ISSUE 23.32 • 2026-08-10 SILICON By Matthew S. Smith If you, like me, became familiar with PCs in the late 1980s or 1990s, then you no doubt have the blue Intel Inside logo seared into your brain. You may even occasionally reminisce about people dancing in bunny suits. Even though  the competence of Intel’s marketing […]

AI By Matthew S. Smith This might be hard to believe, but we’re now at least four years into the era of AI large language models — and perhaps up to nine, depending on your definition. OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released in 2022, GPT-3 was released in 2020, and the paper that defined the transformer architecture […]

SILICON By Matthew S. Smith After more than a year of rumors and, if those rumors are believed, some delays, NVIDIA’s new system on a chip for Windows PCs was revealed at Computex 2026. It’s called RTX Spark, and it’s coming to Windows PCs this fall. RTX Spark will launch with a single chip in […]

SILICON By Matthew S. Smith Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 chips are mighty, but Windows on Arm can still be a mighty pain in the neck. In May 2024, I took the train up to Seattle for Microsoft’s Build developer conference. It’s usually a series of nerdy talks from passionate developers that end up overshadowed by hyper-corporate […]