Micron has signed 16 "strategic customer agreements" (SCAs) that include a floor price the company says comes with "a very robust gross margin for Micron, well above our peak quarterly margins in any past cycle." Most of the deals run through 2030 and cover about 40% of Micron's revenue. The Register reports: Micron CEO, president and chairman Sanjay Mehrotra explained the SCAs in prepared remarks delivered during the company's Q3 earnings call. He explained that Micron has signed 16 SCAs, most of them covering 2026 to 2030, and that they involve a commitment to buy a certain quantity of product and pay for it in a pricing band that has a floor and a ceiling price. The floor price covers the historically high gross margins mentioned above, and the ceiling price means those who commit to an SCA are insulated if memory prices go even higher. The CEO said 16 customers have signed SCAs and then explained why it's worth locking into the deals even though they bake in such high margins. "Our customers are recognizing that supply shortages in memory and storage will take considerable time to improve," he said. "Even as we expect industry supply to improve gradually in 2028, we currently do not have line of sight as to when memory supply will be able to catch up with increasing demand." Even massive efforts to build new chip fabs aren't much help, he said, because the increasing complexity of new memory types means it takes longer to build factories -- and when they come online there still won't be enough capacity to build both the high-bandwidth memory needed for AI and other types of NAND and DRAM. "Supply is structurally constrained in its growth and ability to meet industry demand, despite our comprehensive efforts to increase supply," he said. Don't assume that SCAs mean your suppliers get price certainty, because Mehrotra said the deals will account for 40 percent of Micron revenue -- meaning the company is reserving most of its inventory to sell at prices it can negotiate. The CEO did have a little good news in the form of predictions that Micron's DRAM output in 2026 will "grow in the low- to mid-20s percentage range, slightly above our prior outlook." He also revealed that the SCAs see customers pay up front, which helps Micron to fund its fab expansions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI and Broadcom have unveiled Jalapeno, OpenAI's first custom AI chip, designed primarily to handle inference for ChatGPT and other services. It's a major step in OpenAI's plan to "build the full stack behind its models and products," says OpenAI. "By designing more of the stack ourselves, we can serve more intelligence with greater efficiency and keep pushing advanced AI toward broader access." CNBC reports: The chip with Broadcom is an ASIC, which industry experts say is less flexible than Nvidia's GPU, but is also less expensive and can be designed for specific AI tasks. OpenAI said that it designed the chip in nine months, and that it also crafted large parts of the computer system where it will be used. The companies are calling the chip an "Intelligence Processor" and describe it as the first "AI accelerator" in a platform they're building "to make advanced AI faster, more reliable, and more accessible to more people." [...] A physical sample of the new chip will be delivered to OpenAI on Wednesday. The companies said they're aiming for initial deployment of the Jalapeno chips by the end of 2026, "expanding in the years ahead."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ancient Slashdot reader Mark Round writes: Longtime reader here (since mid-1999 -- Hot Grits! Oog the Caveman! Beowulf clusters!), and I can still remember posting back on Slashdot's own 5th anniversary. Time's rolled on: my own blog just turned 25, and it's now roughly 40 years since I first sat down at a computer. So I went digging through archive.org, old backups, and a box of ZIP disks, and wrote up a long look back at four decades of computing through the one website that's been my online home along the way. It runs from my first 8-bit micro and a 1,200-baud modem through discovering the actual Internet at university (and burning far too many hours on Slashdot and sister sites like freshmeat.net), past gloriously pimped-out Enlightenment Linux desktops, all the way to the modern cloud-native world. Plenty of dodgy screenshots, terrible code, and fond memories of long-gone haunts like kuro5hin.org and Linux Coffee Talk along the way.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Monday, NVIDIA shook up the processor market with its introduction of the NVIDIA RTX Spark chip at the opening of the COMPUTEX trade show in Taiwan. The stock market reacted quickly; NVIDIA up seven percent, Intel down two percent. This coming Monday, the newsletter will feature an article by our own Matthew S. Smith […]

HARDWARE By Will Fastie In last year’s Terabyte update, I mentioned chaotic pricing and the difficulty in stating future trends. This year, it’s far worse. To the extent I mentioned cause and effect, I was wrong. Tariffs bounced around and eventually settled down; they had little effect on the storage market. Inflation was a factor […]

In my profession we have to attend continuing education and the topics can range from accounting to technology. Today was tech day, where Roman Kepczyk was discussing tech trends and planning. A couple of his comments made me go, “Hmmm, interesting.”  He indicated that he has seen several firms actually budget for, pay, and install […]

When Amazon announced that it would be sunsetting some Kindle devices, many people started pointing to workarounds. From jailbreaking Kindles to online library access, when someone says, “Sorry we no longer support that device,” I can guarantee you that someone will find a way around that block to make the hardware at least somewhat functional. […]

This year, I’m going to find some time to practice voice dictation for my writing. I’ve been typing for over 60 years and I’m still pretty good at it, but these old fingers aren’t what they used to be. In the past few months, I’ve noticed an increasing number of typing errors and noticed something […]

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 […]

Flipper Devices, the maker of the Flipper Zero pentesting tool, is asking the community to help build Flipper One, an open Linux platform for connected devices. [...]

ISSUE 23.18 • 2026-05-04 HARDWARE By Will Fastie Somewhere in the AskWoody archives, you’ll find an article stating my ultimate goal — to reduce the number of PCs on my desk from four to one. Hah. That didn’t happen. I did manage to cut it down to two, though. Then I bought a Mac mini. […]

HARDWARE By Will Fastie Physically putting the NAS together is easy. Setup takes some time. You’d think somewhere along the line I’d have deployed network-attached storage for someone, client or friend. This is the first time. It’s different from putting together a RAID solution for a business’s server or creating a mirror for my own […]

HARDWARE By Will Fastie With the NAS now up and running with an accessible storage volume, it’s time to make it useful. What’s useful? As stated in the previous articles, I want the contents of my D: drive out of my daily driver, Obsidian. But I still want all that data to be easily accessible. […]

A new Mirai-based malware campaign is actively exploiting CVE-2025-29635, a high-severity command-injection vulnerability affecting D-Link DIR-823X routers, to enlist devices into the botnet. [...]

Seeing a post in the forums from someone asking for guidance in regard to a device that will last at least 10 years reminded me of another sunsetting product — Kindle. I know I’m going to have to reach out to some of my book-reading friends and ask whether they know how long they’ve had […]

I’m into gadgets that do things around the house. Too often with tech and gadgets, their originators end up selling off the technology to another vendor that doesn’t treat it was well as it should. One that I still rely on to this day is Nest Protect smoke alarms. If you have smoke in one […]

A new attack, dubbed GPUBreach, can induce Rowhammer bit-flips on GPU GDDR6 memories to escalate privileges and lead to a full system compromise. [...]

The GIGABYTE Control Center is vulnerable to an arbitrary file-write flaw that could allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to access files on vulnerable hosts. [...]

The Federal Communications Commission has updated its Covered List to include all consumer routers made in foreign countries, banning the sale of new models in the U.S. [...]

HARDWARE By Lance Whitney I’m not a big fan of today’s Windows laptops, so trying to buy the right one was challenging. Here’s why — and which one I finally picked. Finding the right Windows laptop has become an increasingly difficult chore for me. Why, you ask? Well, I focus on two specific features above […]