Summary of the week of December 1, 2025

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Test Bench v4 available

The Hardlimit development team is pleased to announce the new version of the test bench central. You can visit it from here: https://bm.hardlimit.com/

New Chinese x86 CPUs

A Chinese company has presented the Hygon C86-4G, a new x86 processor whose performance is close to that of a Core i7-14700. The development initially started from Zen IP, but its latest model already has a core, according to them, totally independent.

New record in the test bench

A few days ago, someone broke the test bench record with an EPYC 9755. The processor, worth more than 7000€, with 128 Zen 5 cores and SMT, has exceeded five million points, doubling the second on the list. This CPU has a TDP of half a kW and comes with half a gig of L3 cache.

Price increases are being transferred to PCs

For the past few weeks, there has been a widespread increase in hardware prices, mainly focused on memory and disks. Now HP has said that it will start raising the prices of its computers while offering more modest configurations due to this increase in costs.

Performance improvements through software

Since the Core Ultra 9 285K was launched a year ago, it has improved its performance by 8% while consuming 85% of what it initially did. The improvement has been achieved thanks to successive updates to the CPU's microcode.

Faster HBM4 memory

Samsung has announced that next year it will have HBM4 memory that is 40% faster. For its part, Nvidia has shown interest in this memory, to which Samsung has responded that the price per GB has doubled compared to the previous contract.

Linux 6.18 available

Linux 6.18 comes with improvements in TCP encryption, improved performance in swap, improvements in the performance of packets received by UDP and a never-ending list of other changes and improvements.

Micron abandons Crucial

The memory manufacturer Micron has decided to abandon its consumer memory business under the Crucial brand. The company says it wants to focus on data centers given the DRAM shortage.

Android games on Linux

Valve has presented Lepton in its Steam documentation. It is a compatibility layer in the style of Proton, but this time to bring Android games to Linux.

A Voodoo2 on a Ryzen 9 9900X

Someone has managed to make a 12MB PCI Voodoo 2 run on a Ryzen 9 9900X with Windows 11. From a hardware point of view, it is not a great achievement because PCIe maintains compatibility with the old 32-bit PCI. The novelty is that they have made some drivers work on Windows 11 with which to run Quake II.

On the hardware crisis

The AI fever has caused an unprecedented hardware supply crisis. In this entry, it reviews the state of things and how the panorama could continue to evolve in the coming months. Meanwhile, some silicon manufacturers have already planned important increases in the manufacturing pace for next year. Others, however, seem to think that the current demand is temporary.

Running Windows programs on Linux with WinBoat

WinBoat is an open-source program that allows you to run Windows programs on Linux. It is not a compatibility layer like Wine but an interface that runs Windows 11 in QEMU and shows the windows using RDP as if they were native system windows.