computers

29 Jun 2026

Slashdot

IBM Says It Can Fit Nearly 100 Billion Transistors On a Chip

IBM has unveiled "what it says is the world's first sub-1-nanometer chip technology," reports ZDNet, "designed to pack nearly 100 billion transistors on a fingernail-size die, roughly doubling the density of IBM's earlier 2-nm test chip, first shown in 2021... Today, the smallest, most powerful chips top out at about 80 billion transistors." At the heart of the announcement is NanoStack. This is a three-dimensional, nanosheet-based transistor design that scales vertically, or along the z-axis, by stacking and staggering CMOS devices. Unlike today's nanosheet architectures, which IBM also pioneered and which are being adopted by leading foundries at 3 nm and 2 nm, NanoStack bonds two nanosheet transistors into a single vertical structure, with each tier optimized independently and contacted from opposite sides. Each transistor in the demonstrated structure uses three sub-5 nm-thick nanosheets, about "15 silicon atoms" across, separated by roughly 9 nm spacers. Two such devices are then bonded vertically using an ultra-thin dielectric process IBM describes as a key innovation. Because the top and bottom devices can use different channel materials, dielectrics, and metals, IBM argues NanoStack is less a single trick and more a transistor platform that can be extended through multiple generations: 7 angstrom (Å), 5 Å, 3 Å, and potentially down to 1 Å in its internal roadmap. An angstrom, by the by, is one ten-billionth of a meter. In terms of chips, an angstrom is a tenth of a nanometer. "This is the world's first sub-1 nanometer chip technology with a new transistor architecture," said Jay Gambetta, Director of IBM Research and IBM Fellow, during a press briefing. "We're not just making smaller transistors, we're reinventing how chips are built to deliver dramatically more power and energy efficiency...." Based on internal benchmarking against its 2 nm node, the company said its new chips will deliver up to 50% higher performance at the same power, or up to 70% lower power for the same performance. Big Blue also highlighted a 40% improvement in the scaling of static random-access memory (SRAM) cell area relative to its 2 nm technology. This is a change IBM described as a "step the industry hasn't seen in over a decade" and one that could be particularly important for AI accelerators that live or die on on-chip memory bandwidth... According to Huiming Bu, IBM's VP of silicon technology R&D, NanoStack is a new paradigm. It's moving chips to scaling fully into three dimensions and giving the industry at least "another decade" of logic advances as it crosses from nanometers into angstroms... The 40% SRAM density bump could also help architects push caches and on-die memory closer to compute units, cutting data movement overhead in training and inference workloads. IBM sees a path to production use "in as early as the next 5 years", according to the article, and "expects NanoStack to eventually underpin CPUs, GPUs, mobile SoCs, and SRAM arrays." IBM's VP of silicon technology R&D says the new innovation "can improve performance by 50% compared to the best available chip today, and at the same time can reduce power by 70%."

Scientists Think Neptune and Uranus May Not Be the Ice Giants We Imagined

The planets Neptune and Uranus may be better described as "magma-ocean giants" rather than "ice giants," according to a team of researchers from the University of California. Gizmodo reports: While the Voyager flyby confirmed the planets' classification as ice giants... [a]s the least explored planets in the solar system, the two planets have never been thoroughly investigated. Therefore, scientists aren't sure where the planets originally formed in the early solar system or the reason for their wildly chaotic magnetic fields. A long-standing hypothesis suggests that both worlds have a hydrogen/helium atmosphere that covers a vast mantle of ices, made primarily of water, ammonia, and methane, with a rocky core. The new study, however, notes that the three-layer model of an ice giant's interior structure is not the only way to explain the properties of the two planets. The researchers also point out that objects found in the Kuiper Belt, which are thought to preserve evidence of the material in the outer Solar System where Uranus and Neptune formed, are primarily composed of rock rather than ice. For the recent study, the researchers simulated different models for the interior processes and composition of Uranus and Neptune. The model that best fits Uranus's and Neptune's different properties suggests the two planets have a well-mixed magma ocean with dissolved hydrogen at the bottom and a hydrogen-dominated envelope at the top. The model suggests that at high pressures, hydrogen gas can dissolve into magma, forming a well-mixed fluid. This mixing might help explain Uranus's and Neptune's density, which has traditionally been interpreted as evidence for an ice-rich interior. The article notes that the theory "could also help scientists understand the interior structure of sub-Neptune planets in the Milky Way, which have thus far remained a mystery."

Trump-Shuttered Climate Change Site Now Back Online In Nonprofit Hands

Donald Trump shuttered the web site Climate.gov in 2025, cutting off public access to climate information from America's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). But "former members of the site's team have brought much of it back at a new domain," reports The Register: "Trusted climate information should not disappear when politics change," Climate.us managing director Rebecca Lindsey said of the new platform in a press release. Lindsey, who previously served as the Climate.gov program manager and lead editor, told The Register in an email that she and one of the web developers responsible for the site were the first to be caught up in government purges when DOGE swept through the department in late February 2025... Created in cooperation with sustainability nonprofit accelerator Multiplier, Climate.us aims to be an independent alternative to its old .gov, and many of the former NOAA crew behind the previous website have teamed up for the new initiative to "keep climate information accurate, accessible, scientifically rigorous, and useful for the people who rely on it." Climate.gov, which now redirects to a NOAA page about climate but which hosts none of the data the shuttered site used to contain, was taken offline in July 2025 following a Trump executive order prioritizing "gold standard science...." arguing that prior climate science models relied on worst-case scenarios, which somehow meant the public availability of 15 years of climate data and reporting ought to change... All of the content that was purged from the .gov is now back, along with blogs from experts, climate status reports, maps and data pathways, and national assessments of climate change as well. Lindsey told us that rapidly changing political winds have led her to believe that the government isn't the right place for that mission to continue, and that she would have concerns about returning the site to federal management if a future administration changed its position on climate change... Lindsey said that the Climate.us team will continue with the same mission it had before the Trump administration attempted to quash it: Getting climate science in front of the public in a manner that's understandable so they can make their own decisions about how to respond.

28 Jun 2026

Ars Technica

Why did this journal retract two 1940s papers by Max Planck?

Clicking on the links now reveals blank pages and empty PDFs. "Intellectually, it's not acceptable."

28 Jun 2026 6:49pm GMT

27 Jun 2026

Ars Technica

Apple and Audi alumni have made a luxe EV based on the moon buggy

The Amble One is a street-legal $25,000 electric buggy designed for luxury resorts.

27 Jun 2026 11:07am GMT

OSnews

Microsoft capitulates again, extends Windows 10 support by another year

It's been quiet for a few days since I've been sick, but I'm feeling a bit better since today marks the official end of my one month of using Windows 11 that you people donated for. An article about my experience is definitely upcoming, including whether or not I'll actually stick with Windows 11 on my laptop or go back to Linux, but before we get there, let's talk about Microsoft once again capitulating to the reality that a lot of people really don't want to let go of Windows 10. In a surprising move, Microsoft has quietly confirmed that it's extending Windows 10 support until October 12, 2027, which is one full year beyond the October 2026 cutoff that home users had been planning around. ↫ Abhijith M B at Windows Latest Hundreds of millions of people are still using Windows 10, and with the "AI" techbros buying up all the RAM and other chips for their pachinko machines - making this whole thing a bit of an own goal for prime "AI" booster Microsoft - buying new PCs that are actually compatible with Windows 11 isn't exactly a fun prospect for the vast majority of us normal folk dealing with the cost-of-living crisis. As such, Microsoft really doesn't have any other choice but to keep extending support for Windows 10. It ain't much, but I'll take any morsel of justice I can get. While everyone else has to pay for getting access to these Windows 10 updates, users in the European Union get them entirely for free thanks to the Digital Markets Act. This additional year, too, can be partially attributed to the DMA, as the very same consumer rights organisations who pressured Microsoft into giving EU users truly free access to the Extended Security Updates also put pressure on the company to offer these for more than just one year. Basic consumer protection legislation works.

27 Jun 2026 7:41am GMT

26 Jun 2026

Ars Technica

South Korea plans to train entire military as "drone warriors"

Half-million strong military will train on drones as "universal combat tool."

26 Jun 2026 10:19pm GMT

23 Jun 2026

OSnews

In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words

Every little thing in a graphical user interface that we take for granted today, no matter how small, was thought up by someone, at some point. Case in point: the little red squiggly lines underneath misspelled words. In one form or another, these are everywhere now, and have just become a regular staple of every single text editing field we encounter every single day and don't stop to think about. Still, they were invented by someone, and we happen to know exactly who that was: Tony Krueger. In early versions of Word, the Spell Check feature was something that you explicitly invoked, and then you had to sit and wait while the program looked for all your potentially-misspelled words, and then showed them to you one at a time for a decision on what to do for each one. Word did introduce an Auto Spell Check feature to run spell check when the user was idle, so that when you hit the Spell Check button, the results were ready to go. However, the Auto Spell Check was still a blocking operation. As a result, a lot of users turned it off because it always seemed to decide "Now would be a good time to spell-check the document" just as you wanted to do something, forcing you to wait for the spell check pass to complete before you could, say, save and exit. Tony made the spell checker much more unobtrusive so that it didn't interfere with your foreground work. And when it found a problem, instead of waiting for you to trigger a spell check, it immediately drew red squiggles under potentially-misspelled words (and later green squiggles under potential grammatical errors). ↫ Raymond Chen at The Old New Thing Tony Krueger passed away recently, after, among other things, having worked on an dizzying number of Microsoft Word releases. Imagine coming up with something that seems to basic and elementary to us now, and seeing it spread pretty much everywhere. I wonder what it must feel like to have invented something that seems so simple, most people don't even realise they use it every single day.

23 Jun 2026 8:38pm GMT

KDE is going to fix network shares

I've had my share of issues with network shares on any operating system, but since I mostly use KDE these days I found this deep dive into how, exactly, network shares work in KDE quite interesting. It turns out that while network shares in KDE's Dolphin mostly work, it does involves a few layers that sometimes don't interact well with each other, leading to really curious and annoying problems with mounted shares not appearing, permission issues, and so on. The biggest cause of problems is when using a non-KDE application in KDE that also happens to use a non-KDE save/open dialog. Such a non-KDE save/open dialog won't be able to see any network shared mounted by KDE, and sadly, quite a few applications you're likely to use on a KDE installation use non-KDE open/save dialogs, like Blender, GIMP, LibreOffice, OnlyOffice, Inkscape, Audacity, DaVinci Resolve, and more. That's one hell of a list of applications to offer inconsistent or outright broken access to network shares you've set up and mounted in KDE. Luckily, this issue seems to be getting a ton of attention soon. All is not lost. Happily, KDE just received an investment of over €1.2 million from the Sovereign Tech Fund, and it includes funding for improvements to KDE's network share handling! ↫ Nate Graham The project is in the planning phases at the moment, but they're considering a whole slew of possible changes, fixes, and workarounds to make this stupid and annoying problem just go away. In 2026, nobody should be dealing with manually editing /etc/fstab or getting frustrated over supposedly disappearing network shares.

23 Jun 2026 8:20pm GMT