Let the AI price wars begin. OpenAI has just fired a veritable volley across the bow of China's growing number of AI labs, sacrificing its sky-high margins to try to starve the budding open-weight AI economy. OpenAI is now trying to starve out China's AI labs by cutting token prices by as much as 80% on GPT-5.6 Luna OpenAI has just slashed the token-based pricing for GPT-5.6 Luna by 80 percent, with input tokens now priced at just $0.2 per 1 million from their earlier perch at $1, and output tokens priced at just $1.20 per 1 million vs. the […]
The pricing question has hounded Grand Theft Auto 6 for the past couple of years, ever since Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter suggested that Rockstar Games could price the game at $100 and get away with it. Several other analysts have since scoffed at the idea, but now that we are mere days from the opening of pre-orders (scheduled for Thursday, June 25) on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S and X, the discovery that the Portuguese version of FNAC (a multinational retail chain that operates across France, Portugal, Spain, Belgium, Switzerland, and several other markets) has listed the game […]
The back episodes finally make it online, this is number 4 in a series of episodes - wait - this IS the current episode! Escapes are great, am I right?
There's no doubt that GTA 6 will attract an absolutely massive audience when it launches on November 19 across PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S, and Xbox Series X. According to Circana's Matt Piscatella, though, a lot of casual gamers may be in for a rude awakening when they head to the store to buy one of those consoles and the game in six months' time. Speaking to The Game Business show, he said: Those folks who don't pay a lot of attention that have heard, okay, well GTA 6 is coming, but they're not really keyed in. That's a lot of […]
Asha Sharma has been extremely active since she officially replaced the now-retired Phil Spencer at Xbox in late February. One of her earliest moves was discontinuing the "This Is an Xbox" marketing campaign, which had been widely mocked by fans. More significantly, she formally dismantled the Microsoft Gaming identity in favor of a unified Xbox-first structure, with Microsoft plastering the "Return of Xbox" slogan on its office walls. On April 21, Sharma announced a cut to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate's monthly price from $29.99 to $22.99, while PC Game Pass dropped from $16.49 to $13.99. Simultaneously, new Call of Duty […]
This is not going to be some supercilious post about rising costs that assumes the reader hasn't looked at Newegg or Amazon prices on DDR5 lately, but it IS a post about…
The past few months in PC hardware have been eventful by any measure. Apple shipped the M5 Pro and M5 Max, Intel clarified its core architecture roadmap, and anyone trying to build a new PC has been quietly suffering through DRAM pricing that refuses to behave. These stories look separate on the surface. They are not.
The thread connecting all of them is memory, specifically the growing gap between what compute silicon can do and what the memory feeding it can keep up with.
Start with Apple. The M5 Pro and M5 Max are genuinely interesting chips, not just because of the performance numbers but because of what Apple was forced to do architecturally to get there. Fusion Architecture, Apple’s move to a dual-die SoC design, exists primarily because a single monolithic die cannot accommodate 40 GPU cores, 614 GB/s of unified memory bandwidth, and 18 CPU cores without hitting yield and cost walls. The memory bandwidth figure is the one that matters most for AI workloads running locally, and Apple knows it. The M5 Max at 614 GB/s is not chasing gaming benchmarks. It is chasing large language model inference throughput, and bandwidth is the bottleneck that determines how fast it runs.
That bandwidth problem is not unique to Apple. It is an industry-wide crisis, and the full picture of why is considerably more complicated than most coverage lets on. The AI memory crisis running through the data centre right now traces back to physics: DRAM scaling has not kept pace with compute scaling, HBM production is constrained by TSV fabrication yields and advanced packaging capacity, and the most powerful AI systems on the planet spend more time waiting for data than actually processing it. That is not a software problem. It is a silicon and packaging problem, and it does not have a quick fix.
For anyone building a PC right now, the consequences land differently, but they are still real. DRAM pricing has been pulled in two directions simultaneously: AI infrastructure demand is bidding directly on supply at the high end, while consumer DDR5 pricing has been volatile enough to meaningfully change the calculus on a new build from one month to the next. If you have been holding off on a memory upgrade, waiting for prices to settle, the honest answer is that the market dynamics driving this are structural rather than cyclical. Prices may ease, but the pressure from AI demand on overall DRAM supply is not going away.
On the Intel side, there has been a lot of noise about the company killing off its hybrid core architecture in favour of a unified core design. The reality, as is usually the case with Intel roadmap speculation, is more nuanced. Intel is not killing P-cores, at least not in the timeframe the headlines suggest. The unified core concept is a longer-term architectural direction, and the practical implications for anyone buying an Intel platform in the next year or two are limited. What matters more right now is whether Intel’s current generation delivers the performance-per-watt improvements it needs to stay competitive, particularly in a market where Apple Silicon has reset expectations for mobile efficiency and AMD’s desktop Zen 5 parts are putting pressure on the high end.
The bigger picture across all of this is straightforward: memory is the constraint that determines where performance goes next, whether that is Apple designing a new packaging approach to get more bandwidth, hyperscalers paying premiums to secure HBM allocation, or a consumer trying to figure out whether now is a sensible time to buy a 32 GB DDR5 kit. The compute side of the industry has never been more capable. The memory side is struggling to keep up, and that tension is shaping every major hardware decision being made right now.
According to dataminer PlayStation Game Size (@PlaystationSize on X), Rockstar Games has just added title IDs for Grand Theft Auto VI on Sony's PlayStation Store, possibly hinting at pre-orders opening in the near future: Grand Theft Auto VI title IDs have been added to the PlayStation database. I expect we’ll see something about the game soon, probably the start of pre-orders. When asked how long it usually takes between the time when title IDs first appear on the store and the actual reveal of the pricing information, the dataminer replied: To be honest, it completely depends on the publisher, and […]
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