Top 5 weekly: Intel Battlemage leaks galore, a CPU created in Excel, and more

Did you manage to catch all the cool tech news that happened over the last week? I can’t blame you if you didn’t; with Thanksgiving now come and gone, the dust settling from Black Friday, the Cyber Monday deals on the horizon, and the Christmas bells ringing in the distance, it’s pretty easy to lose track of everything happening. Which is a shame, because this week saw a ton of great news hit the grapevine.

If you were too busy with everything to keep tabs on the week’s news, don’t fret; here are all the cool things that happened.

Please let it work

Microsoft’s new plan for Windows 11 devices is Companion apps. These pop up on your Start menu or Taskbar and help you perform basic tasks. It seems that Microsoft is creating a Companion app called “File Search,” which aims to hunt down files both on your PC and your cloud services. You can even search for keywords in documents and names of collaborators. Let’s just hope it does what Microsoft says it does.

Phenomenal SBC power, itty-bitty living space

As is tradition, the Raspberry Pi 5 has been squashed down into a smaller form factor to create this generation’s Compute Module. It’s designed to fit into smaller gaps and is more modular than the main Pi 5 board, so it’s mostly intended for industry use. However, there’s nothing stopping you from grabbing one for your own projects.

A peek into what could be

Well, Windows 12 ended up being Windows 11 24H2. But hey, we can still imagine what a “Windows 12” would have looked like, with a new UI and system design. We’ve seen people take their own shot as to what they believe Windows 12 would look like, or at least, what they would want it to look like. Now, someone has created a Windows 12 Lite concept video that shows a re-imagining of the operating system with a whole new UI.

We’re gonna need a bigger formula

In another entry under “People using Office apps for things that they really shouldn’t be used for,” someone created a working CPU in Excel. In fact, this is the second time they’ve achieved this, albeit the first design only managed to achieve 1-2Hz of processing power. The second version increased this to 12-14Hz, a huge jump over the previous design. As such, if you’re curious about the inner workings of a CPU, the creator’s project video is well worth a watch.

It’s coming real soon

To round off the week’s digest, we have the flurry of Battlemage GPU leaks that happened over the week. We first learned that they’ll sell for around $250 and that they should be announced on December 3rd. Then, Intel made a post on X officially confirming the December 3rd date, and not long after, on that same day, a leaker revealed the specifications we can expect from these new graphics cards. Will Intel take the fight to Nvidia and AMD, or will it be a novelty at best? We won’t have long until we find out.