Benchmark
The latest Benchmark coverage — news, analysis, and updates from the WindowsNews.AI desk.
Intel Expands APO Support to 15 More Games, But Only a Niche Will See Real Gains
Intel has pushed out a significant update to its Application Optimization (APO) software for Windows 11, adding profiles for 15 new games and refining thread scheduling on its hybrid CPUs. The update...
Microsoft’s MAI-Voice-1 Generates 1 Minute of Audio in Under a Second, Launching In-House AI Offensive
Microsoft has quietly launched two proprietary foundation models—MAI-Voice-1 for speech synthesis and MAI-1-preview for text generation—signaling a deliberate pivot away from its deep dependency...
Alibaba Cloud’s AI Surge: 26% Revenue Jump, $52B Capex, and the Battle for Asia’s Cloud Future Against Azure and AWS
Alibaba’s Cloud Intelligence group just posted a 26% revenue surge to RMB 33.4 billion ($4.66 billion) in the first quarter of fiscal 2026, propelled by AI product revenues that have now grown at...
Inside Microsoft's Quantum Cloud Gambit: Logical Qubits, Majorana Chips, and an €80M Bet on Denmark
Satya Nadella didn't mince words on Microsoft's July 30, 2025 earnings call: “The next big accelerator in the cloud will be Quantum.” The statement, paired with the world's first operational...
Microsoft Clears KB5063878 of SSD Failures, but Uncertainty Persists
Microsoft has officially concluded that its August 2025 security update for Windows 11 (KB5063878) is not the cause of a spate of alarming SSD failure reports, but the declaration has done little to...
Microsoft Embeds Custom HSM Chip in Every Azure Server to Slash Latency and Boost Security
Microsoft has quietly shifted a cornerstone of cloud security from centralized appliance clusters into the very silicon of every new Azure server. At the Hot Chips 2025 conference, the company...
Microsoft’s Hidden Power Plan Eliminates Micro-Latency on Windows Workstations — Here’s How to Enable It Safely
A concealed power profile buried inside Windows 10 and Windows 11 can slash micro-latency by ruthlessly disabling energy-saving features. Known as the Ultimate Performance power plan, it first...
Microsoft’s MAI-Voice-1 Generates a Minute of Audio in Under a Second, Debuts in Copilot Today
Microsoft has quietly shipped two in-house AI models into consumer-facing Copilot experiences, marking a dramatic pivot from pure producer of cloud infrastructure for OpenAI to a builder of its own...
xAI Drops Grok Code Fast 1: Agentic Coding Now in VS Code at $1.50/M Output Tokens
Elon Musk's xAI just launched Grok Code Fast 1, a coding-first, tool-aware model purpose-built for agentic development workflows. The model lands inside Visual Studio Code and third-party extensions...
GPT-5’s Split Reception: Benchmarks Soar, but Users Revolt Over ‘Corporate Beige Zombie’ Tone
OpenAI’s latest flagship model, GPT-5, has landed with a dual identity. On one side, it posts measurable wins in reasoning, math, and code generation, earning praise from benchmark aggregators and...
Microsoft Debuts In-House AI Models MAI-Voice-1 and MAI-1-Preview, Shifting Dependence from OpenAI
Microsoft has officially entered the in-house foundation model arena, unveiling MAI-Voice-1 and MAI-1-preview, two AI models built to power Copilot and Azure services while reducing the company’s...
Microsoft Rolls Out In-House MAI Voice and MoE Models to Slash Copilot Costs
Microsoft has taken the wraps off its first homegrown, production-grade AI models—MAI-Voice-1, a speech generator that can allegedly synthesize a full minute of audio in under one second on a...