hardware

Jane Street announces a new puzzle challenging participants to reverse engineer an ASIC from its GDS layout, recover a netlist, infer the circuit's purpose, and find the final answer.

ProvenMetal, a YC S26 startup, launches a US-based PCB manufacturing service that delivers circuit boards in seven business days as standard, with no expedite fees, targeting drone and defense teams.

Altar II is an ultra-thin fully mechanical keyboard with a 4.75mm profile, featuring a detachable M-Dial and Harmonic Synthesiser haptics, now available for reservation at a discounted price.

Discussion about DeepSeek's price increases and free tier downgrades pushing users toward local hardware, potentially benefiting NVIDIA hardware sales.

Wired's roundup of the best AI notetakers in 2026, reviewing devices like Plaud NotePin S, HiDock P1, and SpeakON, with notes on pricing, battery, and transcription quality.

Standard Machines launches reinforcement-learning environments for chip design, aiming to accelerate tape-out and push frontier AI capabilities.

Tesla tweets about the relationship between AI software ('brain') and hardware/robotics ('body'), hinting at ongoing developments.

A blog post discussing corporate monitor standards, portable monitors as cheap supplements, and the productivity benefits of larger or additional displays.

Anthropic is building a team to design its own custom AI chips, aiming to co-design hardware and models for greater efficiency as demand for Claude rises. The move follows OpenAI, Google, and Meta in pursuing in-house silicon.

This paper presents NANQ, a noise-floor-aware mixed-precision non-uniform quantization framework for analog compute-in-memory (CIM) systems, which adapts quantization precision to hardware noise characteristics and improves model accuracy under low-bit constraints.

Elon Musk announced that SpaceX will use Nvidia GPUs exclusively, citing they are the best.

Oxide Computer Co has raised $445M according to an SEC Form D filing, a significant funding round for the cloud-computing hardware company.

Lamb Labs (YC S26) announces custom AI inference chips claiming 20,000+ tok/s and 63x higher Intelligence per Watt than traditional GPUs, arguing GPUs were adopted for availability rather than suitability.

Google's Pixel 11 will feature a back-facing notification light called HiLight, which also ties into Gemini interactions, similar to features on upcoming Googlebook laptops and the Google Home Speaker.

The Asus Chromebook Plus CX34 is discounted at multiple retailers, with configurations ranging from $349.99 to $399.99. The article highlights its solid performance, 1080p display, and included Google AI perks like Gemini and a free year of Google AI Pro.

A tweet highlights Vocci, an AI wearable ring that records real-world conversations and lets users later process them via Claude or ChatGPT, and trigger actions across connected apps.

A practical guide to selecting MikroTik switches (CRS504, CRS804, CRS812) for building DGX Spark clusters, including pricing and real user examples of 8x DGX Spark setups.

A tweet notes that a fully loaded MacBook M5 Max (128GB RAM, 4TB storage) can be lease-to-owned for $185/month, with a fair end-of-lease purchase option.

Ahmad Osman shares a tweet from Killy thanking him for inspiring a 4x RTX PRO 6000 AI rig build, while admitting he is jealous of the beautiful result.

Chip designer argues AI won't replace chip designers soon, highlighting complex challenges in AI silicon design, and teases a masterclass post covering DAC conference insights and RTL coding.