Daily Tech News 21 June 2026

• AMD and Intel have unveiled their new ACE instruction set, which extends AVX vector instructions into matrix calculations. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  A single ACE instruction can result in up to 1024 multiplications, which is convenient but not exactly adhering to the RISC philosophy.
  
  We'll probably be waiting a couple of years to see this. AMD previously announced a new matrix engine for Zen 7 - which is not expected until 2028.
  
  
  

• UK supermarket Tesco is suing Broadcom over their VMWare villainy. (The Register)
  
  Tesco purchased perpetual licenses to VMWare and signed matching support contracts before the company was bought by Broadcom. Broadcom is now - according to the suit - refusing to provide support services unless customer repurchase the licenses at new, vastly inflated prices.
  
  
  
• Cloudflare has announced temporary accounts for AI agents that can be deployed for an hour without human intervention. (Cloudflare)
  
  There are nine and sixty ways I can think of off the top of my head that this could go horribly wrong. I suspect that Cloudflare can think of even more, and have already put in place countermeasures for half of them.
  
  
  
• A $200 ChatGPT subscription used to the full could be costing OpenAI $14,000. (TechSpot)
  
  And a $200 Claude subscription could cost Anthropic $8000.
  
  Be right back, upgrading some subscriptions...
  
  
  
• A suicide booth for fish? (Tech Crunch)
  
  Marketed as humane but actually designed to preserve the flavour.
  
  Hmm.
  
  
  
• The Atlantic did something useful? (The Verge)
  
  They published a searchable database for music used in training AI song generators.
  
  Most of it copyrighted, much of it by extremely litigious labels.
  
  And here's me all out of popcorn.
  
  
  
• Lenovo's Thinkpad X11 is an 11" tablet. (Notebook Check)
  
  Not the fastest and certainly not the lightest, but it has something few tablets can match: A removable battery.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:30 AM

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