Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has announced that its next-generation release will require RISC‑V processors to meet the newly ratified RVA23 profile. This specification, approved back in April, includes full support for Vector Instructions 1.0 and a Hypervisor extension. As Laurine Kirk, security researcher at Google, notes, by setting this higher baseline, Ubuntu 26.04 will no longer run on roughly 90% of existing RISC-V single-board computers, including the popular Raspberry Pi-style boards, unless their hardware is upgraded. Canonical's move puts it in step with Google and Microsoft, both of which have already targeted RVA23 for their RISC‑V builds. This change will drive manufacturers to ship more secure, future-proof silicon, helping to guard against exploits like GhostWrite, a memory-access vulnerability discovered last year in T-Head's XuanTie C910 CPUs.

We discussed RISC-V ecosystem fragmentation with Andrea Gallo, then the CTO and now the CEO of the RISC-V Foundation, regarding the fragmentation within the RISC-V ecosystem. "If you want to claim that you are RISC-V compatible, then there's an architecture compatibility test suite that verifies that you are complying with the ISA. We run the same tests on a golden reference model and compare the signatures of the tests to ensure alignment with the specification." He added that "We just ratified the RVA23 Profile. The newly ratified RVA23 Profile is a major release for the RISC-V software ecosystem and will help accelerate widespread implementation among toolchains and operating systems." For anyone who wants to ship a working RISC-V processor, be it data center or mobile, the RVA23 profile is the one that guarantees no fragmentation and compatibility.

Intel has kicked off a widespread round of job cuts this week, informing staff members individually about their future with the company. CEO Lip-Bu Tan first advised employees in April to expect significant layoffs, following years of production challenges and declining sales. Although Intel has not provided a total headcount for the reductions, the process will unfold over several weeks, with some workers receiving immediate notice and others awaiting final decisions. Within Intel's manufacturing division, known as Intel Foundry, the company plans to eliminate approximately 15% to 20% of technician, engineer, and researcher positions in its Oregon facilities. At the same time, Intel will close its automotive technology unit, resulting in layoffs for most employees in that business, and outsource marketing activities to Accenture under a new arrangement designed to harness AI for greater efficiency.

Initial layoff notices have gone out in California, and further announcements are expected soon in Arizona and Oregon, Intel's largest US sites. These cuts follow last summer's reduction of 15,000 roles, which left Intel with roughly 109,000 employees worldwide. In 2024, the company reported a $19 billion loss as rivals such as TSMC, AMD, and NVIDIA outpaced Intel with more advanced and cost-effective chips. Plans to expand fab capacity in Ohio, Germany, and Israel have been put on hold due to diminished revenue and shifting market priorities. Intel is counting on its next-generation 18A process node, due for release later this year, to restore its competitive edge. For external customers, the interest is drawn from 18A-P and 14A.

LG Innotek is continuing its quest to become the world's top company in the field of technology components, with its latest milestone being the successful development of an innovative semiconductor substrate technology. LG Innotek (CEO Moon Hyuksoo) announced on July 3rd that it successfully developed and started mass-producing the world's first copper post (Cu-Post) technology, which is applicable high-value-added semiconductor substrates for mobile devices.

With major manufacturers racing to make smartphones ever thinner, ways to minimize the size of smartphone components have become increasingly sought after. Demand is soaring for mobile device semiconductor substrates that provide maximum performance in a minimal size, such as the RF-SiP (Radio Frequency-System in Package) substrate.

Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer is reportedly planning to retire after the launch of the next-generation Xbox console, according to reports from gaming industry sources. The information reported by Insider Gaming originates from @TheGhostOfHope, a leaker with a track record for Call of Duty information. Spencer is allegedly working closely with Xbox President Sarah Bond and her team to facilitate a smooth leadership transition. Bond is expected to assume the role of Microsoft Gaming CEO following Spencer's retirement. However, no replacement for Bond's current position as Xbox President has been identified at this time.

Windows Central's Jez Corden has indicated that Spencer's retirement would occur "some time" after the next-generation Xbox launches, though no formal plan is currently in place. Industry reports suggest the next-generation Xbox hardware could arrive as early as 2026 or 2027. This report arrived during a tough time for Xbox, as Microsoft cut jobs across its gaming division affecting many Xbox studios. The company canceled several big-name projects, including Everwild, Perfect Dark, and ZeniMax Online's unannounced MMORPG. Microsoft also shut down The Initiative. Phil Spencer has been in charge of Microsoft's gaming division for more than ten years. He has overseen key efforts such as the launch of Game Pass, the purchase of Activision Blizzard, and various strategic moves that have shaped Xbox's current market standing.

Intel's CEO Lip-Bu Tan is looking at a big change to how the company makes chips for others, Reuters reports citing people who know about it. The new plan might mean Intel stops offering its 18A process technology to other companies. This is different from the strategy of the former CEO, Pat Gelsinger, who had invested heavily in the 18A manufacturing process. Since assuming leadership in March, Tan has been working to reduce costs and find new approaches to revive the struggling chipmaker. By June, he began expressing concerns that the 18A process was failing to attract new customers. Abandoning external sales of 18A technology and focusing on its 14A process would require Intel to take substantial write-offs on the billions invested in its development. Industry analysts suggest these charges could reach hundreds of millions or potentially billions of dollars.

Intel plans to show the board these options later this month. However, a final decision is not expected until this autumn given the complexity and financial stakes involved. Even if they change plans, Intel will still keep its promises about 18A process including producing small amounts of chips for Amazon and Microsoft, and making its own "Panther Lake" laptop processors scheduled for late 2025. Along with standard 18A, Intel is creating two upgraded versions: 18A-P launching in 2026 and 18A-PT arriving in 2028.

Corsair Gaming, Inc. (Nasdaq: CRSR) ("Corsair" or the "Company"), a leading global provider of high-performance gear for gamers, streamers, content creators, PC builders and SIM driving enthusiasts, today announced that the planned CEO transition has taken effect. Andy Paul, Corsair's Founder and Chief Executive Officer, has officially retired from the Company and its Board of Directors, effective today. Thi La, formerly the Company's President and Chief Operating Officer, has assumed the role of Chief Executive Officer.

Originally announced in February 2025, the transition is part of a long-planned succession strategy approved by Corsair's Board of Directors. Ms. La steps into the CEO role after more than 14 years with Corsair, where she has held key executive positions in operations, product leadership, and strategic development.

Intel has confirmed plans to phase out its in-house automotive chip team and lay off most of the employees in that segment. In a memo to staff on Tuesday, the company stated that it will honor existing contracts with vehicle manufacturers and suppliers but will essentially dissolve the unit that designed and marketed its small automotive platform. This move supports Intel's new strategy under new CEO Lip-Bu Tan to concentrate on client computing and data center operations. "We are refocusing on our core client and data center portfolio to strengthen our product offerings and meet the needs of our customers," the statement said. "As part of this work, we have decided to wind down the automotive business within our Client Computing Group. We are committed to ensuring a smooth transition for our customers."

Intel's automotive division has never generated a major share of revenue, and the company does not report its results separately. Still, Intel highlights that over 50 million vehicles worldwide use its processors for services such as infotainment, electric vehicle management, and driver assistance. Despite that footprint, the division remains small compared with the rest of Intel's diverse chip portfolio. Importantly, the decision does not affect Mobileye, which Intel spun off and took public in 2023. Mobileye continues to operate independently, even though Intel retains nearly all of the voting shares. Intel has already informed its manufacturing staff of plans to cut up to 20% of its workforce starting in July. It will also outsource much of its marketing function to Accenture, relying on AI to manage campaigns. These actions are much needed for Intel's determination to make operations leaner and sharpen its focus on the markets where it remains strongest.

1047 Games, the developer behind Splitgate and the recently announced follow-up, Splitgate 2, has just announced a round of layoffs to an undisclosed number of "valued 1047 Games team members," according to an announcement on LinkedIn. The studio says that the decision was made at a time when the company is "redirecting resources to build the best game for our players." In addition to the job cuts, 1047 Games's co-founders, Ian Proulx and Nicholas Bagamian, are not receiving salaries at this time. The announcement claims that the studio is working on the next phase of Splitgate 2 and using community feedback to perfect the gameplay experience.

Adding insult to injury, the company's CEO was recently criticized online for wearing a hat that said "Make FPS Great Again" to the Summer Game Fest event shortly after releasing Splitgate 2, which faced a somewhat negative reception because of generic battle royale gameplay mechanics and aggressive monetization tactics. Currently, the game has a "Mixed" review rating on Steam just over a month after its initial launch into Early Access. According to an X post by Proulx, he was unaware of the game's aggressive monetization and $80 launch bundles, which were also part of the reason the game was heavily criticized at launch. The first Splitgate game also had a somewhat mixed response at its initial Beta launch in 2019, so it would not be surprising to see the game and developer bounce back from this hit, however, some of the original Splitgate community seems to have been burned by the rocky launch and CEO's recent statements.

Intel today announced a series of leadership appointments aligned with its focus on strengthening customer relationships and becoming a more engineering-focused company. Greg Ernst, a respected sales leader with more than 20 years of Intel experience, has been named chief revenue officer. In addition, Srinivasan Iyengar, Jean-Didier Allegrucci and Shailendra Desai are joining Intel in key engineering leadership roles.

"We see significant opportunities ahead to strengthen our product offerings and meet the changing needs of our customers," said Lip-Bu Tan, CEO of Intel. "Greg, Srini, J-D and Shailendra are highly accomplished leaders with strong reputations across our ecosystem, and they will each play important roles as we position our business for the future."

Intel's tale of financial difficulties has been told for many quarters now, and the company is slowly paving the way to profitability through workforce reduction, new aggressive product roadmaps, and, as of now, a 50% gross margin requirement before entering production. At Bank of America's global technology conference, Intel Products CEO Michelle Johnston Holthaus noted that CEO Lip-Bu Tan is "laser-focused on the fact that we need to get our gross margins back up above 50%." Explaining the reasoning behind this decision, MJH added that it is "something that we probably should have had before, but we have it now so that product doesn't move forward; you actually don't get engineers assigned to it if it's not 50% or higher gross margins moving forward."

Interestingly, this means that every new product will now go into evaluation of profitability first, unlike the "build it and they will (hopefully) come" philosophy, which cost Intel many billions of R&D just to enter new markets without a solid financial plan. MJH also added about 50% gross margin expectation:" So I think our future products can all get there, I think really what it comes down to is you have to have a lot of discipline in your product life cycle planning to build products from day one that hit that and so there's a lot of things that I talked about when we talked about Lip-Bu coming on board of getting our OpEx and our CapEx in line, getting the types of products that we're going to build in alignment, really understanding market and ASPs." This means that upcoming Panther Lake, 18A node HVM, Clearwater Forest Xeons, Xe3/Xe4 Arc GPUs, and Jaguar Shores AI accelerators all carry a gross margin of 50% or more, making them viable for Intel and sustainable in the long run.

Nintendo's Switch 2 hybrid console is due to arrive at retail tomorrow (June 5), and pre-launch marketing campaigns are in full swing. The Japanese gaming giant has called in a high profile partner—Jensen Huang—to add some surprisingly technical heft during hype festivities. At this stage in time, NVIDIA's Tegra "T239" chipset is a well known quantity—thanks to years of leaked "internal info," and disabled examples turning up for close analysis in China. Industry experts did not anticipate Nintendo's fairly frank discussions that covered Switch 2's hardware capabilities. The Nintendo "Creator's Voice" video series has featured a number of high-profile third-party software development buddies (including CD Projekt RED), but yesterday's Team Green CEO contribution received widespread press attention.

Jensen paid tribute to Satoru Iwata, a former and much missed Nintendo president. Their collaboration started during the era of OG Switch development: "he wanted to create something no one had seen before. A console powerful enough for big, cinematic games—but small enough to take anywhere. It sounded impossible. But that vision became the original Nintendo Switch. We lost Iwata-san before the launch, but his clarity, his purpose, it still inspires our work every day. Together, we poured everything into that system." As mentioned back in April, NVIDIA dedicated significant resources into making their latest "technical marvel."

TSMC has declared that it has no immediate plans to build fabrication plants in the Middle East, reinforcing its strategy to focus on regions where customer demand is strong. Last week's rumors that TSMC might establish a gigafab in the United Arab Emirates have been dismissed by company executives as baseless. CEO CC Wei explained that an expansion into the Gulf does not fit with TSMC's model of locating factories near its largest clients. With ongoing investments in the US, Japan, and Germany, the company aims to serve technology leaders and automotive manufacturers more effectively. Wei added that, without a solid local customer base, building in the Middle East would be impractical. At the same time, TSMC indicated it is reviewing wafer pricing. Fluctuations in the Taiwanese dollar and changing global tariffs were cited as factors under consideration.

According to Wei, long-term agreements could include modest price increases, especially for advanced process nodes, where research and development costs and manufacturing challenges are rising. Looking ahead, TSMC confirmed that the upcoming A14 1.4 nm node wafers are expected to be priced around $45,000 each. This would represent a 50 percent increase over the current 2 nm wafers, which cost about $30,000 apiece. Production of the 1.4 nm node is projected to begin around 2028. Only TSMC's top-tier customers are likely to reserve capacity for this cutting-edge node in its early stages. As demand for advanced semiconductors rises, the company's approach to pricing and geographic focus will be key to maintaining its leadership in the global foundry market.

Today (June 1) we made a very difficult decision to suspend the development of project Gemini and project Bifrost—the relevant current reports have been released to the market. The suspension of the Gemini project is a consequence of the fact that the Publisher has not presented us with a draft of the subsequent content rider to the Publishing Agreement covering the terms and conditions of further milestones on project Gemini and the lack of communication from the Publisher as to its willingness to continue or terminate the Gemini project.

Project Bifrost was suspended due to the above and the analysis of the Group's cash flow, which showed a lack of prospects for securing organizational resources and funds necessary to continue the production and release of this project. As a result, we have to significantly regroup as a studio and scale down our teams, which hurts the most. We wish to express our deepest regret and sadness over how these events have unfolded and our sincere gratitude for everyone's contribution up to this point.

• Sebastian Wojciechowski, CEO

Ready for a front-row seat to the next scientific revolution? That's the idea behind Doudna—a groundbreaking supercomputer announced today at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California. The system represents a major national investment in advancing U.S. high-performance computing (HPC) leadership, ensuring U.S. researchers have access to cutting-edge tools to address global challenges. "It will advance scientific discovery from chemistry to physics to biology and all powered by—unleashing this power—of artificial intelligence," U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright (pictured above) said at today's event.

Also known as NERSC-10, Doudna is named for Nobel laureate and CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna. The next-generation system announced today is designed not just for speed but for impact. Powered by Dell Technologies infrastructure with the NVIDIA Vera Rubin architecture, and set to launch in 2026, Doudna is tailored for real-time discovery across the U.S. Department of Energy's most urgent scientific missions. It's poised to catapult American researchers to the forefront of critical scientific breakthroughs, fostering innovation and securing the nation's competitive edge in key technological fields.

Lenovo Group Limited, together with its subsidiaries ('the Group'), today announced Q4 and full year results for the fiscal year 2024/25, reporting significant increases in overall group revenue and profit. For the full year, revenue grew 21% year-on-year to US$69.1 billion, marking the Group's second-highest annual revenue in its history. Net income was up 36% year-on-year to US$1.4 billion on a non-Hong Kong Financial Reporting Standards (non-HKFRS) basis. The Group's diversified growth engines continue to accelerate, with non-PC revenue mix up nearly five points year-on-year to 47%. All business groups were healthy and strong and met their strategic intent and financial goals, and all sales geographies gained double-digit revenue growth year-on-year, reflecting the strength of the Group's diversified businesses and resilient global footprint.

The results were not only driven by the Group's focus on executing a clear strategy, but also its end-to-end integrated global operations (design, demand forecasting, procurement, manufacturing, marketing, sales, and services), ODM+ manufacturing model, and global resources/local delivery model. Over the past 20 years of operating a global business, Lenovo has established a manufacturing footprint that boasts 30+ manufacturing sites (either in-house or outsourced) in 11 different markets around the world. The combination of these gives the Group maximum flexibility and resilience to navigate through uncertainties and be more adaptive to the market conditions.

As previously promised, Dr. Rick Tsai took to the Computex 2025 stage earlier today. The MediaTek CEO's keynote speech included a teaser for next-gen. Currently, the fabless chip design firm's best offerings are manufactured at TSMC foundries—utilizing 3 nm node processes. According to inside track knowledge, the forthcoming Dimensity 9500 mobile chipset will be based on "N3P." During today's important presentation, Tsai announced his company's next major leap—with "2 nm silicon innovation." According to a presentation slide, a tape-out phase is anticipated by this September. Industry experts reckon that a futuristic flagship—perhaps "Dimensity 9600"—SoC will benefit from this generational jump. Finalized products could arrive around late 2026; with MediaTek reportedly being on TSMC's 2 nm (N2) mass production order books. Officially, MediaTek's shift from 3 nm into 2 nm is expected to improve chip performance—with an estimated 15% uplift—while reducing power consumption (by ~25%).

Agentic AI is redefining scientific discovery and unlocking research breakthroughs and innovations across industries. Through deepened collaboration, NVIDIA and Microsoft are delivering advancements that accelerate agentic AI-powered applications from the cloud to the PC. At Microsoft Build, Microsoft unveiled Microsoft Discovery, an extensible platform built to empower researchers to transform the entire discovery process with agentic AI. This will help research and development departments across various industries accelerate the time to market for new products, as well as speed and expand the end-to-end discovery process for all scientists.

Microsoft Discovery will integrate the NVIDIA ALCHEMI NIM microservice, which optimizes AI inference for chemical simulations, to accelerate materials science research with property prediction and candidate recommendation. The platform will also integrate NVIDIA BioNeMo NIM microservices, tapping into pretrained AI workflows to speed up AI model development for drug discovery. These integrations equip researchers with accelerated performance for faster scientific discoveries. In testing, researchers at Microsoft used Microsoft Discovery to detect a novel coolant prototype with promising properties for immersion cooling in data centers in under 200 hours, rather than months or years with traditional methods.

Six years ago, developer 1047 Games released the free-to-play Splitgate, an arena-based first-person shooter that allowed players to place portals around maps, adding a fresh strategic layer. Now Splitgate 2 is set to double down on this unique idea with bigger maps, a new class-based system, and the introduction of The Lab, a player-facing version of the team's map creator. Ahead of the open beta opening up on May 22, we sat down with Ian Proulx, CEO and co-founder of 1047 Games, to talk about Splitgate 2's new mechanics and how community feedback and rigorous playtests are helping deliver a sequel that hits the right notes.

Making a sequel to a free-to-play shooter in 2025
When asked how the team is doing in the weeks leading up to the open beta, Proulx's response was succinct and to the point: "It's definitely a bit of a crazy time for us." Splitgate had a team of around 15 people. In contrast, there are about 200 developers working fulltime on Splitgate 2, plus 50 or so outsourced contributors. "We've definitely put a lot of thought and effort into making sure that we have a process that works versus the first game, where everybody was doing a little bit of everything all the time," Proulx added.

Yesterday, Lei Jun—the CEO of Xiaomi—finally introduced his firm's proprietary XRING 01 mobile chipset, via a couple of Weibo posts. In an initial afternoon short blog entry, the executive informed his followers with a happy unveiling: "I would like to share with you a piece of news: Xiaomi's self-developed and designed mobile phone SoC chip, named XRING 01, will be released in late May. Thank you for your support!" About a month ago, the company's oft-rumored return to in-house chip efforts was linked to a major corporate offshoot. The speculated "chip platform department" was likely established a while ago, given early May reports of the division's staff headcount exceeding 1000+. At the time, an "Xring" codename was mentioned by industry tipsters (in China).

In a follow-up "Weibo Text" bulletin, Xiaomi's head honcho recalled older project timelines and technological attempts: "even drinking ice for ten years can't cool your blood! Xiaomi's journey to making chips began in September 2014. Time flies, and more than ten years have passed in the blink of an eye...Figures 2 and 3 are photos of Xiaomi's first chip launch conference in February 2017." Jun's did not provide any hints about the XRING 01 chip's underpinnings. Late 2024 leaks alluded to a reportedly troubled prototype—insiders connected this design to fairly new Arm Cortex architecture, and a TSMC 4 nm "N4P" node process. The vast majority of Xiaomi's modern flagship smartphone devices utilize top-end Qualcomm Snapdragon chipsets. For example, the brand's latest Xiaomi Ultra 15 model is powered by the ubiquitous Snapdragon 8 Elite (Gen 4) platform.

AMD and HUMAIN, Saudi Arabia's new AI enterprise, today announced a landmark agreement to build the world's most open, scalable, resilient, and cost-efficient AI infrastructure, that will power the future of global intelligence through a network of AMD-based AI computing centers stretching from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to the United States. As part of the agreement, the parties will invest up to $10B to deploy 500 megawatts of AI compute capacity over the next five years. The AI superstructure built by AMD and HUMAIN will be open by design, accessible at scale, and optimized to power AI workloads across enterprise, start-up and sovereign markets. HUMAIN will oversee end-to-end delivery, including hyperscale data center, sustainable power systems, and global fiber interconnects, and AMD will provide the full spectrum of the AMD AI compute portfolio and the AMD ROCm open software ecosystem.

"At AMD, we have a bold vision to enable the future of AI everywhere—bringing open, high-performance computing to every developer, AI start-up and enterprise around the world," said Dr. Lisa Su, Chair and CEO, AMD. "Our investment with HUMAIN is a significant milestone in advancing global AI infrastructure. Together, we are building a globally significant AI platform that delivers performance, openness and reach at unprecedented levels." With initial deployments already underway across key global regions, the collaboration is on track to activate multi-exaflop capacity by early 2026, supported by next-gen AI silicon, modular data center zones, and a developer-enablement focused software platform stack built around open standards and interoperability.

NVIDIA today received multiple accolades at COMPUTEX's Best Choice Awards, in recognition of innovation across the company. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 GPU won the Gaming and Entertainment category award; the NVIDIA Quantum-X Photonics InfiniBand switch system won the Networking and Communication category award; NVIDIA DGX Spark won the Computer and System category award; and the NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 system and NVIDIA Cosmos world foundation model development platform won Golden Awards. The awards recognize the outstanding functionality, innovation and market promise of technologies in each category. Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, will deliver a keynote at COMPUTEX on Monday, May 19, at 11 a.m. Taiwan time.

GB200 NVL72 and NVIDIA Cosmos Go Gold
NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 and NVIDIA Cosmos each won Golden Awards. The NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 system connects 36 NVIDIA Grace CPUs and 72 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs in a rack-scale design. It delivers 1.4 exaflops of AI performance and 30 terabytes of fast memory, as well as 30x faster real-time trillion-parameter large language model inference with 25x energy efficiency compared with the NVIDIA H100 GPU. By design, the GB200 NVL72 accelerates the most compute-intensive AI and high-performance computing workloads, including AI training and data processing for engineering design and simulation. NVIDIA Cosmos accelerates physical AI development by enabling developers to build and deploy world foundation models with unprecedented speed and scale.

Hermen Hulst, CEO, Studio Business Group, Sony Interactive Entertainment: "today, I am thrilled to officially unveil a new studio in the PlayStation Studios family. teamLFG originated at Bungie, but has also rallied developers from across the industry to bring to life an ambitious incubation project that I'm very excited about. The studio is now fully formed and ready to be introduced to the world. I'll let teamLFG introduce themselves properly and give a tiny glimpse of what they've been working on."

teamLFG: "Hello, world. It's a delight to meet you, and we're very grateful to be joining PlayStation Studios. Our studio is headquartered in Bellevue, WA, with team members working both on-site and remotely throughout the U.S. and Canada. We are a team composed not just of industry veterans who have shipped titles like Destiny, Halo, League of Legends, Fortnite, Roblox, and Rec Room, but also industry newcomers with fresh creative perspectives and skills. We are passionate about exceptional action-based gameplay, moment-to-moment game feel, and richly social virtual worlds."

Take-Two Interactive—the owner of Rockstar Games—has publicly endorsed the studio's decision to delay the launch of Grand Theft Auto VI into 2026. Following months of insider whispers, long-time franchise fans were not surprised when reading Rockstar's apology. Initially, Grand Theft Auto VI (GTA VI) was pictured as an important system seller—industry experts and analysts theorized a sharp uptake of PlayStation 5 Pro units. Due to the AAA+ title's planned home console-exclusive release, many hardcore gamers would opt for the best available experience—enabled by flagship hardware.

Naturally, the game's publisher was looking forward to massive sale results in 2025—mainly driven by Rockstar's big open world blockbuster. With a revised release date of May 26—within the next financial year—company leadership remains confident about a current GTA VI-less calendar. Strauss Zelnick—Two Interactive Software's chairman and CEO—believes that an upward trajectory is still on the cards: "we support fully Rockstar Games taking additional time to realize their creative vision for Grand Theft Auto VI, which promises to be a groundbreaking, blockbuster entertainment experience that exceeds audience expectations. While we take the movement of our titles seriously and appreciate the vast and deep global anticipation for Grand Theft Auto VI, we remain steadfast in our commitment to excellence. As we continue to release our phenomenal pipeline, we expect to deliver a multi-year period of growth in our business and enhanced value for our shareholders."

Christoph Schell, Intel's chief commercial officer and executive vice president, plans to step down on June 30, according to a recent Securities and Exchange Commission filing. The notice filed on April 28 states Schell is leaving to "pursue another career opportunity" with Kuka Group where he'll take on the CEO role. "Since joining Intel in 2022, Christoph has poured his heart and soul into our business and worked tirelessly in service of our customers," Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan wrote. "He has helped to steer our Sales and Marketing Group (SMG) through a challenging period and built a strong team along the way. I am grateful for his contributions and wish him success in his next role". Kuka Group stands out as a world leader in robotics offering robots, manufacturing cells, software, and cloud-based digital services. This exit comes after Intel reported another quarter of losses and more cost-cutting plans. However, it might not affect CEO Lip-Bu Tan's efforts to reshape the company, which include cutting jobs and simplifying management layers.

Since joining Intel in March 2022 from Hewlett-Packard, where he served seven years in senior management positions, Schell has witnessed Intel's continued financial challenges, including the recent first quarter results showing a net loss of US$800 million on revenue of US$12.7 billion. While the revenue met the upper threshold of previous guidance, Lip-Bu Tan acknowledged in the financial results statement that although "the first quarter was a step in the right direction, there are no quick fixes as we work to get back on a path to gaining market share and driving sustainable growth." Schell's tenure at Intel coincided with a period of leadership transition, having been appointed under former CEO Pat Gelsinger, who resigned in December 2024 after assuming the position in February 2021. Following Schell's departure, the head of America sales, Greg Ernst, is stepping in as the interim leader of Intel's Sales and Marketing Group.

Towerborne is available now in Xbox Game Preview on Xbox Series X|S, Windows PC, Cloud, Game Pass, and as an Xbox Play Anywhere title. It's a big moment for all of us at Stoic (Banner Saga Trilogy), and we wanted to take a moment to talk about our journey so far—and where Towerborne is going next. At its core, Towerborne is a new kind of Looter Brawler—side-scrolling, pick-up-and-play combat fused with deep ARPG progression. You take on the role of an Ace, a spirit-forged hero sworn to defend the Belfry, humanity's last refuge. Venture solo or squad up in online co-op (or couch co-op on Xbox!); every swing, every loot drop, and every Umbra companion you recruit pushes back the darkness beyond those tower walls.

Our release via Xbox Game Preview marks a watershed moment in Towerborne's journey, a game we started building years ago. That early spark of imagination grew into the world you're stepping into today. Yesterday's release also brings a sizable update that deepens progression through the new Class Mastery system, reshapes the world map with dozens of handcrafted missions, and introduces fresh Umbra, legendary gear, and a formidable new foe.