PCIe 7.0 is earmarked for data-heavy applications rather than consumer computing hardware.The PCIe 7.0 specification has now been released, while many of us are still waiting for PCIe 6.0 to materialize in consumer products. The PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) announced on Wednesday that PCIe 7.0 is now available to members of its organization, delivering a theoretical maximum bandwidth speed of 512GB per second in both directions, across a x16 connection.“PCIe technology has served as the high-bandwidth, low-latency IO interconnect of choice for over two decades and we are pleased to announce the release of the PCIe 7.0 specification, which continues our long-standing tradition of doubling the IO bandwidth every three years,” PCI-SIG President Al Yanes said in the announcement. “As artificial intelligence applications continue to scale rapidly, the next generation of PCIe technology meets the bandwidth demands of data-intensive markets deploying AI, including hyperscale data centers, high performance computing (HPC), automotive, and military/aerospace.”You may have noticed that consumer computing devices weren’t included in that statement — the specification is targeting data-driven applications like cloud and quantum computing datacenters for now, and will take some time to even appear in those markets. PCI-SIG says that PCIe 7.0 will be backward compatible with previous PCI Express versions, but there’s no mention of plans to bring it to everyday desktop SSDs or GPUs any time soon. That shouldn’t be surprising, given the PCIe 5.0 spec that launched in 2019 only started trickling into consumer hardware two years ago, and is still fairly uncommon.Meanwhile, PCI-SIG says that pathfinding for PCIe 8.0 is “already in progress.” With any luck, PCIe 6.0 will have made its consumer debut by the time the next-gen specifications have been finalized in 2028.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.Meta is paying $14.3 billion to acquire 49 percent of Scale AI and hire its CEO, Alexandr Wang, to revamp its troubled AI efforts. As part of the deal, Wang will report directly to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and remain on Scale's board of directors, both companies announced on Thursday. Sources say Wang will lead a new AI lab at Meta tasked with building "superintelligence." Meta spokesperson Ashley Zandy says the company "will share more about this effort and the great people joining this team in the coming weeks."Zuckerberg has been actively recruiting a new team of researchers from rival firms to join Wang's team, according to people familiar with the matter and other press reports. The Meta founder has reached out to potential recruits directly - usually via a cold email or WhatsApp message - and lured some of them away from companies like Google with seven- and eight-figure compensation packages. Scale works with Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and others to help train their models by having humans annotate and label the data that feeds them. Most of that work is done through low-cost labor outside of the US, and it has become a critical component of AI development. With Wang …Read the full story at The Verge.

I have used air coolers for the majority of my PC building journey, only switching to liquid cooling as recently as 2022. Well, it turns out AIO liquid coolers aren't universally better than air coolers, not even in the performance department. Sure, if you compare the best liquid coolers on the market against the best air coolers, liquid cooling will win, but the average user doesn't need the best and most high-end coolers.

The Nintendo Switch 2 is finally out now for everyone to pick up in stores. Despite a minor scare about availability at first, many people are finally experiencing the Switch 2 for the first time. Along with their new console, people have been playing games with online functionality through the Nintendo Switch online service. Those with an active membership with Switch Online can enjoy what's new in the service with Nintendo's newest console release. Whether you're driving through the long roads of Mario Kart World or diving into any of the other third-party titles available at the launch of Switch 2, chances are you're going to hop online at some point.

Windows 10 is reaching end-of-life (EoL) in a few months, and Microsoft is gearing up to migrate its customers to Windows 11 in one final push ahead of the October 14, 2025 deadline. While many Windows users will likely gravitate towards the latest version of the operating system, or stick around with their unsupported OS, there is also a third option that we have highlighted in the past. That is, migration to a free Linux distro, such as Linux Mint. Now, the creator of the popular LibreOffice software has suggested doing the same, citing the high costs of switching to Windows 11.

Building out a home lab requires one to take advantage of various features not typically available to (or used by) consumers. This includes hardware RAID, super-fast link-aggregated networking, remote management, virtualisation, and more. If I had to pick one feature that would be my highlight with managing my home lab as I build it out, it's hardware-based remote management. I'm not talking software running on a server and your client, but a hardware-level tool that can run even when the host is offline. A few are available, including Lenovo xClarity, Dell iDRAC, and HP iLO.

So, regardless of which devices are in your smart home, and whether they're inherently smart or controlled by smart plugs and other gadgets, they all need reliable communication protocols to work. Whether they use Zigbee, Z-Wave, Matter, Thread, or plain Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, all of them need ways to announce their existence, and so that other devices can control them or take information from their sensors.

Years ago, no high-end PC was complete without a couple of boot drives configured in RAID 0. Today, things are a bit different. SSDs are available for reasonable prices, in high capacities, and with even higher speeds. But you don't have to throw RAID away. There are still a ton of benefits to using SSDs in a RAID array between redundancy, parity, and with the right RAID controller, even higher speeds. Still, SSDs and HDDs aren't built equally, and there are some common mistakes you should navigate around if you're configuring SSDs into a RAID array.

If you’re running self-hosted services in Docker containers, keeping an eye on their logs is essential. But manually tailing logs or building scripts to monitor them is time-consuming and can easily miss important issues. That’s where LoggiFly comes in. This small but powerful app reads the logs of your Docker containers and sends alerts based on customizable patterns. It fills a much-needed gap for self-hosted sysadmins who want granular control without a full observability stack.

A month ago, I reported on a new feature spotted in Windows 11's beta builds which made data transfer between two PCs a lot easier. At the end of that piece, I mused if Microsoft would also add this tool to Windows 10. After all, if Microsoft really wants people to ditch Windows 10 and move to 11, it'd be very handy to give users a tool to swap with a click of a button.

We’re still over a month away from the premiere of season three, but Paramount has announced that Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is getting a fifth season — and that it will be its last.While Strange New Worlds’ first four seasons are (or will be) all ten episodes long, the fifth will run for just six. Still, executive producers Akiva Goldsman, Henry Alonso Myers, and Alex Kurtzman said in a joint statement that they’ll “complete our five-season mission, just as we envisioned it.”“From the very beginning, Strange New Worlds set out to honor what Star Trek has always stood for — boundless curiosity, hope and the belief that a better future is possible,” the statement reads. “And to the passionate fans who’ve boldly joined us on this journey — thank you. With three more spectacular seasons ahead for you to see and enjoy, this adventure is far from over.”The prequel, which follows the USS Enterprise under Captain Pike (portrayed by Anson Mount), complete with younger versions of a few members of the original crew, was renewed for a fourth season in April 2024. That’s now in production, with the fifth set to follow later this year, but before either airs the series will return to Paramount Plus with a two-part season three premiere on July 17th. The other Trek series on the way right now are Starfleet Academy and an untitled live action comedy.

Although there are many cloud storage providers nowadays, a lot of consumers tend to gravitate towards OneDrive, either because it's bundled in their Microsoft 365 package or because they prefer Redmond's interconnected technology landscape. While Microsoft is busy adding AI features to its cloud storage solution, sometimes it helps to just get the basics right. This is what the company has targeted with its latest update, which has introduced support for removable drives in macOS.