Reinventing the zipper

Orange Pi 6 CIX CD8180 12-core Arm SBC gets 2.5GbE networking, smaller form factor, drops battery support

Orange Pi 6 is a new compact SBC (90x90mm) powered by the CIX P1 (CD8180) 12-core Arm Cortex-A720/A520 SoC with up to 32GB LPDDR5 RAM. Compared to the larger Orange Pi 6 Plus, it features 2.5GbE instead of 5GbE networking, drops LiPo battery support, and comes in a smaller form factor. Key specs include dual M.2 PCIe Gen4 x4 slots, multiple display outputs, a 28.85 TOPS NPU, and support for Debian, Ubuntu, Android, Windows 11, and OpenHarmony. Pricing starts at $239 for the 8GB model, reflecting the high cost of LPDDR5 RAM, making it significantly pricier than typical Orange Pi boards.

Micron says chip shortage will "improve gradually" in 2028

Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra has stated that the AI-driven global RAM and NAND shortage will persist through 2027 and only begin to improve gradually in 2028, with no clear timeline for supply catching up to demand. The shortage stems from major chip makers — Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix — pivoting to serve hyperscaler data center demand, leaving consumer markets undersupplied. Micron posted record Q3 2026 revenue of $41.46 billion, a 346% year-on-year increase. The supply crunch is driving up prices for DDR5 RAM and SSDs, with downstream effects including higher console prices and the Steam Machine launching at $1,049.

Tombot raises $7m to bring its robotic dog Jennie to market

Tombot has closed a $7 million Series A3 round to scale manufacturing of Jennie, its autonomous robotic Labrador puppy designed as a companion for people with dementia, cognitive impairment, anxiety, loneliness, autism, and PTSD. Investors include healthcare and aging-services backers such as Caduceus Capital Partners and the Lutheran Foundation for Long Term Living. The company reports over 23,000 pre-orders and waitlist sign-ups ahead of a planned Fall 2026 commercial launch — its first shipments to paying customers. Jennie mimics the behavior of an 8-to-10-week-old puppy and is pitched as delivering companionship benefits without the care burden of a live animal.

The CPU's growing role in agentic AI infrastructure

Arm-sponsored content arguing that CPUs play a critical but underappreciated role in agentic AI infrastructure. While accelerators handle model performance, CPUs act as the control plane — managing data movement, workload scheduling, and secure isolation. Arm's Neoverse platform underpins custom silicon from AWS (Graviton), Google (Axion), Microsoft (Azure Cobalt), and NVIDIA (Grace Hopper/Blackwell), all reflecting a shift toward purpose-built Arm-based processors in cloud and AI datacenters. The piece introduces the Arm AGI CPU, built with Meta, targeting rack-level density for agentic AI deployments.

Linux 7.2 Staging Still Working To Tame The Realtek RTL8723BS "Beast Of A Driver"

The Realtek RTL8723BS WiFi driver, added to the Linux kernel staging area back in 2017 with Linux 4.12, is still undergoing cleanup work nearly a decade later. For Linux 7.2, the staging pull request is dominated by 154 patches targeting this driver, described by Greg Kroah-Hartman as a 'beast of a driver.' The patches focus on removing function wrappers, cleaning up code, renaming functions, and eliminating unnecessary abstractions to bring the driver in line with upstream Linux WiFi driver standards. The RTL8723BS supports 802.11 b/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0, and the goal remains graduating it from the staging area into the formal networking subsystem.

General Intuition’s $2.3B bet that video games can train AI agents for the real world

General Intuition has raised $320 million at a $2.3 billion valuation to scale AI agents trained on hundreds of millions of hours of video game footage. The key differentiator is action-labeled gameplay data — records of button presses and timing — rather than video alone, which the company argues enables richer causal understanding. The same model powering a Fortnite-playing agent also drives a quadrupedal robot that required only 8 minutes of real-world fine-tuning. The round was led by Khosla Ventures with participation from Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, and Google DeepMind researchers. General Intuition plans to sell its agentic model as a foundation for gaming, simulation, and robotics use cases via an API, while also launching Nerve, a jobs marketplace letting gamers earn income through data labeling and robot teleoperation.

Ubuntu brings Livepatch to arm64 for rebootless kernel updates

Ubuntu vừa mở rộng tính năng Livepatch hỗ trợ kiến trúc arm64 lần đầu tiên trên Ubuntu 26.04 LTS và Ubuntu Core 26, cho phép cập nhật kernel bảo mật không cần khởi động lại. Tính năng này yêu cầu đăng ký Ubuntu Pro (miễn phí cho cá nhân trên 5 máy) và chỉ áp dụng cho kernel (không bao gồm linux-raspi, nên Raspberry Pi không hỗ trợ).

Là lập trình viên phát triển ứng dụng trên các hệ thống ARM64 như cloud công nghệ lớn (AWS, Azure, GCP), bạn nên đọc bài này để hiểu cách tối ưu hóa bảo mật hệ thống mà không cần tạm dừng hoạt động, giúp tăng hiệu suất và giảm thời gian downtime trong sản phẩm của mình.