Hard-On-Tech

AMD acquires AI chip startup Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models into silicon

The Hot Take: That sounds alot like an ASIC...

In AMD’s latest bid to upset Nvidia's dominance in AI hardware, the House of Zen has acquired AI chip company Taalas, which bakes model weights directly into silicon in a process that promises to boost inference performance by an order of magnitude or more. The deal, announced at market close on Thursday, appears to be framed in much the same context as Nvidia’s $20 billion licensing deal with Groq last December: make high-performance “premium” inference services prized for AI agents, like code assistants, faster and cheaper to run. AMD didn’t disclose the terms of the deal, but from what we understand, this is an actual acquisition rather than an acquihire. Founded in 2023 and based in Toronto, Taalas’ approach to inference is radically different from conventional GPUs or the dataflow architectures that underpin Groq LPUs or Cerebras' waferscale accelerators. A model-specific integrated circuit The startup’s chips don’t rely on HBM to store the model weights but rather etch them directly into the silicon. In a sense, Taalas’ chips are really model-specific integrated circuits or MSICs. Perhaps more importantly, Taalas’ tech isn’t just conceptual. In February, the startup revealed its first test chip fabbed on TSMC’s 6nm process tech, which it called the HC1. Initial benchmarks saw the chip serve Meta’s Llama 3.1 8B at a blistering 16,960 tokens a second — when announced last February, that was 48x faster than Nvidia's GPUs and 8.5x faster than Cerebras' accelerators. While Llama 3.1 is ancient by today’s standards, having made its debut all the way back in mid 2024, the reticle-sized chip was really intended to prove the concept. Taalas has been incredibly secretive about how its chips actually work, but we know its processors are comprised of two main regions: the mask-ROM recall fabric where model weights are etched, and the SRAM recall fabric where KV caches and fine-tuning adapters are stored. For its second-gen HC2 chip due out this summer, Taalas aims to boost parameter count to 20 billion parameters. That might not sound like much, but just like with GPUs for larger models, weights are simply distributed across multiple accelerators using pipeline parallelism. At 20 billion parameters per chip, you’d need just 50 accelerators to support a trillion-parameter model, and AMD just so happens to have a rack-scale compute platform and in-house system design team that can comfortably accommodate that. That’s quite a bit more space and power efficient than Nvidia’s recently unveiled LPX systems, which would need a few dozen GPUs and at least 2,000 Groq LPUs to serve the same model. From what we understand, AMD intends to pair its Instinct-based Helios racks with chips based on Taalas’ tech, which implies a disaggregated architecture where compute-heavy prompt processing is done on GPUs while token generation is offloaded to Taalas-based accelerators. It’s also possible that AMD could adopt a sort of tick-tock cadence in which customers initially deploy and validate models on Instinct accelerators and, once they’re satisfied with them, transition to Taalas accelerators. We can only speculate at this point, but here’s what AMD’s SVP of AI, Vamsi Boppana, had to say about it in a canned statement: “AMD is building a full-stack AI platform that gives customers the flexibility to deploy the right compute solutions for every AI workload." You better really love that model While the tech is blazing fast, if you hadn’t already figured it out, it comes with a pretty substantial downside. Once the chips are deployed you’re stuck with that model. Any change bigger than something like a LoRA adapter is going to require a re-spin of the chips, which is not only expensive but time-consuming. Nearly four years into the AI boom, new models are rolling out on a nearly monthly basis. In order to benefit from Taalas’ tech, AMD’s customers are going to have to be really sure about their choice of models, which will be easier for some than others. However, if the startup is to be believed, the situation isn’t quite as bad as it sounds. While new models will require a re-spin, it doesn’t require starting over from scratch. Instead, just two layers of metal need to be changed, which is a lot cheaper and less time-consuming. With that said, we strongly suspect this tech will largely be deployed by AI model devs, their infrastructure providers, and a handful of inference providers. In an interview with our sibling site The Next Platform in February, the company suggested that etching a model's weights into silicon is 100x less expensive than training a frontier model. AMD is certainly in a position to negotiate those deals. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta are all major Instinct customers. Given the close working relationship between the model houses and the chip designer, it wouldn't be surprising to see a GPT or Claude deployed on a combination of Taalas and instinct accelerators. The tech also has implications for model development. One of the ways developers have cut down on hallucinations is by trading time for accuracy. The technique, called test-time scaling, is quite simple in practice, and involves allowing a model to “think” for longer before responding. One drawback of test-time scaling is that it consumes substantially more tokens, which makes it expensive, and means users have to wait longer for the chatbot, code assistant, or agent to respond. If AMD’s Taalas buy can drive down the cost per token and boost output speeds by 10x or 20x, model devs may opt to extend the reasoning time even further. In any case, we may not have to wait long to see just how Taalas fits into AMD’s broader vision. Subject to regulatory approval, the deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter. ®

Proxmox ports itself to Arm with help from Nvidia and Supermicro

The Hot Take: Interesting...

Proxmox Server Solutions, the company behind the open source Proxmox virtualization stack, has announced a port of its flagship Virtual Environment to the Arm CPU architecture – and a collaboration with Nvidia and Supermicro that made it happen. The outfit’s announcement states that it can now run on 64-bit ARM (arm64/aarch64), but the only fully supported platforms are Nvidia’s Grace Hopper and Vera. Proxmox will also provide “best-effort support” for other UEFI-based ARMv9-A or newer hardware, and says ARMv8-A “generally works as well”. If you fancy trying it on a single-board Arm machine like the Raspberry Pi, you’re out of luck because Proxmox’s stack won’t work on such boxes. You may, however, soon be able to run Proxmox on other Arm servers because the company says it is also “working together with further enterprise server vendors on their ARM efforts and hope to expand the list of officially supported hardware platforms in the future.” Proxmox’s press release says the release is the product of a “technical collaboration with NVIDIA and Supermicro” and revealed the software “is already operating across select enterprise production environments.” The company said it aimed the release at “organizations building modern and energy-efficient data centers.” Technical collaborations don’t come from nowhere: Vendors get them going when they see customer demand. This release therefore suggests Nvidia and Supermicro customers want to virtualize their AI infrastructure. Nvidia has a long partnership with VMware, the server virtualization market leader in terms of revenue and technical chops. Last year, the Broadcom business unit told The Register its customers are in no rush to adopt Arm servers in their datacenters or in hybrid clouds that work across x86 servers and Arm-based cloud instances. VMware does, however, think the prevalence of Arm-powered machines on the network edge, where they are increasingly used to run AI workloads, has caught the eye of some customers. It is therefore moving slowly to port its products to Arm. Nvidia, Supermicro, and Proxmox are clearly hearing and/or responding to different voices. Analyst firm IDC recently found non-x86 servers account for almost half of all spending, but very few enterprise server vendors make Arm-based servers. HPE and Supermicro are the most prominent dabblers, but there’s little evidence either company has won significant sales. The Arm surge instead comes from hyperscale clouds like AWS, Microsoft, and Google – all of which have created their own CPUs based on the architecture. Proxmox is not alone in supporting server virtualization on Arm. Chinese virtualization player Sangfor is there already, as is SUSE. The open-source Xen and KVM hypervisors also support the platform. The Arm-compliant version of Proxmox’s Virtual Environment is version 9.2. The company says the release “shares the code base, package repositories, and release lifecycle with its x86-64 counterpart.” That means it is built on Debian 13.5 "Trixie" and version 7.0 of the Linux kernel. It also includes QEMU 11.0, LXC 7.0, and ZFS 2.4. “Configuration, tooling, and documentation are identical to x86-64, except for a small set of architecture-specific differences,” Proxmox says. The product is FOSS so you can download it here. ®

Here’s when Windows 11 26H2 will roll out, and what’s actually new on existing PCs

The Hot Take: Nice to see MS wanting stability over features.

I expect Windows 11 26H2 to ship in October 2026 as an enablement package. Based on past trends, it’ll roll out sometime between the last week of September and the last week of October. Windows 11 25H2 shipped in the last week of September, but versions 24H2 and 23H2 were released in October of their respective years. But is there anything new in this year’s annual update? I’d say nothing major in particular. Windows 11 26H2 is the annual feature update for the operating system, but it doesn’t come with anything exciting. If you’ve read headlines that claim otherwise, you’ve been clickbaited. Windows 11 26H2 exists only to give you another year of servicing, which means more stability for enterprises. For example, Windows 11 24H2 support ends on October 13, 2026, but Windows 11 25H2 remains supported until October 12, 2027. That means you have only a year of support remaining if you’re using Windows 11 25H2. At this point, Microsoft can either release a major platform update, which could potentially cause issues, or ship another minor release, 26H2, which provides another year of support until October 2028. The company is choosing the second route for good reason. It’s also true that Microsoft has teased major performance and quality improvements throughout the year, with the biggest changes slated to arrive later this year, but it isn’t locking anything to a specific Windows platform release. That means you’ll get everything whether you run Windows 11 24H2, 25H2, or 26H2. All quality improvements will ship to everyone via monthly cumulative updates, and you don’t have to wait for any specific Windows feature release like 26H2. Windows 11 26H2 shares the same servicing model as versions 25H2 and 24H2 Right now, Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2 receive the exact same set of improvements through monthly cumulative updates or even out-of-band releases. That’s because the two releases share the same servicing model, and Windows 11 26H2 is going to become part of it. If you’re on Windows 11 24H2 or 25H2, you can directly upgrade to Windows 11 26H2, and it’ll take less than five minutes. Windows Latest previously reported that Windows 11 26H2 is just 174KB, which is only 0.003% of the original Windows 11 24H2 release. No changes to system requirements Microsoft says nothing changes with Windows 11 26H2’s system requirements. If you can run Windows 11 24H2, you can also run 26H2, and it’s really that simple. But if you purchase a new Arm PC, such as one powered by Snapdragon X2 or Nvidia RTX Spark, your PC will run Windows 11 26H1 out of the box, and you cannot move to Windows 11 26H2. You’ll be upgraded to Windows 11 27H2 in the second half of 2027 alongside those already on version 26H2. What’s actually ‘new’ in Windows 11 26H2? There are at least two behavioral changes that are exclusive to Windows 11 26H2, and you won’t have them in version 25H2. The first is related to Windows Backup, which is now being rebranded as “Windows settings backup and restore.” Starting with Windows 11 26H2, Microsoft says it’ll automatically back up your settings and some personal files to the cloud. You’ll need to turn off the feature if you don’t like the idea, as it’ll be enabled by default. “Starting with Windows 11, version 26H2, Windows backup will be enabled by default for eligible devices. Any existing administrator-configured policy (enabled or disabled) will continue to be honored,” Microsoft noted in a support document spotted by Windows Latest. I also found that only the following items are synced to the cloud: Windows settings Microsoft Store apps list Some personal files or changes, so you can easily move to a new device and resume working. And yes, you still have the choice to restore from a backup or start fresh when setting up Windows 11 on a new PC. This behaviour is not changing. “Whether upgrading from Windows 10 or refreshing PCs, it delivers a consistent user experience and enhances business continuity through robust backup and rapid recovery capabilities,” the company explained. Point-in-time restore Microsoft recently rolled out Point-in-time restore to all existing PCs running Windows 11 25H2 and 24H2, so you might wonder how it’s new in version 26H2. It isn’t. As I said, the two noticeable changes are related to behaviour, not entirely new features. In this case, Microsoft says Point-in-time restore will be turned on by default for everyone with Windows 11 26H2. For those unaware, Point-in-time restore allows you to create system restore points and even modify their frequency, so you can always restore Windows if something goes wrong, including due to third-party apps or drivers. Until now, Microsoft has been gradually turning on the feature, and it’s entirely disabled on Enterprise PCs, but Windows 11 26H2 makes it the default behaviour for everyone unless you choose to turn it off. It is worth noting that Point-in-time restore can use up to 50GB of storage, but you can always adjust how much space it can use and purge previous restore points when you no longer need them. Windows 11 26H2 is not a full OS upgrade, and it’s a good thing for everyone. If you care about stability, Windows not changing the platform release means you’re in the safe zone, and you don’t have to worry about the next big release breaking anything. On the other hand, if you care about new features, you don’t have to worry, as Microsoft now releases features on a monthly cadence. The post Here’s when Windows 11 26H2 will roll out, and what’s actually new on existing PCs appeared first on Windows Latest

Microsoft never learns, IT admins rage as a new OneDrive app invades Windows 11 and keeps coming back when you remove it

The Hot Take: Sorry I prefer privacy on my own cloud. GTFOH.

As Windows Latest first reported, Microsoft is quietly installing “OneDrive Photos” on PCs, and our tests show that it’s tied to the OneDrive sync client, which is already pre-installed on Windows. Initially, I assumed that only consumers would be getting the app, but it turns out that it’s being pushed to enterprise customers as well. Windows Latest spoke to IT admins and found that Microsoft is forcing the OneDrive Photos app onto enterprise PCs, including those that use Microsoft Intune. Worse, OneDrive Photos works only with a personal Microsoft account, so Windows 11 enterprise installations are now stuck with an app they cannot even use. “Microsoft never learns,” an angry IT admin told Windows Latest. “We manage hundreds of PCs using Intune, and all had this new ‘OneDrive Photos’ entry in the Start menu. How many mistakes will it take before they realize we do not want random apps across our organizations?” “This app doesn’t work with Entra accounts,” one admin told me. “Also, you can’t remove it without removing OneDrive entirely, as it’s somehow tied to the sync client we use across our organization. Unless Microsoft wants us to dump OneDrive and this is bait, I do not see why it’s being forced onto PCs without an MSA.” There are dozens of similar complaints on Reddit and other forums, and the number is only increasing because nobody likes it when Windows slips in an app they never installed. I’ve never worked at or with Microsoft, but as someone who has used Windows for decades and interacted with hundreds of businesses heavily invested in the ecosystem, I’ve learned one thing: Windows users do not like apps or settings being added or changed without their knowledge. What is OneDrive Photos for Windows 11? OneDrive Photos for Windows 11 is actually OneDrive.com’s Gallery section. And yes, it’s yet another glorified web wrapper, which means it loads Microsoft Edge and opens OneDrive.com in a tab. Unlike traditional web apps, OneDrive Photos is actually quite well made. It has a Windows 11-like Acrylic design for the context menu and does not take up a huge amount of resources. RAM usage rarely touches 1GB. I don’t exactly hate the OneDrive Photos app, but I don’t see the point, even as a consumer. Windows already comes with a Photos app, which allows you to view your OneDrive and even iCloud photos. Unless Microsoft is planning to replace the Microsoft Photos app with OneDrive Photos at some point in the future, I do not see any point in this app. IT admins are upset because OneDrive Photos is a beta app, works only with a personal Microsoft account, and was rolled out to enterprise PCs without any notice. I couldn’t find anything in my Microsoft 365 Message Center or on Microsoft’s Learn portal. A OneDrive app simply popped up out of nowhere. “This is NOT how you treat a Pro/Ent OS Edition or how a vendor should treat anything running in a managed environment,” one administrator wrote in a post on Reddit. Windows Latest also found that OneDrive Photos is not installed as a traditional Microsoft Store or MSIX package. Instead, it is delivered as OneDrive.App.exe inside the existing Microsoft OneDrive installation folder. Depending on how OneDrive is installed, we have found it in locations such as: C:\Program Files\Microsoft OneDrive\OneDrive.App.exe A new Start menu shortcut is also created under: C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\OneDrive Photos.lnk In other words, you can’t easily manage it using Group Policies or remove it using Microsoft Store policies. Thankfully, I have a script that takes care of the removal: $LogPath = Join-Path $env:ProgramData "OneDrivePhotosRemediation.log" $ShortcutName = "OneDrive Photos.lnk" $ShortcutPaths = @( Join-Path $env:ProgramData "Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\$ShortcutName" Join-Path $env:PUBLIC "Desktop\$ShortcutName" ) Get-ChildItem -Path "$env:SystemDrive\Users" -Directory -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | ForEach-Object { $ShortcutPaths += Join-Path $_.FullName "AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\$ShortcutName" } Add-Content -Path $LogPath -Value "----- $(Get-Date -Format 'yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss') -----" Add-Content -Path $LogPath -Value "Starting OneDrive Photos shortcut cleanup." $RemovedCount = 0 foreach ($ShortcutPath in $ShortcutPaths) { if (Test-Path -LiteralPath $ShortcutPath) { try { Remove-Item -LiteralPath $ShortcutPath -Force Add-Content -Path $LogPath -Value "Removed: $ShortcutPath" Write-Output "Removed: $ShortcutPath" $RemovedCount++ } catch { Add-Content -Path $LogPath -Value "Failed removing $ShortcutPath - $($_.Exception.Message)" Write-Output "Failed: $ShortcutPath" } } } Add-Content -Path $LogPath -Value "Cleanup completed. Shortcuts removed: $RemovedCount" Add-Content -Path $LogPath -Value "" Write-Output "OneDrive Photos shortcut remediation completed. Removed: $RemovedCount" exit 0 However, running the above script isn’t enough, as you need to schedule it to be executed daily or at least weekly. I found that it’s a game of cat and mouse because Windows reinstalls OneDrive Photos when you remove it, and it keeps coming back because it’s tied to the OneDrive sync client, which updated itself to version 26.129.0706.0003. I am in touch with Microsoft about OneDrive Photos, and my early findings suggest that it was an unintended rollout. An apology should be coming soon. The post Microsoft never learns, IT admins rage as a new OneDrive app invades Windows 11 and keeps coming back when you remove it appeared first on Windows Latest

AMD waits for Nvidia before joining the GPU mugging

The Hot Take: So when is there going to be a price fixing class action for GPUs?

AMD is reportedly preparing to jack up graphics card prices after waiting for Nvidia to blink first. According to PC Gamer the word comes from industry watcher Harukaze5719 who reckons AMD was holding fire until Nvidia pushed up its own prices. “This was to avoid the risk of declining product competitiveness and market share loss from a hasty price adjustment during a period of demand pressure,” Harukaze5719 wrote on X. AMD has already warned manufacturers about a price rise of “at least 10 per cent” across all products. The increase is said to kick in from the start of August, which is handy timing if you enjoy paying more for the same silicon. “The price positioning is expected to be similar to that of the Nvidia series graphics cards,” Harukaze5719 wrote. Last week, Nvidia was said to be preparing graphics card and component price rises of 20 to 30 per cent. Samsung was tipped for similar rises on memory units, because apparently the hardware industry looked at gamers and decided they had too much rent money left. The main culprit is the AI data centre feeding frenzy. Those outfits are hoovering up components and cutting fat deals to grab stock before consumer buyers get a sniff. Harukaze5719’s analysis pointed to a current “weak recovery phase in the consumer graphics card market”. It cited “high price sensitivity at the end-user level” and “existing inventory still needing to be digested” as reasons AMD had been cautious. The mess is spilling into consoles too. For decades, console prices usually fell after launch as production matured and platform holders chased a wider audience. Now Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft have all raised console prices since release, sometimes more than once. They have warned that more increases could follow, which is lovely news for anyone still pretending gaming hardware is a cheap hobby. The knock-on effect could push next-generation consoles close to £1,000, about €1,170, for the first time. A thousand-quid console used to sound like satire. Now it looks like a PowerPoint target somewhere in procurement.  

HP, Asus and Acer reportedly turn to CXMT for laptop memory

The Hot Take: Sorry Micron's exit is just to convenient.

HP, Asus and Acer have begun using limited quantities of DRAM from China's ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) in selected budget notebooks sold outside the US, Nikkei Asia reported, as a global memory shortage pushes PC makers to widen their supplier base.

Linux Desktop Market Share Surge Past 10% May Be AI Bot Driven

The Hot Take: So Linux isn't creeping to take over windows. Just bots using it are, GOT IT.

StatCounter claims Linux has risen to 10.65% of the United States' web traffic, outstripping Chrome OS at 2.06%, macOS at 8.6%, and OpenBSD at below 1%. That's an interesting number, but the math doesn't add up if you assume the traffic is from human users alone. As many of today's biggest companies claim, we're in the age of agentic AI,

New Micron lawsuit reignites fight over New York fab - complaint alleges 'forever chemicals' will flow into Oneida River

The Hot Take: Um, so memory gets a law suit over 'forever chemicals' but not the other items? Doesn't that seem a bit odd?

Pushback against Micron's planned manufacturing complex in Clay, New York, which comprises four separate fabs, is once again at the center of an environmental lawsuit. Filed by Neighbors for a Better Micron and Jobs to Move America — the same groups that filed a separate lawsuit against Micron in January — filed a new complaint Friday, claiming that approved wastewater and air permits aren't valid and will allow Micron to leak "forever chemicals" into the Oneida River. Go deeper with TH Premium: Chipmaking(Image credit: tsmc)A deeper look at the chipmaking supply chainTSMC's $165 billion U.S. investments examinedChina reportedly reverse-engineers EUV toolChina bets on DUV, as EUV blockade reshapes chipmaking"The Permits were issued against eh backdrop of the significant environmental consequences already acknowledged through the course of the Micro Project's State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA) review. including the release of PFAS and other highly persistent and hazardous chemicals," the complaint reads. "Rather than fully and meaningfully evaluate and address those consequences and impose the necessary protections before granting final authorization, [the Department of Environmental Conservation] issued permits that defer essential analyses, controls and limitations, and mitigation decisions until after issuance or until future regulations and studies have been conducted." The lawsuit names the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), Onondaga County (where Clay is located), and Micron. Its claim is that, despite Micron receiving wastewater and air permits from the DEC, those permits aren't adequate to regulate the plant's emissions. In one part of the lawsuit, the petitioners claim the permits are "not routine operating approvals," and in another, claim the loose permit guidelines "are not collateral or technical omissions."Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, otherwise known as PFAS or "forever chemicals," are synthetic chemicals that are essential to semiconductor manufacturing. The chemicals are present throughout nearly the entirety of the manufacturing chain, necessitating strict water and air containment management to align with environmental regulations. "The SPDES permit authorizes the acceptance and discharge of Micron's industrial wastewater containing identified emerging contaminants, including PFAS compounds, but it imposes no substantive controls on those harmful contaminants beyond monitoring their presence and concentration." In January, the two petitioners named in this complaint filed another lawsuit against Micron, claiming that the project failed to comply with the state's environmental review process. Last month, Micron asked a judge to dismiss the lawsuit. It's still set for oral arguments on August 25, however. This lawsuit currently doesn't have a date set for oral arguments, if it ever reaches that point. The petitioners are seeking the nullification of both wastewater and air permits, which would force Micron back under the environmental review process, and costs associated with the suit.

Industry shift

The Hot Take: To me it the Computer industry is moving towards the model they used exactly on Automobiles. PC components are being priced out of consumer acceptable prices. Manufacturers are our pricing add in board manufacturers like MSI, Asus, etc. Leaving system OEMs like Apple, Lenovo, Dell & HP. All which are offering up leasing options, exactly the same way the automobile industry went decades ago when cars became to much to buy out right. I hope we can turn this back around.

RTX Spark’s Driver Paves Way For Unofficial eGPU Support On Snapdragon X2 Elite Laptops, Bringing 200+ FPS In Competitive Shooters Like Overwatch, With the Right GPU

The Hot Take: This is the biggest limitation to ARM SoC's as their GPU's are mid-range. So acceptance from gamers will require ability to get high end GPU for performance.

The Snapdragon X2 Elite might have doubled down on compute performance, but a multitude of tests show that its GPU continues to be one of the weakest links of the SoC. Fortunately, a user shows that the RTX Spark driver has introduced unofficial eGPU support through a USB4 connection, allowing you to experience competitive shooters like Overwatch at upwards of 200FPS. Redditor shares “simple to follow” instructions on how to bring eGPU support to Snapdragon X2 Elite laptops Notebooks like the ASUS Zenbook A16 offer a solid configuration to help ARM laptop owners enjoy AAA and competitive titles without relying on […]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/snapdragon-x2-elite-egpu-support-nvidia-rtx-spark-driver/