Micron workers increasingly support strike over bonus pay — labor union wants profit-sharing scheme, as employees at Samsung, SK hynix enjoy bonuses worth hundreds of thousands of dollars

The Hot Take: Good, hope they do. Micron needs to take some losses if you ask me.

Micron Taiwan faces a potential strike as support for this labor action is increasing among its workers. Local media reports that a preliminary survey showed 80% of the people involved support such a move, with its labor union demanding that the current bonus system be replaced with a profit-sharing scheme, similar to what SK hynix employees receive. Micron, alongside Samsung and SK hynix, have been raking in a lot of cash because of the AI-driven memory chip shortage, and its workers want a piece of the action.Go deeper with TH Premium:…

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Intel 14A defect density is dropping faster than the company expected — 'we have not seen this performance since 22nm,' says CFO

The Hot Take: Good, needed more than just for their own products but defense too.

Intel's confidence in its 14A (1.4nm-class) fabrication process is rising as defect density drops. The company's own design teams are at work developing products that will use the technology, while external customers are now asking about 14A volumes Intel can get them, according to David Zinsner, chief financial officer of Intel, who spoke at Deustche Bank's 2026 Technology Conference. The CFO went as far as saying that 14A is Intel's best process since 22nm technology from the 2010's. But while the comment is optimistic, there is a…

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OpenAI’s First-Gen Jalapeno ASIC Blows Competition Out Of The Park, Performs 1.5x to 1.9x More Work Per Kilowatt Than NVIDIA’s Blackwell Chips, While Threatening The CUDA Moat

The Hot Take: Please let GPU prices drop soon....

OpenAI seems to have used its current spate of models that run on NVIDIA GPUs to design the Jalapeno chip, and then paired it with its own Gluon kernel programming language, thereby daring to threaten NVIDIA's legendary CUDA moat. How the tables have turned! The architecture of OpenAI's Jalapeno chip SemiAnalysis has just provided a detailed breakdown of OpenAI's Jalapeno ASIC, describing a somewhat novel architecture that delivers substantial economies of scale. As such, the Jalapeno pairs a single reticle-sized compute die - built on TSMC’s…

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Intel’s Market Share Of The x86 CPU Market Falls To 1995-Levels, As AMD Now Controls An Adjusted 46.4% Of The Market For Server CPUs Vs. Intel’s 53.6% Share, Claims Mercury Research

The Hot Take: Lets hope Intel can fully recover and start chewing back that x86 market or I fear with get pushed into ARM SoC mediocrity.

Intel seems to have staged a decisive turnaround in the second quarter of the ongoing year, with its data center revenue up a very healthy 59 percent year-over-year. Yet, Intel's inertia is still working against it, as clearly demonstrated within a new report from Mercury Research, which has tallied that Intel's share of the CPU market has fallen to levels last seen in 1995 even as AMD remains perched on an ascendant trajectory. After accounting for the fact that AMD does not count embedded CPUs it ships for networking and storage applications…

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Exynos 2700 beats the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro in internal testing, insiders say

The Hot Take: Nice if that's the case, and big trouble for Qualcomm too.

Internal tests of the Exynos 2700 have Samsung LSI buzzing – the chipset outperformed Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 (both of them, actually), according to anonymous insiders. The testing was pretty thorough and included CPU, GPU, NPU and power efficiency benchmarks. First, let’s clear this up – Qualcomm has officially confirmed that there will be two Elite chips in the next generation. They are tentatively being called the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro. This is separate from the non-Elite Gen 6 chip, by the way.…

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Nvidia senior manager linked to Supermicro scheme smuggling AI servers to China

The Hot Take: Not good, and I hope they get prosecuted the to full extent of the law.

Taiwan has indicted nine people—reportedly including an Nvidia senior manager and two Supermicro employees based in the country—who allegedly helped forge documents to cover up illegal exports of high-end AI servers to China in violation of US export controls. On Monday, Reuters reported that prosecutors in Keelung did not release any names but confirmed that the suspects were “charged with breach of trust and document forgery.” One suspect linked to a related case remains at large, accused of the “siphoning of funds from a distributor…

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GrapheneOS' privacy-friendly Motorola phones are coming next year

The Hot Take: I wonder if Lenovo's help will get them to accept more than just Pixel and Lenovo devices. We can only hope.

It's now clearer just when you can expect GrapheneOS' privacy-oriented Android ROM to be available beyond Pixel devices. The GrapheneOS team has finally shared more details on when its software will come to Motorola phones.

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IBM Details The World's First Dual-Architecture Processor As It Builds Its Next-Gen Dual ISA Core That Natively Executes Z & Arm Software On The Same Chip

The Hot Take: This is RISC with RISC, I'm wondering if we'll get a CISC with RISK chip hybrid from Intel or AMD.

IBM's next-generation chip will combine dual ISA within the core, enabling the execution of Z and Arm software simultaneously. IBM Is Sending The World's First Dual-ISA Processor Core For Tape-Out Soon IBM's Christian Jacobi (IBM Fellow & CTO, IBM Systems Development) presented the Hot Chips 2026 talk in which he announced the first Dual-ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) Core for IBM Z and LinuxOne generation. The dual architecture allows IBM to execute both Z- and Arm-based software. IBM states that this isn't putting two different core…

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