit the hardest-companies like Apple with lots of buying power have been able to limit the price increases for their PCs, phones, and other gadgets so far, but smaller outfits like Valve and Raspberry Pi haven't been so lucky.
Ayaneo started teasing the Pocket Play, its first smartphone, back in November, and then in December it showed us what it would look like, Sony Ericsson Xperia Play vibes and all. Today, Ayaneo has finally revealed the chipset sitting at the helm of the Pocket Play. It's MediaTek's Dimensity 9300. That's an odd choice, given that the SoC in question came out in 2023. Sure, it was MediaTek's top dog of 2023, but it's more than two years old.
Probably not worth it The Ryzen 7 9850X3D mostly does what it says it does: It's a mild speed bump to AMD's best gaming processor that, in most cases, very slightly extends the company's performance lead over Intel chips like the Core Ultra 9 285K. But the vanilla 9800X3D is almost as fast, it uses 25 or 30 W less power during gaming (which also results in temperatures that are 10 to 15 degrees Celsius cooler), and it's $30 cheaper as of this writing.
