Cliff Robinson

Apple announced that John Ternus will succeed Tim Cook as Apple’s next CEO later this year in a major shift for the company. Although we normally do not cover many executive moves in the industry, Apple is enormous, and this is a major move for a company with a history of relatively long-tenured CEOs.

KIOXIA today announced the KIOXIA EG7 Series solid state drives, the company’s first client solution to adopt BiCS FLASH generation 8 QLC (quadruple-level cell) technology. The new DRAM-less SSDs are designed to provide affordable storage for value-oriented slim laptops, commercial notebooks, and consumer desktops. These are the types of SSDs we often would expect to find in Project TinyMiniMicro and other small systems we review.

The Kioxia BG8 series of SSDs arrives roughly one year after the Kioxia BG7, bringing PCIe 5.0 connectivity to the mainstream client SSD segment. Like its predecessor, the BG8 series is intended for OEM deployments in laptops and desktops rather than retail channels. The new generation continues to leverage Kioxia’s BiCS FLASH Generation 8 TLC NAND with CBA (CMOS directly Bonded to Array) technology, with the goal of delivering substantial performance gains while maintaining a DRAM-less architecture.

Micron has a new capacity point for its 6600 ION NVMe SSD family, and this one is the eye-catcher. The company now has a 245.76TB version of the Micron 6600 ION, giving data center platforms a way to put almost a quarter petabyte of flash into a single SSD.

PCI-SIG PCIe speeds and lane bandwidth table through PCIe 8.0

Kioxia has a new high-end client SSD family. The Kioxia XG10 Series moves the M.2-based XG line to PCIe Gen5. This generation has capacities up to 4TB, and sequential performance figures of up to 14GB/s sequential reads and 12GB/s sequential writes, making for a big generational change. For context, we previously reviewed the KIOXIA XG8 2TB PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD. XG10 is the follow-on performance client line.

Dan Cornwell knocks out this brilliant 28-panel page in which Dredd fights a gang of creeps. It’s a knock-down, drag-out brawl, which leaves Dredd a loser. Creeps cast him into a central pit, what they call The Cauldron, where all the dregs of the Oubliette end up. I love the panels in which Dredd is plummeting, where Cornwell stretches out Dredd’s head to sell the speed at which he’s travelling.

While we are out building fun clusters, Gigabyte is doing something really interesting. It has a 40-node cluster with 320 cores 1.28TB of memory, 80x SSDs, and 40 (integrated) GPUs in a single 1U chassis. We encountered Gigabyte’s hardware on display at Computex 2026, and it is quite neat.

Samsung Electronics announced mass production of the PM1763, its first PCIe 6.0 enterprise SSD built for AI and HPC server environments. We are just starting the transition to PCIe Gen6 systems with some hyper-scale CPUs, NVIDIA Vera, and soon AMD EPYC Venice launching with support. As a result, we need devices like SSDs to take advantage of the new, higher-speed interface.

The popular Geekbench platform has a new version. Geekbench 7 is now out, and at STH, we have been trying it for the past few days. We thought it was time for a quick post after this week’s AMD Advancing AI 2026. The new version has updated CPU and GPU benchmarks along with NVIDIA CUDA support.