Daily Tech News 28 December 2025

• So what's the real story behind Nvidia spending $20 billion for a non-exclusive license to Groq's (not that one) inference technology?
  
  Definitely not fraud.* (Ossa-ma)
  
  Or so argue Nvidia and Groq's lawyers as the FTC no doubt prepares for a endoscopic examination of their respective corporate records.
  
  Nvidia buying another AI company would lead to messy stuff like regulatory approval, and Nvidia doesn't have time for that. So they paid $20 billion for a non-exclusive license to the technology... Oh, and that also included Groq's executive and engineering teams and all their patents and trade secrets.
  
  But not the company itself, or any duty to support its customers. GroqCloud has been left to quietly die under control of the former CFO, drained of its engineering talent and indeed its entire reason to exist.
  
  What Groq actually does is interesting: They make chips that use hundreds of megabytes of internal SRAM rather than tens of gigabytes of external DRAM, and have staggering amounts of bandwidth - 80 terabytes per second per chip.
  
  Not suitable for training LLMs but great for running them once they have been trained.
  
  As for the deal: Is this technically illegal? Possibly. Will Nvidia get away with it? Probably.
  
  * Though if not fraud, why fraud shaped?

• In other dirty Nvidia tricks, the company has dropped support for Pascal on Linux. (Hack A Day)
  
  Who uses Pascal on Linux?
  
  Oh, that Pascal. Nvidia's RTX 1000 series from 2016.
  
  Still, more than nine years of support, and with some messing around you can make things work using open source drivers.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile the Linux driver for the Radeon R300 has received fresh updates. (Phoronix)
  
  That card is from 2002.
  
  And if your card is only 12 years old Radeon HD 7000 and RX 200 cards have received updates in Linux kernel 6.19 as well.
  
  They now run 30% faster.
  
  
  
• The MinisForum DEG2 dock is now available. (Liliputing)
  
  It has a lot more features than the DEG1 - it supports ThunderBolt 5 as well as OCuLink, and provides an M.2 slot, 2.5Gb Ethernet, a second ThunderBolt port for other peripherals, and two USB 3.2 ports.
  
  Priced at $240. If you have OCuLink and don't need that extra stuff, the DEG1 is still available at $99.
  
  
  
• Mirari is a modern - ish - Amiga motherboard. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It uses a PowerPC CPU (which the Amiga never did but might have done if Commodore hadn't gone extremely bankrupt) and a standard micro-ATX motherboard. It provides three PCIe slots, two M.2 slots, four USB ports, and a single DDR3L memory slot.
  
  Which accepts 8GB modules which is more than any Amiga dreamed of.
  
  And... No video of any kind. Which is a little odd for an Amiga project. But you can put something in those PCIe slots to solve that problem.
  
  
  
• ChatGPT could soon start pushing ads in the middle of it's supposedly personalised responses. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I say "could" here as does the article but given that OpenAI is projected to be losing $74 billion per year by 2028 even if it meets revenue forecasts I'd upgrade that probability to 100%.
  
  Maybe higher.
  
  
  
• Graphics cards are next. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Expect price hikes and rationing.
  
  
  
• Acemagic has succeeded in creating a Ryzen AI Max 395 system that I do not want. (Liliputing)
  
  Yes, it has 128GB of RAM and is priced at a relatively reasonable $2399.
  
  It's also gouge-your-eyes-out ugly.
  
  
  
• The internet now causes cancer in New York. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Or something. Sorry - no offence to Tech Crunch here, they're just reporting the news - but the story was so dumb it gave me both retrograde and anterograde amnesia. And also the other kind, the kind they don't talk about, that erases your memories in parallel universes where you didn't even read the article.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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