By Paulo Vargas Old gadgets aren’t just riding a nostalgia wave. They’re coming back because modern tech has become too needy, too app-dependent, and too exhausting.

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By Hisan Kidwai Flipkart is hosting a large-scale smartphone-focused event in Phuket, bringing together major brands, industry experts, and…
The post What Is Flipkart India’s Favourite Smartphones Awards? Explained appeared first on Fossbytes.

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Meta is continuing its compute grab as the agentic AI race accelerates to a sprint.

Today, the company announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) that will bring “tens of millions” of AWS Graviton5 cores (one chip contains 192 cores) into its compute portfolio, with the option to expand as its AI capabilities grow. This will make the Llama builder one of the largest Graviton customers in the world.

The move builds on Meta’s expansive partnerships with nearly every chip and compute provider in the business. It’s working with Nvidia, Arm, and AMD, as well as building its own internal training and inference accelerator chip.

“It feels very difficult to keep track of what Meta is doing, with all of these chip deals and announcements around in-house development,” said Matt Kimball, VP and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. This makes for “exciting times that tell us just how incredibly valuable silicon is right now.”

Controlling the system, not just scale

Graphics processing units (GPUs) are essential for large language model (LLM) training, but agentic AI requires a whole new workload capability. CPUs like Graviton5 are rising to this challenge, supporting intensive workloads like real-time reasoning, multi-step tasks, frontier model training, code generation, and deep research.

AWS says Graviton5 has the ability to handle “billions of interactions” and to coordinate complex, multi-stage agentic tasks. It is built on the AWS Nitro System to support high performance, availability, and security.

“This is really about control of the AI system, not just scale,” said Kimball. As AI evolves toward persistent, agentic workloads, the role of the CPU becomes “quite meaningful;” it serves as the control plane, handling orchestration, managing memory, scheduling, and other intensive tasks across accelerators.

“This is especially true in agentic environments, where the workloads will be less linear and more stateful,” he pointed out. So, ensuring a supply of these resources just makes sense.

Reflecting Meta’s diversified approach to hardware

The agreement builds on Meta’s long-standing partnership with AWS, but also reflects what the company calls its “diversified approach” to infrastructure. “No single chip architecture can efficiently serve every workload,” the company emphasized.

Proving the point, Meta recently announced four new generations of its MTIA training and inference accelerator chip and signed a massive deal with AMD to tap into 6GW worth of CPUs and AI accelerators. It also entered into a multi-year partnership with Nvidia to access millions of Blackwell and Rubin GPUs and to integrate Nvidia Spectrum-X Ethernet switches into its platform, and was also one of Arm’s first major CPU customers.

In the wake of all this, Nabeel Sherif, a principal advisory director at Info-Tech Research Group, posed the burning question: “What are they going to do with all this capacity?”

Primarily it will support Meta’s internal experimentation and innovation, he said, but it also lays the groundwork and provides the capacity for Meta to offer its own agentic AI services, for instance, its Llama AI model as an API, to the market.

“What those [services] will look like and what platforms and tools they’ll use, as well as what guardrails they’ll provide to users, is still unclear, but it’s going to be interesting to see it develop,” said Sherif.

The expanded capacity will enable a diversity of use cases and experimentation across various architectures and platforms, he said. Meta will have many options, and access to supply in an environment currently characterized not only by a wide variety of new CPU approaches, but by significant supply chain constraints. The AWS deal should be viewed as a complement to its partnerships and investments in other platforms like ARM, Nvidia, and AMD.

Kimball agreed that the move is “most definitely additive,” not a replacement or substitution. Meta isn’t moving off GPUs or accelerators, it’s building around them. “This is about assembling a heterogeneous system, not picking a single winner,” he said. “In fact, I think for most, heterogeneity is critical to long term success.”

Nvidia still dominates training and a lot of inference, while AMD is becoming “more and more relevant at scale,” Kimball noted. Arm, meanwhile, whether through CPU, custom silicon or other efforts, gives Meta architectural control, and Graviton5 fits into that mix as a “cost- and efficiency-optimized general-purpose compute layer.”

A question of strategy

The more interesting question is around strategy: Does this signal Meta is becoming a compute provider? Kimball doesn’t think so, noting that it’s likely the company isn’t looking to directly compete with hyperscalers as a general-purpose cloud. “This is more about vertical integration of their own AI stack,” he said.

The move gives them the ability to support internal workloads more efficiently, as well as providing the infrastructure foundation to expose more of that capability externally, whether through APIs, partnerships, or other means, he said.

And there’s a cost dynamic here, too, Kimball noted. As inference becomes persistent, especially with agentic systems, economics shift away from peak floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) (a measure of compute performance) and toward sustained efficiency and total cost of ownership (TCO).

CPUs like Graviton5 are well positioned for the parts of that workload that don’t require accelerators, but still need to run continuously. “At Meta’s scale, even small efficiency gains per workload compound quickly,” Kimball pointed out.

For developers and enterprise IT, the signal is pretty clear, he noted: The AI stack is getting more heterogeneous, not less so. Enterprises are going to see tighter coupling between CPUs, GPUs, and specialized accelerators, with workloads increasingly split across them based on behavior (prefill versus decode, stateless versus stateful, burst versus persistent).

“The implication is that infrastructure decisions have to become more workload-aware,” said Kimball. “It’s less about ‘which cloud?’ and more about ‘where does this specific part of the application run most efficiently?’”

This article originally appeared on NetworkWorld.

Source:: Computer World

By Shikhar Mehrotra Fitbit’s 4.68 update goes beyond a typical patch; it brings back sleep log editing, introduces Conversational Check-Ins with your Coach, and delivers step-by-step workout guidance.

Source:: Digital Trends

By Ana Maria Constantin Summary: Europe’s effort to protect children online has collided with its own privacy architecture. The ePrivacy derogation allowing voluntary CSAM scanning expired on April 3 after Parliament voted 311-228 to reject its extension, the EU’s new age verification app announced April 15 was hacked in under two minutes, and the CSA Regulation (“Chat Control”) remains […] This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

By Allison Steffens Herrera In short: X-Energy raised $1.02 billion in the largest nuclear IPO on record, pricing at $23 (21% above range) on the Nasdaq, with shares surging 31% on opening to imply a $12 billion market cap. The offering was 15x oversubscribed. The same company failed to close a $1 billion SPAC in 2023. The difference is […] This story continues at The Next Web

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By Shikhar Mehrotra DeepSeek V4-Pro scores 3,206 on Codeforces, ahead of GPT-5.4 and Gemini, while costing $3.48 per million tokens versus Claude’s $25, making it one of the most price-competitive frontier-class AI releases in 2026.

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By Manisha Priyadarshini Researchers at Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute have developed ShadeCut, a technology that applies patterned colored films to solar panels to mimic roof tiles, masonry, or custom designs.

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As Europe seeks to assert its technological independence from the US vendors Aleph Alpha, once seen as Germany’s sovereign AI hope, is the target of a transatlantic takeover.

Aleph Alpha is set to merge with Canada’s Cohere in a deal that will bring together Cohere’s global AI clout and Aleph Alpha’s background in research. The two companies hope they will be able to develop an AI powerhouse, with backing from their Canadian and German ecosystems

“Organizations globally are demanding uncompromising control over their AI stack. This transatlantic partnership unlocks the massive scale, robust infrastructure, and world-class R&D talent required to meet that demand,” said ” said Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez in a news release that artfully presents the deal as a merger of equals but that, according to a footnote, only requires the approval of the German company’s shareholders, a sure sign of a one-sided takeover.

The combined companies will be looking to offer customized AI in highly-regulated sectors including finance, defense and healthcare. By pooling their talents and offerings, theu hope to offer AI solutions to organizations according to local laws, cultural contexts, and institutional requirements.

The move comes at a time when businesses across the word are looking at non-US options as a reaction to the Trump administration’s policy on tariffs and the uncertainty caused by the war with Iran.

There have been several initiatives within Europe to counteract the US dominance. The EU’s Eurostack plan looked to make sure that major projects had a European option. Aleph Alpha was one of the companies highlighted within the scheme. The EU also launched Open  Euro LLM, an attempt to slow down the US and China’s lead in AI.

This article first appeared on CIO.

Source:: Computer World

By Deepti Pathak The 2026 versions of the ASUS Zenbook and VivoBook laptops have recently been released in the Indian market….
The post New ASUS Zenbook and Vivobook Laptops Now Up for Sale in India appeared first on Fossbytes.

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By Ana Maria Constantin Summary: Meta is cutting approximately 8,000 employees (10% of its workforce) beginning 20 May, cancelling 6,000 open roles, and planning additional cuts for H2 2026. The layoffs, announced via an internal memo from HR head Janelle Gale, are structural rather than performance-based, reorganising teams into AI-focused “pods” while Meta spends $115-135 billion on AI infrastructure […] This story continues at The Next Web

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By Alina Maria Stan Summary: US petrol prices passed $4/gallon for the first time in four years (+30% YoY), driven by the Iran conflict and Strait of Hormuz disruption. Tesla delivered 358,023 vehicles in Q1 2026, up 6% against a weak comparison quarter but missing estimates by 7,600 units. Consumer EV interest is rising (Edmunds: 23.8% consideration) but overall […] This story continues at The Next Web

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Global IT spending is expected to rise this year to $6.31 trillion, according to a new forecast from Gartner, a 13.5% increase compared to 2025.

According to the research firm, AI is the single most important driver behind the growth, with investments in AI infrastructure, in particular, driving the trend. The data center systems segment is expected to grow by a whopping 55.8% during the year, by far the fastest growing of all categories.

At the same time, IT services continue to account for the largest share of total spending and are expected to exceed $1.87 trillion this year. Software is also showing strong growth, particularly in generative AI.

Growth is also expected in the device market, though at a significantly slower pace. Overall, the market is expected to reach approximately $856 billion, though Gartner says this growth is being slowed by rising memory prices.

Source:: Computer World

Chinese market research firm Sigmaintell expects Apple to be the only company to see growth in the laptop market this year.

Overall, Sigmaintel predicts global notebook shipments will reach 181.1 million units this year, a decline of 8%. That drop will, in part, be caused by memory and component shortages and also by slowing market demand. That’s going to damage all of the notebook vendors, bar Apple,. 

Apple laptop sales expected to rise more than 20%

Sigmaintell calculates Apple will ship 28 million laptop in the year, up 21.7% from 2025. This puts Apple in third place in laptop shipments, a demand the company will be able to meet despite component shortages because of the efficient use of memory inherent to its systems. That memory efficiency acts as a protection against the impact of climbing costs, even as competitors struggle with the affects on their business.

Apple’s incoming CEO, John Ternan, is being presented as a hardware man, so he will no doubt be pleased to experience the benefit of MacBook Neo’s massive attack on the lower echelons of the market. The Neo is already generating millions of additional sales, something Apple’s diversified revenue engine, including services, can further capitalize on.

PC makers face steep decline

There’s quite stark news for PC manufacturers. The report predicts Lenovo, Dell, HP, and ASUS will see sharp sales declines and warns that the entire industry will need to quickly transition from hardware-based sales toward full ecosystem plays. 

That’s going to be extraordinarily difficult for most PC makers. Not only do most of them use operating systems they don’t build themselves, but most lack a successful range of services customers will happily choose to use. 

For the most part, while Apple offers Apple Music, competitors only offer Spotify, a situation that generates far less revenue for them. That lack of successful monetization in terms of attached income across the customer base meant less when the PC market was growing, but in an environment buffeted by multiple business challenges it becomes a vulnerability that cannot be ignored. It exposes the inherent weakness of a strategy in which hardware manufacturers rely on third parties for operating systems and services, as the lion’s share of income doesn’t reach those hardware makers. 

You can go your own way

There’s little doubt that part of the reason Apple is in such a strong position is because of its highly strategic outgoing CEO, Tim Cook, who led efforts to build a strong services business, accompanied by a wide ecosystem of complementary accessories. You don’t just buy an iPhone, you buy a Mac, AirPods, and Apple Music. You don’t just get an iPad, but you likely also acquire Apple Arcade. 

To a great extent, Apple’s strength now owes a big debt to the many years in which the company was marginalized. Forced to follow its own path, Apple deliberately developed its own unique platform-based approach. That approach meant the company remained profitable even when it held just a few percentage points of the PC market; as its market share improves, we can also see its profitability climb. 

The way that you do it

This good news may not matter as much as you might think to Apple’s leadership team. To them, while becoming the industry’s fastest-growing notebook manufacturer is nice, what matters more is crafting a platform experience that means something to the people using it. That, after all, is how to generate the high user satisfaction Apple’s platform loyalty and word-of-mouth recommendations come from.

That 16% of everyone purchasing a notebook this year will choose a Mac suggests a watershed moment for all Apple’s platforms.

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Source:: Computer World

By Rachit Agarwal SpaceX wants to make its own GPUs, but building chips is no walk in the park. Here’s what we know so far.

Source:: Digital Trends

By Hisan Kidwai When smartphones first became mainstream, durability took a back seat. We were expected to take care…
The post OPPO F33 Pro Review: Looks Premium, Survives Drops, But Is It Worth ₹37,999? appeared first on Fossbytes.

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By Paulo Vargas Google may soon require a Google account for Pixel Watch Fall Detection, ending one of the feature’s more flexible setup options and adding a grace period before enforcement kicks in, based on newly discovered app strings.

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By Rachit Agarwal Research suggests self-driving cars could make traffic significantly worse, not better, and the evidence on the streets is already starting to back that up.

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By Hisan Kidwai Business laptops are a niche that suits only a few, but if there were one laptop…
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By Vikhyaat Vivek Researchers at Nottingham Trent University have developed a vibrating smart pillow sleeve that alerts deaf users to fires, burglar alarms, and phone calls at night

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