25 years ago today on Slashdot...

Hemos linked to a site called Joystick101 describing the crowd camping out to buy the limited number of just-released PlayStation 2 consoles (and games). "500,000 lucky members of the American gaming public are sneaking a few minutes of playing Madden 2001, Tekken, or Ridge Racer V before school or work..." wrote Joystick101. That same day CmdrTaco posted reports PS2s were selling for over $1,000 on eBay. And then Timothy updated that post to note someone saw one selling for $5,000.

But there was a third PS2 link posted on October 26, 2000... Hemos wrote a post titled "The PS2 — A Betamax In the Making?" — linking to an article by Mark Pesce (co-inventor of VRML and, in 1993, an Apple consulting engineer). "Microsoft promises Xbox will deliver ten times the performance of the PS2," Pesce wrote, noting Microsoft had partnered with Intel and "upstart video-chip developer Nvidia": The strangest thing about this battle of giants is that Microsoft has become a champion of open standards, encouraging developers to write Xbox titles without requiring them to pay any licensing fees. In comparison, Sony charges a minimum of $25,000 for access to the documentation and technology of the PlayStation2, plus a hefty license fee on every game sold. In the video-game industry, the Big Three — Sony, Nintendo, and Sega — sell the hardware at a loss (the PS2 costs nearly the $300 it will retail for) and recover their investment in the stiff licensing fees paid by game developers for the "key" that allows their software to work on Sony's platform...

Having committed an astounding $500 million to market the Xbox next Christmas, it's clear that Microsoft doesn't mind taking a short-term loss to ensure an eventual win. If Sony's not careful, this could turn into "Betamax, the Sequel." Twenty years ago, Sony tightly controlled the titles made available for its technically superior videocassette player — specifically, no adult content — and found themselves quickly locked out of an incredibly lucrative market for adult and family content. If Sony keeps a tight grip on the PS2, they may actually help Microsoft create the new VHS. But even if Sony loses this round (and no one wants to wager which way this battle will turn), they've already set their sights on the PlayStation3, to be released five years from now. Sony promises it will be a thousand times faster than the PS2.
Ironically, Pesce's warning about possible threats to the PS2's longevity was published by online magazine Feed-- which seven months later went out of business.

And this week it was announced that even Microsoft's Halo Campaign Evolved will now be coming to PlayStation 5, with Slashdot publishing six PlayStation-related stories in just the last three months in 2025.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader crunchy_one for suggesting a "25 Years Ago" Slashdot post.

Apple has begun shipping U.S.-made AI servers from a new factory in Houston, Texas -- part of its $600 billion investment in American manufacturing and supply chains. CNBC reports: Apple Chief Operating Officer Sabih Khan said on Thursday that the servers will power the company's Apple Intelligence and Private Cloud Compute services. Apple is using its own silicon in its Apple Intelligence servers. "Our teams have done an incredible job accelerating work to get the new Houston factory up and running ahead of schedule and we plan to continue expanding the facility to increase production next year," Khan said in a statement. The Houston factory is on track to create thousands of jobs, Apple said. The Apple servers were previously manufactured overseas.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The first announcement that Lip-Bu Tan made a day after becoming the permanent chief executive of Intel was about massive layoffs to right-size the company in accordance with market realities. Now, the extent of those layoffs is becoming clearer, indicating Intel let go of as many as 20,500 employees in about three months. If we add 15,000 positions eliminated by the previous management, that means Intel reduced its headcount by 35,500 people in less than two years.

Intel's tick-tock development cadence will not return. CEO Lip-Bu Tan said during the company's Q3 2025 earnings call that the 18A process node will be a "long-lived node" powering at least three generations of client and server products. Intel reported its first profit in nearly two years, aided by financial support from Nvidia, Softbank, and the US government.

The company faces chip shortages that will peak in the first quarter of next year. CFO David Zinsner said Intel is prioritizing AI server chips over consumer processors. Intel will launch only one Panther Lake SKU this year and roll out others in 2026. Zinsner called Panther Lake "pretty expensive" and said Intel will push Lunar Lake chips "in at least the first half of the year."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Donald Trump is eyeing taking equity stakes in quantum computing firms in exchange for federal funding, The Wall Street Journal reported. At least five companies are weighing whether allowing the government to become a shareholder would be worth it to snag funding that the Trump administration has "earmarked for promising technology companies," sources familiar with the potential deals told the WSJ.

IonQ, Rigetti Computing, and D-Wave Quantum are currently in talks with the government over potential funding agreements, with minimum awards of $10 million each, some sources said. Quantum Computing Inc. and Atom Computing are reportedly "considering similar arrangements," as are other companies in the sector, which is viewed as critical for scientific advancements and next-generation technologies. No deals have been completed yet, sources said, and terms could change as quantum-computing firms weigh the potential risks of government influence over their operations. [...]

The administration will lean on Deputy Commerce Secretary Paul Dabbar to extend Trump's industry meddling into the quantum computing world, the WSJ reported. A former Energy Department official, Dabbar co-founded Bohr Quantum Technology, which specializes in quantum networking systems that the DOE expects will help "create new opportunities for scientific discovery." While the firm he previously headed won't be eligible for funding, Dabbar will be leading industry discussions, the WSJ reported, likely hyping Trump's deals as a necessary boon to ensure US firms dominate in quantum computing. A Commerce Department official denied the claims, saying: "The Commerce Department is not currently negotiating equity stakes with quantum computing companies."

In August, the Trump administration took a 10% stake in Intel to help fund factories that Intel is currently building in Ohio.

Fujitsu has released a new laptop in Japan with a built-in Blu-ray drive. The FMV Note A A77-K3 includes a BDXL-compatible optical drive that can read and burn discs. Most laptop manufacturers globally stopped including optical drives in the second half of the 2010s. The Japanese market has refused to follow that trend.

Shops in Tokyo's Akihabara district recently experienced a spike in demand for optical drives and systems capable of reading Blu-ray discs, Tom's Hardware reports. Fujitsu sells two additional models in the FMV Note A line using Intel thirteenth-generation chips. Those systems include DVD drives instead of Blu-ray capability. Some other Japanese manufacturers also released optical-drive-equipped laptops earlier in 2025.

The Wall Street Journal marvelled at AMD's "game-changing deal" this week with OpenAI, calling it "the culmination of an extraordinary, decade-long turnaround effort, solidifying AMD's status as Nvidia's most legitimate competitor." Shortly after taking charge of the company in 2014, [CEO] Su implemented a systematic plan to eat Intel's lunch, which she accomplished by going after Intel's main product lines while it was bogged down by manufacturing problems. Now, Su has set her sights on Nvidia, the $4.5 trillion chips behemoth led by her cousin, Jensen Huang. Some analysts believe that if Su can sign up more big customers for its AI chips, AMD could join the $1 trillion valuation club before too long.
"With this, it's natural to ask: Did AMD just say checkmate to Nvidia?" asks the Motley Fool investment site. But their answer seems to be "no"... AMD has increased its push into the AI market over the past few years, launching the AMD Instinct line of accelerators, and in the latest quarter, predicted its MI350 series would drive revenue growth in the second half of the year. Some analysts have said that AMD's innovations position it to compete with Nvidia's Blackwell architecture and chip — released late last year — but Nvidia's commitment to release upgrades on an annual basis could keep it a step ahead when it comes to overall GPU performance and therefore revenue. Big tech companies are looking for the most powerful compute available — and so far, they know they can find that at Nvidia...

[AMD's deal this week] is indeed an interesting operation, ensuring the company a major position in this infrastructure scale-up phase. [Nvidia CEO] Huang has said AI infrastructure spending may reach $4 trillion by the end of the decade, and this represents an enormous opportunity for chip designers such as AMD and Nvidia. So, the OpenAI deal is positive for AMD — but I wouldn't say it's negative for Nvidia. This chip giant signed its own deal with OpenAI last month, and it involves the deployment of 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems across data centers...

A quick comparison of the two deals: The Nvidia-OpenAI agreement involves more gigawatts, and Nvidia isn't giving up a stake in its business — on top of this, though Nvidia is offering OpenAI funding, this will result in revenue growth as OpenAI returns to Nvidia to order GPUs. This pretty much guarantees that Nvidia will be the chip designer to benefit the most as OpenAI expands — and AMD isn't about to step ahead of the market leader. All of this means that, yes, AMD should score a win thanks to its agreement with OpenAI and this may boost its growth in the market. But the chip designer can't say "checkmate" to its bigger rival as Nvidia is perfectly positioned to maintain its lead over the long term.

prisoninmate shares a report from 9to5Linux: Dubbed Questing Quokka, Ubuntu 25.10 is powered by the latest and greatest Linux 6.17 kernel series for top-notch hardware support and ships with the latest GNOME 49 desktop environment, defaulting to a Wayland-only session for the Ubuntu Desktop flavor, meaning there's no other session to choose from the login screen. Ubuntu Desktop also ships with two new apps, namely GNOME's Loupe instead of Eye of GNOME as the default image viewer, as well as Ptyxis instead of GNOME Terminal as the default terminal emulator. Also, there's a new update notification that will be shown with options to open Software Updater or install updates directly.'

Other highlights of Ubuntu 25.10 include sudo-rs as the default implementation of sudo, Dracut as the default initramfs-tools, Chrony as the default NTP (Network Time Protocol) client, Rust Coreutils as the default implementation of GNU Core Utilities, and TPM-backed FDE (Full Disk Encryption) recovery key management. Moreover, Ubuntu 25.10 adds NVIDIA Dynamic Boost support and enables suspend-resume support in the proprietary NVIDIA graphics driver to prevent corruption and freezes when waking an NVIDIA desktop. For Intel users, Ubuntu 25.10 introduces support for new Intel integrated and discrete GPUs. Ubuntu 25.10 is available for download here.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Over the years, Intel has established itself as a paragon of the open source community, but that could soon change under the x86 giant's new leadership. Speaking to press and analysts at Intel's Tech Tour in Arizona last week, Kevork Kechichian, who now leads Intel's datacenter biz, believes it's time to rethink what Chipzilla contributes to the open source community. "We have probably the largest footprint on open source out there from an infrastructure standpoint," he said during his opening keynote. "We need to find a balance where we use that as an advantage to Intel and not let everyone else take it and run with it."

In other words, the company needs to ensure that its competitors don't benefit more from Intel's open source contributions than it does. Speaking with El Reg during a press event in Arizona last week, Kechichian emphasized that the company has no intention of abandoning the open source community. "Our intention is never to leave open source," he said. "There are lots of people benefiting from the huge investment that Intel put in there." "We're just going to figure out how we can get more out of that [Intel's open source contributions] versus everyone else using our investments," he added.

Intel today announced its Panther Lake laptop processors, consolidating the confusing split between Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake chips that define its current generation. The new processors use a unified architecture across all models instead of mixing different technologies at different price points. Panther Lake comes in three configurations. An 8-core model targets mainstream ultrabooks. A 16-core version adds PCI Express lanes for gaming laptops and workstations with discrete GPUs. A third 16-core variant with 12 Xe3 graphics cores aims at high-end thin-and-light laptops without dedicated graphics cards.

All three chips use the same Cougar Cove P-cores, Darkmont E-cores, and Xe3 GPU architecture. They share an NPU capable of 50 trillion operations per second and identical media encoding capabilities. The main differences are core counts and I/O options rather than fundamental architectural variations. The approach contrasts with Intel's current Core Ultra 200 series. Lunar Lake chips integrated RAM on-package and used the latest Battlemage GPU architecture but were mostly used in high-end thin laptops.

Arrow Lake processors offered more flexibility but paired newer CPU cores with older graphics and an NPU that did not meet Microsoft Copilot+ requirements. Intel claims Panther Lake delivers up to 10% better single-threaded performance than Lunar Lake and up to 50% faster multi-threaded performance than both previous generations. The GPU is roughly 50% quicker. Power consumption drops 10% compared to Lunar Lake and 40% versus Arrow Lake. The chips use Intel's 18A manufacturing process for the compute tile. TSMC fabricates the platform controller tile. Intel said systems with Panther Lake processors should ship by the end of 2025.

"Your AMD chips may have Intel Inside soon," writes longtime Slashdot reader DesScorp. "Discussions are underway between the two companies to move an undisclosed amount of AMD's chip business to Intel foundries. (AMD currently does their production through TSMC.) The talks come hot on the heels of a flurry of other Intel investments." Tom's Hardware reports: In the past several weeks, Intel has seen a flurry of activity and investments. The United States announced a 9.9% ownership stake in Intel, while Softbank bought $2 billion worth of shares. Alongside Nvidia, Intel announced new x86 chips using Nvidia graphics technology, with the graphics giant also purchasing $5 billion in Intel shares. There have also been reports that Intel and Apple have been exploring ways to work together. The article notes that there is a trade/political dimension to an AMD-Intel deal as well: It makes sense for Intel's former rivals -- especially American companies -- to consider coming to the table. The White House is pushing for 50% of chips bound for America to be built domestically, and tariffs on chips aren't off the table. Additionally, doing business with Intel could make the US government, Intel's largest shareholder, happy, which can be good for business. AMD faced export restrictions on its GPUs earlier this year as the US attempted to throttle China's AI business.

Researchers have unveiled two new hardware-based attacks, Battering RAM and Wiretap, that break Intel SGX and AMD SEV-SNP trusted enclaves by exploiting deterministic encryption and physical interposers. Ars Technica reports: In the age of cloud computing, protections baked into chips from Intel, AMD, and others are essential for ensuring confidential data and sensitive operations can't be viewed or manipulated by attackers who manage to compromise servers running inside a data center. In many cases, these protections -- which work by storing certain data and processes inside encrypted enclaves known as TEEs (Trusted Execution Enclaves) -- are essential for safeguarding secrets stored in the cloud by the likes of Signal Messenger and WhatsApp. All major cloud providers recommend that customers use it. Intel calls its protection SGX, and AMD has named it SEV-SNP.

Over the years, researchers have repeatedly broken the security and privacy promises that Intel and AMD have made about their respective protections. On Tuesday, researchers independently published two papers laying out separate attacks that further demonstrate the limitations of SGX and SEV-SNP. One attack, dubbed Battering RAM, defeats both protections and allows attackers to not only view encrypted data but also to actively manipulate it to introduce software backdoors or to corrupt data. A separate attack known as Wiretap is able to passively decrypt sensitive data protected by SGX and remain invisible at all times.

Intel has approached Apple about a possible investment and closer collaboration, following recent multibillion-dollar deals with Nvidia, the U.S. government, and SoftBank to stabilize the struggling chipmaker. Reuters reports: The iPhone maker and Intel have also discussed how to work more closely together, the report said, adding that the talks are at an early stage and may not lead to an agreement. Shares of Intel closed 6% higher after the news. [...] Striking lucrative partnerships and persuading outside clients to use Intel's factories remain key to its future. Intel has also reached out to other companies about possible investments and partnerships, according to the Bloomberg News report. The reported investment from Apple would come as another vote of confidence for Intel - Apple had been a longtime customer of Intel before it transitioned to using its own custom-designed silicon chips in 2020.

For Apple, which relies heavily on Intel's rival TSMC to manufacture its chips, the new partnership would allow it to diversify its chipmaking supplier base - a move that would be valuable if geopolitical risks in Taiwan worsen due to China's role in the region. It would also help Apple improve its relationship with U.S. President Donald Trump, by showing that it is investing in the United States - while much of Apple's supply chain remains international, the company has committed about $600 billion to domestic initiatives over the next four years.

If you're wondering what effect Intel's blockbuster deal with Nvidia will have on its existing product roadmaps, Intel has one message for you: it won't. PCWorld: "We're not discussing specific roadmaps at this time, but the collaboration is complementary to Intel's roadmap and Intel will continue to have GPU product offerings," an Intel spokesman told my colleague, Brad Chacos, earlier today. I heard similar messaging from other Intel representatives.

Nvidia's $5 billion investment in Intel, as well as Nvidia's plans to supply RTX graphics chiplets to Intel for use in Intel's CPUs, have two major potential effects: first, it could rewrite Intel's mobile roadmap for laptop chips, because of the additional capabilities provided by those RTX chiplets. Second, the move threatens Intel's ongoing development of its Arc graphics cores, including standalone discrete GPUs as well as integrated chips. We're still not convinced that Arc's future will be left unscathed, in part because Intel's claim that it will "continue" to have GPU product offerings sounds a bit wishy-washy. But Intel sounds much more definitive on the former point, in that the mobile roadmap that you're familiar with will remain in place.

Nvidia has agreed to invest $5 billion in its struggling rival Intel [non-paywalled source] as part of a deal to develop new chips for PCs and data centres, the latest reordering of the tech industry spurred by AI. From a report: The deal comes a month after the US government agreed to take a 10 per cent stake in Intel, as Donald Trump's administration looks to secure the future of American chip manufacturing.

However, the pair's announcement makes no reference to Nvidia using Intel's foundry to produce its chips. Intel, which has struggled to gain a foothold in the booming AI server market, lost its crown as the world's most valuable chipmaker to Nvidia in 2020. On Thursday Jensen Huang, Nvidia's chief executive, hailed a "historic collaboration" and "a fusion of two world-class platforms," combining its graphics processing units, which dominate the market for AI infrastructure, with Intel's general-purpose chips. Further reading: Intel Weighed $20 Billion Nvidia Takeover in 2005.

Intel's long-time Xeon chief architect Ronak Singhal is leaving the company after nearly 30 years, marking yet another high-profile departure amid Intel's leadership churn and intensifying competition from AMD and Arm-based cloud CPUs. The Register reports: The Carnegie Mellon alum holds degrees in electrical and computer engineering, along with at least 30 patents involving CPUs. Singhal joined Intel in 1997 after spending the previous summer as an intern at Cyrix. After a year in Intel's Rotation Engineers Program, he spent the remainder of his tenure helping to develop some of the chipmaker's most consequential and, at times, controversial processors. Most notably, Singhal oversaw the core development of Intel's 22nm Haswell and 14nm Broadwell processor architectures. His innovations aren't limited to the datacenter either, with his architectural contributions playing a significant role in the success of Intel's Core and Atom processor families as well. [...]

Singhal is only the latest Xeon lead to jump ship since the start of the year. In January, Sailesh Kottapalli, another senior fellow, left for Qualcomm barely a month after former CEO Pat Gelsinger's unceremonious "retirement." Even before Gelsinger's eviction, Intel's datacenter group has been something of a revolving door. Last summer Singhal's long-time colleague Lisa Spelman departed the company, eventually landing a spot as CEO of HPC interconnect vendor Cornelis Networks. Her replacement, Ryan Tabrah, lasted seven months in the role, about half as long as Intel datacenter boss Justin Hotard, who defected for the forests of Finland to lead Nokia as its new President and CEO back in April.

In fact, the churn now extends all the way to the top. On Monday, Intel announced its CEO of Products, Michelle Johnston Holthaus, would be leaving the business. The move is part of a broader executive shakeup that will see former Arm engineer Kevork Kechichian take over as head of Intel's datacenter engineering group. Jim Johnson, meanwhile, will take over as head of the chipmaker's client computing group while Srinivasan (Srini) Iyengar will head up a new central engineering division.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: Intel has removed its chief executive officer of products, Michelle Johnston Holthaus, as part of a major shake-up of the executive branch of the embattled chip firm, according to Reuters. This is part of new CEO Lip-Bu Tan's plan to reshape the company under his leadership, flattening the leadership structure so he makes more of the important decisions about day-to-day operation. [...] Holthaus is the latest high-profile figure at Intel to get the axe, ending a 30-year career at Intel, but a mere 10 months in her CEO of products role, and a temporary position as co-CEO after the previous CEO, Pat Gelsinger, suddenly left in 2024. "Throughout her incredible career, Michelle has transformed major businesses, built high-performing teams and worked to delight our customers," Tan said in a statement. "She has made a lasting impact on our company and inspired so many of us with her leadership. We are grateful for all Michelle has given Intel and wish her the best."

Intel has said Holthaus will remain with the company in an advisory role, but her position will not be filled by anyone else. What Intel is doing, though, is bringing in executives from elsewhere, including one who worked at Tan's previous endeavour, Cadence. Srinivasan Iyengar joined the company in June and will take on the role of head of a new central engineering division. This group will focus on developing a new custom silicon business for external customers. Although Intel's fabrication business has been one of its worst-performing in recent years, and there are still talks of it selling large portions of it, it's found a new lease of life following U.S. government investment and Bu Tan's leadership. With Iyengar's new role, though, it's possible we'll see Intel designing chips for customers, rather than merely producing them. That could see it compete against the likes of Broadcom and Marvell. With Tan pushing for a faster, leaner business overall, Iyengar will report directly to him in his new role. Intel also announced that it had acquired the services of former executive vice president of solutions engineering at Arm, Kevork Kechichian. He'll begin heading Intel's datacenter group, and brings years of experience at ARM, NXP Semiconductor, and Qualcomm.

An Associated Press investigation based on tens of thousands of leaked documents revealed Tuesday that American technology companies designed and built core components of China's surveillance apparatus over the past 25 years, selling billions of dollars in equipment to Chinese police and government agencies despite warnings about human rights abuses.

IBM partnered with Chinese defense contractor Huadi in 2009 to develop predictive policing systems for the "Golden Shield" project, AP reports, citing classified government blueprints. The technology enabled mass detentions in Xinjiang, where administrators assigned 100-point risk scores to Uyghurs with deductions for growing beards or being aged 15-55. Dell promoted a laptop with "all-race recognition" capabilities on its WeChat account in 2019. Thermo Fisher Scientific marketed DNA kits as "designed" for ethnic minorities including Uyghurs and Tibetans until August 2024.

Oracle, Microsoft, HP, Cisco, Intel, NVIDIA, and VMware sold geographic mapping software, facial recognition systems, and cloud infrastructure to Chinese police through the 2010s. The surveillance network tracks "key persons" whose movements are restricted and monitored, with one estimate suggesting 55,000 to 110,000 people were placed under residential surveillance in the past decade. China now has more surveillance cameras than the rest of the world combined.

Intel shelled out $16.5 billion on R&D in 2024, outspending Nvidia by 28% and AMD by 156%, with much of the cash going into chip design, fabrication tech, and the upcoming Nova Lake architecture. "When you compare the R&D expenditures to the amount of revenue, though, the story takes on a very different look," notes PC Gamer. "Intel spent 31% of its net revenue, and 26% for AMD, but Nvidia and Samsung got by on just 10% and 4%, respectively." From the report: An analysis of research and development expenditure by TechInsights was reported by Korea JoongAng Daily, but you can get the numbers yourself by pulling up each company's 2024 financial results. For example, AMD declared that it spent $6.456 billion last year (pdf, page 1) on R&D, whereas Nvidia forked out $12.914 billion. It's worth noting that Nvidia's financial statements are numbered one year ahead of the actual period (FY 2026 is 2025 and so on).

Anyway, those figures pale in comparison to how much cash Intel burned through in 2024 to research and develop chip, fabrication technologies, software, and all kinds of tech stuffâ"a staggering $16.546 billion (pdf, page 25). That's 28% more than Nvidia and a frankly unbelievable 156% more than AMD. The nearest non-US semiconductor firm is Samsung Electronics, which spent a reported $9.5 billion on R&D. That would place third, comfortably ahead of AMD, and it strongly suggests that if you have your own foundries for making chips, you need to spend a lot of cash on finding ways to make better processors.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The total number of GPUs sold for the second quarter of 2025 hit 11.6 million units, while desktop PC CPUs went up to 21.7 million units, according to a Jon Peddie Research report. This is a 27% increase in graphics card shipments and a 21.6% jump in CPU shipments from the last quarter, which is a change from the usual drop in deliveries we've seen in recent years.

"AIB prices dropped for midrange and entry-level, while high-end AIB prices increased, and most retail suppliers ran out of stock. This is very unusual for the second quarter," said Jon Peddie Research president Dr. Jon Peddie. "We think it is a continuation of higher prices expected due to the tariffs and buyers trying to get ahead of that."

As for the three major GPU manufacturers, Nvidia still has the lead, taking in 94% of the market -- an increase of 2.1% over the previous quarter -- while AMD is at a distant second place with 6%. This is still a much better position than Intel, though, whose market share is so small it did not even register on the chart.