Processor design over the last few decades has moved toward RISC processors that aim to implement a few simple operations very efficiently. For a while, though, the trend was toward ever-more-complex CISC designs that let programmers implement complex behaviors using as few instructions as possible. Few processors took this approach further than the Intel iAPX432. This hyper-CISC processor was a commercial failure, largely due to its notoriously poor performance, but [MarkTheQuasiEngineer]’s benchmark suggests that this notoriety wasn’t totally deserved.

The first step before running a benchmark was to build a computer around the processor. The iAPX432 was implemented in three chips, two of which acted as the general data processor (GDP), and one of which handled input and output. [Mark] built an SBC (design and code here) that houses the two GDP chips and an FPGA for I/O. The 432 did have a well-deserved reputation for efficiently turning electricity into heat, and the original voltage regulator failed rather quickly.

The 432 was designed to use machine code which was almost a high-level language, with built-in object-oriented programming. It had over 200 operators, some of which implemented complex object-oriented operations, and a wide variety of data types, but it had no directly-accessible general-purpose registers. In addition to the lack of registers, it also had a very complex addressing system, allowing both direct and indirect addressing. For better performance, [Mark] used direct addressing.

For the benchmark, [Mark] implemented the Spigot algorithm to calculate the value of Pi. The results were somewhat surprising: calculating 2048 digits, it beat his previous retro-processor benchmarks; an Intel 8086 running the same algorithm took 2.5 times as long. Based on the results of this hand-written code, [Mark] speculates that the 432’s poor performance had more to do with poor compiler optimization than with the fundamental design.

We’ve covered some of the history of this troubled chip before. For a similarly ambitious but ill-fated Intel project, check out the history of Itanium.

I recently had the opportunity to test out a wearable from Bee, the AI wrist gadget that Amazon acquired last year and has since updated with a number of new features.

Like other AI wearables, Bee is designed as a kind personal assistant: it records, transcribes, and summarizes the user’s conversations throughout the day, providing an ongoing note-taking capability that’s useful if you’re forgetful or just want to be more organized about your life. If you sync it with your calendar, it can also send you alerts and reminders about things you’re supposed to do throughout the day.

TechCrunch has written about Bee before, and the way it works is pretty simple: the user powers it up, puts it on, syncs it with the Bee mobile app, and enters some basic personal information. Bee has a built-in recorder that can be turned on and off by clicking the wearable’s button. When Bee is recording, a green light flashes. When it’s not, that green light goes off. After a conversation has been recorded, the app will create an automated summary that is easy to read, as well as an entire transcription of the conversation.

Your mileage may vary on how exciting (or not) this whole conceit is. The problem for me is that I am something of a privacy enthusiast. In a world where the average person is beset from all sides by constant digital surveillance, I appreciate any opportunity I can get to not be recorded. Therefore, the idea of walking around with an eavesdropping gizmo strapped to my wrist 24/7 was not particularly appealing.

Yet, even I have to admit that — in the right context — Bee could have a lot of potential to help organize your life.

Bee really comes through in the context of professional engagements. If your day is full of meetings and you have trouble keeping it all straight, Bee could be a moderately competent assistant.

During a business-related phone call this week, I activated Bee after getting confirmation that I could record our meeting. Afterward, the app faithfully regurgitated a summary of the conversation, helpfully breaking down each segment of our talk so that I could review it later without having to re-listen to our entire conversation. This was undeniably helpful, although it should be noted that this isn’t something that’s markedly different than those offered by other transcription services, like Otter or Granola and others, which also offer transcriptions and auto-generated summaries.

That said, you could envision a situation in which a professional who has to navigate between various meetings throughout the day would be well-served by this device. You could just keep Bee running throughout the day and, later, review the conversation summaries for anything you’re not clear about.

Bee does a relatively good job at summarizing conversations, but the actual transcripts offered by the wearable can be a bit of a mess. Previous critics have noted that you usually have to manually enter the names of other speakers, as Bee doesn’t always know who is talking. During my conversation, I noticed that it had also omitted certain sections of our chat — nothing huge, but it wasn’t a complete account of everything that had been said.

I also took Bee to my semi-weekly movie night with my friends and left it running throughout the night. Given the fact that we watched Reservoir Dogs, I was mildly afraid that the wearable would mistake all of the vulgar carnage for real-life bloodshed and potentially trigger some sort of internal alarm. However, Bee knew — basically — what was happening. The wearable figured out that we were watching a movie and, in the summary of events afterward, the wearable labeled the conversation “Tarantino Film Scene Analysis.”

While Bee shows early promise as a professional tool, I would not want this thing recording me in my personal life. Weirdly enough, Bee has largely been marketed as a product for personal use. To be comfortable with that, you have to be comfortable with Bee having access to a majority of both your offline and digital life.

Indeed, to work well, Bee needs expansive mobile permissions — including access to your location, photos, phone contacts, calendar, and mobile notifications. You can also share your health data with it — should you, for whatever reason, want it to know about your sleep patterns or your resting heart rate.

The large accumulation of data Bee collects is stored in the cloud, which — again, for the digital privacy enthusiast — presents its own concerns. In a message to tech YouTuber Becca Farsace, Bee apparently unveiled a demo of the device running entirely locally. Were the company able to produce such a device, I would be thoroughly impressed — and might even consider buying one. That said, Amazon hasn’t offered any update on those plans.

As for Bee’s digital privacy protections, the company says that it offers encryption to protect user data — both at rest and in-transit. In its privacy policy, the company states that it has “implemented technical and organizational security measures designed to protect the security of any personal information” that the company processes. Bee also claims that it undergoes “rigorous third-party security audits” and employs continuous security monitoring. That all sounds quite good, although it’s worth noting that Amazon — like many large tech companies — has been subject to the occasional data security issue or two (not exactly surprising for a company that governs as much of the global cloud environment as it does, but still).

In short, Bee is a curious piece of hardware that, given some time and some tweaking, could have some promising professional applications further down the road. As a digital assistant for your personal life, however, it might prove to be a little too invasive for some users.

Offbeat

A French engineer has declared war on AWS, Google and Microsoft using AI-generated sea shanties, satirical poetry, and a multilingual protest campaign

A French SRE has given Amazon, Google, and Microsoft until September to fix cloud lock-in or face an endless barrage of AI-generated protest songs, satirical poetry, and Finnish polka.

Amine Raiti, an infrastructure architect and SRE currently working at a European Central Bank-regulated financial institution, has launched what may be the least conventional anti-cloud campaign in enterprise IT history: a multilingual pressure operation called “Operation Dindon,” complete with satirical poetry, orchestral music, K-pop, and a fictional turkey trapped in cloud dependency.

His demands are fairly simple: let companies cancel multi-year cloud commitments when business tanks, stop charging eye-watering egress fees to move customer data around, and make it possible to leave proprietary cloud services without detonating the IT budget.

Speaking to The Register, Raiti claims one AWS NAT Gateway setup costs roughly €6,700 ($7,777) annually for functionality that Linux admins have been handling with iptables since the late 1990s. He also points to managed Kubernetes pricing he says can exceed €14,000 ($16,251) a year.

Complaints about hyperscaler pricing usually stay confined to conversations between infrastructure teams, the occasional furious LinkedIn post, regulators and Reg readers. 

Raiti took a slightly different approach, producing a 14-part satirical series called The Legend of Dindon, centered around a fictional turkey who locks himself into cloud dependency and cannot escape, with each episode targeting a different cloud pricing or lock-in practice.

Episodes include The Managed Mirage, The Highway to Hell (The AWS NAT Gateway Autopsy), and The Turkey Who Plucked Himself in the Cloud, proving that cloud resentment has finally evolved into performance art.

From there, the campaign evolves from LinkedIn storytelling into a formal public ultimatum aimed directly at the hyperscalers.

Earlier this month, Raiti published what he calls an “Iron Ultimatum” in 11 languages directed at the three hyperscalers. If they agree to meaningful reforms, he says he will publish a celebratory “Diwan” praising their wisdom. If not, the AI-generated campaign continues indefinitely.

According to Raiti, Operation Dindon now includes 50 AI-generated songs spanning opera, gospel, K-pop, sea shanties, Finnish polka, Raï, and Chopin nocturnes, all allegedly produced in around two minutes per track for less than €50 a month.

Raiti says the idea for Operation Dindon came from his time in infrastructure leadership roles at a French adtech company. He says the business was tied to multi-year cloud commitments that continued even as revenues fell and staff were laid off.

Raiti does not directly accuse the cloud providers of causing the layoffs and describes the account as his own view of events. But he says that watching cloud costs continue to tick along while jobs disappeared was the point when vendor lock-in stopped sounding like an abstract IT problem.

The hyperscalers haven’t publicly responded. There are still several months remaining before the September deadline, giving the industry plenty of time to prepare for the possibility that the next phase of cloud criticism may arrive in the form of AI-generated sea shanties about vendor lock-in. ®

The internet is now a must-have for streaming movies, shopping for deals online and working. You likely have an opinion about your internet service provider, and we want to hear it — the good and the bad. 

We’re bringing back People’s Picks to ask you which internet service provider you can count on. During the month of May, you can take our 2-minute survey to share your thoughts. The top picks will make it to our roundup, so be sure to check back in a few weeks to see if your favorite made the list.

Watch this: 5G From the Sky: New Internet Infrastructure Takes Flight

03:24

Why we want to hear from you

Speed test results and price comparisons only tell half the story. How the service holds up during peak hours, reliability and customer service are things you experience, and only you can speak to.

“An internet connection is like electricity or water — an absolutely essential utility, but one you really only notice when it’s not working. I’m excited to learn what real people actually value in their internet providers. It’s simple enough to compare speeds and prices when shopping around, but what is it like to actually live with it every day?” says Joe Supan, CNET’s principal writer and broadband expert.

Whether you live in a big city with lots of options or in a rural area where satellite is your only option, we want to know which provider you use and what you think of it.

How to make your voice heard

The survey is open during May and takes just a few minutes to complete. After we gather enough information, we’ll tally the results and publish the winners.

Looking for a new provider? Check out our list of the best internet providers to see what we think.

GlobalData’s count puts the country well clear of the rest of Europe and inside the global top five, but more than 40% of the total came from just three companies: Nscale, Wayve, and Ineffable Intelligence.

UK-domiciled companies raised $10.5bn of venture capital between January and April 2026, roughly double the figure for the same period last year, according to research published by GlobalData on Monday.

Deal volume was down by about 2% year on year, which is the more revealing of the two numbers; the value increase is sitting almost entirely in the size of a handful of late-stage rounds.

Three of those rounds, the firm says, account for more than 40% of the total. Nscale, the British AI infrastructure operator backed by Nvidia, closed a $2bn Series C in March at a $14.6bn valuation, the largest Series C in European history.

Wayve, the London-based self-driving company, raised $1.2bn in February at an $8.6bn valuation, with Microsoft, Nvidia, Uber, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, and Stellantis on the cap table.

The 💜 of EU tech

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Ineffable Intelligence, the AI start-up set up in late 2025 by former DeepMind researcher David Silver, raised $1.1bn at seed in April, at a $5.1bn valuation, in what is now Europe’s largest-ever seed round.

GlobalData counts 14 deals at or above $100m for the four-month period, of which three crossed the billion-dollar line. The matching period in 2025 had none.

Aurojyoti Bose, the firm’s lead analyst, framed the print as a function of compressed timing rather than a broader base widening: “Total funding surpassed the $10bn milestone in just four months this year, a marked acceleration versus 2025, when it took nine months to reach the same level. A major driver for this value surge was the announcement of some big-ticket deals.”

The country sits comfortably ahead of the rest of Europe on both deal count and value, and inside the global top five, GlobalData says. Its share of global VC deal volume is about 7%, and its share of global value about 3%.

The reading is consistent with the wider European pattern over the same period, in which capital has concentrated at the top of the cap-table stack, late-stage AI infrastructure, foundation-model labs, autonomy, and thinned out at the lower-mid market, which is where the year-on-year deal-count decline appears to have come from.

Two of the three billion-dollar deals also drew direct UK state participation. The British Business Bank invested in Wayve alongside Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Baillie Gifford, and Schroders Capital; Ineffable received backing from the UK’s Sovereign AI Fund and the British Business Bank, alongside Sequoia, Lightspeed, Nvidia, DST Global, Index, and Google. The state’s hand in the headline number is, at this point, explicit.

Bose closed with a caution on whether this concentrates or distributes: “The UK’s ability to sustain this funding momentum will depend on whether late-stage capital deployment broadens beyond a handful of outsized transactions into a deeper pipeline of growth-stage companies.”

On the current four-month sample, that has not yet happened. Total value crossed $10bn unusually fast; volume did not. The next two quarters will show whether the second number begins to follow the first.

Conversations about AI governance rarely drift toward children’s soccer games, meditation routines or the pressure of representation in corporate leadership, but then again, Zendesk Chief Legal Officer Shana Simmons isn’t your typical C-suite exec.

Opening up over breakfast at the company’s annual Relate customer conference, our conversation about AI regulation and enterprise governance quickly turned to empathy, authenticity and identity.

As we get out of the house, the gear-obsessed WIRED Reviews team is writing about our favorite bags and EDCs. Today, reviewer Boutayna Chokrane raves about her love for her Lululemon gym bag. You can also check out other Bag Check stories where WIRED writers share their carryall of choice.

I have long had a soft spot for messenger bags. There’s a retro Silicon Valley vibe to the crossbody that I respect: It implies you move fast, travel light, and keep your world compartmentalized. The unfortunate practical reality of many a messenger bag, though, is chronic neck and shoulder pain. With all of its weight relying on one strap, a single shoulder is left to bear all the burden. After a few blocks adorned with a messenger, you may feel that your style choice has transformed into a full-on punishment. After years of testing various incarnations of messenger bag—including micro slings and cavernous totes—I’d made peace with this trade-off. Beauty is pain, after all.

Then I met the comfort-forward, durable, and compact-yet-cavernous Lululemon 3-in-1 Duffle.

True to its name, it’s a multi-use transport system that is easy to reconfigure when my commute demands a different carry. You can grab it by the top handles, sling it across your body when you need your hands, or detach the shoulder strap and wrap it around your yoga mat to use it as a stand-alone mat carrier. No matter how you task it to carry your stuff, rest assured the bag’s design promises utility and comfort: The strap is cushioned enough to spare your shoulder, resilient enough to handle the load of your gym gear, and springy enough to double as a stretching strap. Every component of the duffel has a reason to exist, and some of them even have two.

I’ve been toting this duffel for the gym four days a week since January 2025, which is about as real-world a test as it gets. It has endured Chicago at its most extreme: sleet, wet snow, and torrential rain. The water-repellent nylon shrugs off all elements without any fanfare. The bag dries fast, resists grime, and—most impressively to me—doesn’t hold onto odor. Trust me, I’ve pushed that boundary more than once with sweaty clothes after hot Pilates and have found the included drawstring pouch effectively quarantines everything.

It’s also low-maintenance: After a trip to the beach, a couple of quick shakes cleared out any memory of sand. This duffel requires blessedly minimal upkeep, save for the occasional spot clean, making it a refreshingly low-effort option for commuters who don’t need another chore on their to-do list.

The design is deceptively compact. Externally, it presents as a modest and understated gym bag. But peek inside, and you’ll immediately see that this duffel, with its shocking 30-liter capacity, is Poppins-esque. There’s a dedicated shoe compartment on the side that accommodates up to a men’s size 14, though I prefer to use the bottom section for footwear to keep the main cavity flexible. There’s a slot for a 24-ounce water bottle, interior pockets for keys, AirPods, and other small essentials that tend to disappear into bag voids, and there’s still room for a change of clothes, a Theragun, and a dopp kit. Nothing about this bag feels over-engineered, but nothing feels missing, either.

The 71,000-square-metre Hagastaden campus, signed with Atrium Ljungberg and Castellum, ends more than two decades in the suburb once branded Sweden’s Silicon Valley.

Ericsson is moving its global headquarters out of Kista. The Swedish telecoms-equipment maker said on Monday that, starting in 2028, it will gradually relocate its Stockholm operations, including the HQ, R&D functions, group functions, and the Imagine Studio showcase space, to a new city campus in the Hagastaden district, north of central Stockholm.

The numbers attached to the move are substantial. Across new leases with Atrium Ljungberg and Castellum, plus a Castellum agreement Ericsson signed earlier for the Infinity property, the company will occupy roughly 71,000 square metres in Hagastaden across six buildings.

Atrium Ljungberg’s portion alone, three buildings totalling 58,000 square metres on a 15-year contract, is described by the landlord as the largest office lease in Swedish history and the largest known office deal in Europe so far this year.

Annual rent to Atrium Ljungberg lands at about 360m kronor ($39m) at 2026 levels.

Castellum’s new pieces, the 9,500-square-metre Emerald House and the 3,500-square-metre Jubileumshuset, carry an annual rental value of roughly 80m kronor, according to the company’s release.

That sits on top of the 24,000-square-metre Infinity contract Castellum signed previously, expected to be ready by late 2027.

Börje Ekholm, Ericsson’s chief executive, framed the move in talent terms.

“With a vibrant location in the heart of the city’s technology collaboration and innovation community, including easy access to our changing business ecosystem, partners and decision makers, Hagastaden is clearly best-placed to address our future operations,” he said in the company’s statement.

“A thriving city campus will also strengthen our attraction for the top talent of the future.”

The translation is that the Kista calculation no longer works. The suburb in northern Stockholm has spent thirty years marketing itself as Sweden’s Silicon Valley, with Ericsson’s presence as the central evidence.

That story has been deteriorating for several years. Office vacancy rates in Kista ran at 26.7% in the first quarter of 2026, more than double the central Stockholm rate, according to Colliers data cited by Bloomberg.

The facility-management firm Coor Service Management announced its own departure from Kista in late 2024, citing security concerns; reports of organised-crime activity in the surrounding area have become a recurring feature of Swedish business coverage.

Ericsson’s lease did not name those factors, but the campus calculus is unmistakable.

The deal is a clear positive for the two landlords. Atrium Ljungberg shares rose as much as 5.1% on Monday, the most since April 8, and Castellum gained 2.1%.

Pareto Securities analyst Viktor Byrenius told Bloomberg the agreements were “a sign of strength” for Atrium Ljungberg, which has been working through elevated vacancy across the Stockholm region.

The Hagastaden lease materially shifts that occupancy story for the next decade and a half.

For Ericsson, the move comes against a quieter recent set of financial prints. The company narrowly missed Q1 profit estimates in April, as the North American 5G upgrade cycle that drove 2024 and early 2025 began to unwind.

Headcount in Sweden has been declining; the company cut roughly 1,200 jobs locally last year.

The Hagastaden campus is being designed for a smaller, denser, more central operation than the sprawling Kista footprint it replaces, which is its own form of strategy statement.

Move-in is phased and slow. Ericsson said the process will begin in early 2028 and run for several years.

The Infinity building is due late 2027; the rest of the Hagastaden campus is still under construction, on a deck built above one of the city’s major highways. By the time the relocation is complete, Ericsson’s last fixed link to Kista will, in practical terms, be gone.

On the Find X9 Ultra, the primary camera has a 200-megapixel 1/1.28-inch sensor. With a low f/1.5 aperture possible, this is an incredibly versatile camera, built to take in light and work well even in difficult shooting conditions. There’s also a pair of telephoto cameras. The first has a 200MP sensor and can zoom up to 3x (70mm equivalent) for portrait photos and general-purpose shots, while the showstopper is an ‘ultra’ telephoto, capable of 10x zoom at 50MP.

It’s rare, but we’ve seen 10x zoom in smartphones, including, briefly, Samsung’s Galaxy S23 Ultra. However, they weren’t paired with such high-resolution sensors. This offers more detail in shots, as well as the ability to digitally crop down to get even closer to the subject — although you won’t need to nearly as often. The Find X9 Ultra also has a 50MP ultra-wide camera and a 3.2MP multispectral sensor to strengthen white balance and color accuracy.

Mat Smith for Engadget

However, Oppo’s innovative 10x telephoto is the most thrilling part of the phone’s penta camera setup. The 10x optical zoom also opens up the possibility of 20x lossless zoom, all before we start attaching Oppo’s teleconvertor lens. It also has sensor-shift stabilization to improve clarity and reduce the chances of blur. (Vivo has its own solution, which we’ll get to in a minute.)

The 3x telephoto camera is a convenient midpoint between the main camera and its huge sensor and the incredible range of the 10x telephoto. However, Oppo gets a little too keen on computational photography boosting here and I’d often get shots with ghostly outlines, especially of human subjects. Overly aggressive digital sharpening also made some images look unnatural.

Mat Smith for Engadget

Within the camera app (and arguably too many shooting modes), Oppo’s collaboration with Hasselblad gives shooters a Master Mode that blissfully strips away the computational AI tricks and augmentations. This means that while you won’t get that AI nip-tuck on telephoto shots, you also won’t get nightmarish low-res faces or scrambled alien lettering. I broadly preferred it, though I occasionally missed the better low-light performance of the AI-boosted basic photo mode.

Mat Smith for Engadget

The Vivo X300 Ultra has the exact same 1/1.12-inch 200MP main camera sensor, although it has a narrow 35mm focal length, which could be argued to be more “cinematic’. Its aperture can go as low as f/1.85, losing again to its Oppo rival.

The X300 Ultra ultrawide camera, however, performs head and shoulders above the Find X9 Ultra’s version. Unlike most smartphone ultra-wide cameras, which I cynically view as a lazy effort by companies to add another camera to their smartphones, Vivo went to town. To start, Vivo added optical image stabilization (OIS), which is rare for this focal length. This, combined with a 50MP sensor, means images look crisper and more detailed than those from rival devices, which typically use lower-res sensors.

To Oppo’s credit, its ultrawide camera isn’t bad. The Find X9 Ultra also has a 50MP camera sensor and a lower f/2.0 lens. However, the sensor isn’t as big (the X300 Ultra’s 1/1.28-inch sensor is nearly twice the physical size of the Find X9 Ultra’s 1/1.95-inch sensor ) and it lacks built-in OIS. There’s also a lot less lens flaring on light sources with the Vivo phone, likely due to Zeiss’ anti-reflective lens treatment.

Mat Smith for Engadget

The X300 Ultra’s telephoto (another 200MP sensor) maxes out at 3.7x zoom without a teleconverter and while you can crop down from that for more ‘zoom’, it loses a lot of detail and adds a lot of artifacts in the process. Fortunately, for those looking to punch in further, Vivo has you covered.