GPU prices are coming to earth just as RAM costs shoot into the stratosphere

GPU prices are coming to earth just as RAM costs shoot into the stratosphere

fivenewscrypto    novembre 27, 2025   

It’s not a bad time to upgrade your gaming PC. Graphics card prices in the 2020s have undulated continuously as the industry has dealt with pandemic and AI-related shortages, but it’s actually possible to get respectable mainstream- to high-end GPUs like AMD’s Radeon RX 9060 XT and 9070 series or Nvidia’s RTX 5060, 5070, and 5080 series for at or slightly under their suggested retail prices right now. This was close to impossible through the spring and summer.

But it’s not a good time to build a new PC or swap your older motherboard out for a new one that needs DDR5 RAM. And the culprit is a shortage of RAM and flash memory chips that has suddenly sent SSD and (especially) memory prices into the stratosphere, caused primarily by the ongoing AI boom and exacerbated by panic-fueled buying by end users and device manufacturers.

To illustrate just how high things have jumped in a short amount of time, let’s compare some of the RAM and storage prices listed in our system guide from three months ago to the pricing for the exact same components today. Note that several of these are based on the last available price and are currently sold out; we also haven’t looked into things like microSD or microSD Express cards, which could also be affected.

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China launches an emergency lifeboat to bring three astronauts back to Earth

China launches an emergency lifeboat to bring three astronauts back to Earth

fivenewscrypto    novembre 27, 2025   

An unpiloted Chinese spacecraft launched late Monday and linked up with the country’s Tiangong space station a few hours later, providing a lifeboat for three astronauts stuck in orbit without a safe ride home.

A Long March 2F rocket fired its engines and lifted off with the Shenzhou 22 spacecraft, carrying cargo instead of a crew, at 11:11 pm EST Monday (04:11 UTC Tuesday). The spacecraft docked with the Tiangong station nearly 250 miles (400 kilometers) above the Earth about three-and-a-half hours later.

Chinese engineers worked fast to move up the launch of the Shenzhou 22, originally set to fly next year. On November 4, astronauts discovered one of the two crew ferry ships docked to the Tiangong station had a damaged window, likely from an impact with a small fragment of space junk. The crew members used a microscope to photograph the defect from different angles, confirming a small triangular area with a crack, Zhou Jianping, chief designer of China’s human spaceflight program, told Chinese state media.

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Landlords’ go-to tool to set rent prices to be gutted under RealPage settlement

Landlords’ go-to tool to set rent prices to be gutted under RealPage settlement

fivenewscrypto    novembre 27, 2025   

RealPage has agreed to settle an antitrust lawsuit raised by the Department of Justice, alleging that landlords used its tools to coordinate efforts to artificially raise rental prices across the US.

In a press release, the DOJ promised the proposed settlement “would help restore free market competition in rental markets for millions of American renters.”

For years since the pandemic started, rental prices outpaced inflation, and the DOJ suspected that RealPage was the dominant force driving a market that never favored renters. Recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data covering a 12-month period ending this September showed rents are still rising by 3.5 percent amid an affordability crisis, leaving some US renters in fear of housing instability.

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Valve’s Steam Machine looks like a console, but don’t expect it to be priced like one

Valve’s Steam Machine looks like a console, but don’t expect it to be priced like one

fivenewscrypto    novembre 27, 2025   

After Valve announced its upcoming Steam Machine living room box earlier this month, some analysts suggested to Ars that Valve could and should aggressively subsidize that hardware with “loss leader” pricing that leads to more revenue from improved Steam software sales. In a new interview with YouTube channel Skill Up, though, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais ruled out that kind of console-style pricing model, saying that the Steam Machine will be “more in line with what you might expect from the current PC market.”

Griffais said the AMD Zen 4 CPU and RDNA3 GPU in the Steam Machine were designed to outperform the bottom 70 percent of machines that opt-in to Valve’s regular hardware survey. And Steam Machine owners should expect to pay roughly what they would for desktop hardware with similar specs, he added.

“If you build a PC from parts and get to basically the same level of performance, that’s the general price window that we aim to be at,” Griffais said.

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Formation of oceans within icy moons could cause the waters to boil

Formation of oceans within icy moons could cause the waters to boil

fivenewscrypto    novembre 27, 2025   

Our exploration of the outer Solar System has revealed a host of icy moons, many with surface features that suggest a complex geology. In some cases, these features—most notably the geysers of Enceladus—hint at the presence of oceans beneath the icy surfaces. These oceans have been ascribed to gravitational interactions that cause flexing and friction within the moon, creating enough heat to melt the body’s interior.

Something that has received a bit less attention is that some of these orbital interactions are temporary or cyclical. The orbits of any body are not always regular and often have long-term cycles. That’s also true for the other moons that provide the gravitational stress. As a result, the internal oceans may actually come and go, as the interiors of the moons melt and refreeze.

A new study, released today by Nature Astronomy, looks at one of the consequences of the difference in density between liquid water and ice (about 10 percent): the potential for the moon’s interior to shrink as it melts, leaving an area of low pressure immediately below its icy shell. If the moon is small enough, this study suggests, that could cause the surface of the ocean to boil.

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Mushroom foragers collect 160 species for food, medicine, art, and science

Mushroom foragers collect 160 species for food, medicine, art, and science

fivenewscrypto    novembre 27, 2025   

Like many mushroom harvesters, I got interested in foraging for fungi during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I had been preparing for a summer of field work studying foraged desert plants in a remote part of Australia when the pandemic hit, and my travel plans were abruptly frozen. It was March, right before morel mushrooms emerge in central Pennsylvania.

I wasn’t doing a lot other than going on long hikes and taking classes remotely at Penn State for my doctoral degree in ecology and anthropology. One of the classes was an agroforestry class with Eric Burkhart. We studied how agriculture and forests benefit people and the environment.

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Anthropic introduces cheaper, more powerful, more efficient Opus 4.5 model

Anthropic introduces cheaper, more powerful, more efficient Opus 4.5 model

fivenewscrypto    novembre 26, 2025   

Anthropic today released Opus 4.5, its flagship frontier model, and it brings improvements in coding performance, as well as some user experience improvements that make it more generally competitive with OpenAI’s latest frontier models.

Perhaps the most prominent change for most users is that in the consumer app experiences (web, mobile, and desktop), Claude will be less prone to abruptly hard-stopping conversations because they have run too long. The improvement to memory within a single conversation applies not just to Opus 4.5, but to any current Claude models in the apps.

Users who experienced abrupt endings (despite having room left in their session and weekly usage budgets) were hitting a hard context window (200,000 tokens). Whereas some large language model implementations simply start trimming earlier messages from the context when a conversation runs past the maximum in the window, Claude simply ended the conversation rather than allow the user to experience an increasingly incoherent conversation where the model would start forgetting things based on how old they are.

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