Tech Pulse Daily - January 5, 2026

CES 2026 Day 1: The "Local AI" Hardware Wars

CES 2026 has officially begun, and the theme is unmistakable: Running LLMs Locally. Hardware manufacturers are no longer boasting about gaming FPS; they are boasting about tokens per second (TPS).

NVIDIA RTX 6000 Mobile: Jensen Huang took the stage to reveal the RTX 6000 Ada-Next mobile series. The flagship RTX 6090 Laptop GPU features a massive 48GB of VRAM, specifically designed to fit Llama-4-70B entirely in memory. This is a game-changer for mobile developers who need workstation-class inference on the go.

AMD Strix Halo 2: AMD is countering with pure efficiency. Their new Strix Halo 2 APU uses a unified memory architecture similar to Apple Silicon, offering up to 128GB of shared RAM. Early benchmarks show it beating the M5 Pro in Cinebench R26 while consuming 30% less power.

🚨 Security Alert: "Git-Ransom" Campaign

A sophisticated supply chain attack dubbed "Git-Ransom" has been identified by CrowdStrike. Attackers are exploiting a vulnerability in a popular (but unmaintained) VS Code productivity extension with over 2 million downloads.

The malicious update scrapes local `.env` files and `id_rsa` keys, uploading them to a C2 server. Over 40,000 private repositories are estimated to be compromised.