Apple's desktop and notebook processors traditionally lead the pack in single-thread workloads, as industry-leading single-thread performance has been the company's focus for a long time.

Intel has consistently pushed the boundaries of processor technology and has delivered some of the best CPUs we've ever seen. That level of success doesn't happen overnight. Leading Linux publication Phoronix tested 15 mobile Intel processors over 18 years to show the evolution of processor performance from the Penryn architecture to the cutting-edge Panther Lake.

AMD ended 2025 with fanfare as it managed to increase its market shares across all major CPU product segments, according to Mercury Research, and achieved a 29.2% share of all x86 processors shipped in the fourth quarter, which is an all-time record for the company.

The tech press has been lit up like Chernobyl reactor #4 for months about shortages in memory, solid-state drives, and hard drives. The shortages are driven by explosive AI demand, and the latest report says that up to 70 percent of the memory produced worldwide in 2026 will be consumed by data centers. However, those specific topics have yet to be part of the global zeitgeist.

CES may have started out as the Consumer Electronics Show, but it has never been solely about consumers. That was true before the AI boom, and it’s even more true today. Jaded tech journalists who’ve prowled the halls for a decade (and usually more) don’t want to hear the AI talk, but the topic is so pervasive at the event that even hopeful skeptics can turn to cynicism.

The AMD Ryzen 5 5800X — launched on November 5, 2020 — recently hit the top spot in Amazon UK’s list of best-selling CPUs. The refreshed 5800XT, which arrived in July last year, is likewise in the top ten most popular processors in Amazon US, with the chip sitting in fourth place.

The computer manufacturer Framework has announced price increases of up to 50% for DDR5 memory upgrades on the company's Framework Laptop DIY Edition—the price adjustment results from the ongoing memory shortage

Intel faces serious threat in the laptop market, not just from its nemesis AMD but also Qualcomm and Apple, thanks to the arrival of high-performance, highly efficient ARM cores that have forced the chipmaker to up every part of its game to compete.

Micro Center just launched a brand-new gaming PC featuring the new AMD Ryzen 5 7500X3D. The 7500X3D is seemingly the most affordable X3D chip from the Ryzen 7000 series

Apple's processors are notorious for their high performance when running in their native environments: macOS and iOS. However, an experiment conducted by NPacific, a Chinese enthusiast (via HXL), shows that Apple's latest M5 processor can destroy high-end CPUs from AMD and Intel while running Windows 11 in virtualization mode.