Daily Tech News 24 May 2026

Top Story

• Samsung made a last-minute deal to give massive bonuses - not as massive as SK Hynix, but still enough to pay off my entire mortgage - so everything is peachy and things can go back to normal, right? Right? (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Yeah, right. Now every Samsung employee everywhere except the memory division is upset and seeking increased bonuses.
  
  Notably including the division that tests and packages the bare memory dies, an essential step before they can be sold to customers.
  
  
  

Tech News

• What's the best $100 CPU right now? (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This probably matters mostly to people who already have RAM and want to revive an old system because they can't afford to build a new one. The article compared Intel's 12100F ($80) and 14100F ($100)with AMD's Ryzen 5 5500 across a range of games and productivity tasks.
  
  And the answer is, well, it depends. The 14100F is faster but runs hotter than the others. The 5500 is a six-core chip while the two Intel models are four cores (and no efficiency cores) so it pulls ahead on multi-threaded productivity.
  
  All the chips run on dead platforms with no future upgrade path... Except that these are the slowest, cheapest chips on each platform so dead or not you have a lot of options. The 16-core 5950X from AMD and the 24-core 14900K from Intel are still readily available in stores. The 14900K is significantly faster than the 5950X... If you run it with DDR5 memory, where this article assumes older DDR4.
  
  
  
• Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for its free tier? (AMD)
  
  Because fuck you, apparently. An AMD representative responded, but did not answer the question.
  
  

Demo Interlude



That might not seem particularly impressive at first glance. Maybe in 1981.

But if you watch the beginning closely, you'll see the directory listing. The code that delivers this is 16 bytes.

This article explains how it works, including a complete assembly language listing.



Musical Interlude



Not Hololive's biggest hit - I didn't even know Kaela had an original song - but I like this one. Even if I don't understand a word of it - it's in Bahasa Indonesian.



Disclaimer: But who isn't these days?