Arm faces potential shareholder revolt over CEO's 'excessive' $800 million pay package — huge stock award would only be fully realised if chip designer hits $2 trillion valuation

The Hot Take: Was wondering when something like this would happen, just took the CEO being greedy.

British semiconductor and software design company Arm is asking shareholders to approve a massive performance-based pay package for CEO Rene Haas worth up to $800 million if the company reaches a $2 trillion valuation, a move that has drawn pushback from proxy advisors ahead of a September 9th vote. According to an August 31 report by the Telegraph, the company is facing a potential shareholder revolt as proxy advisory firms such as Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) and Glass Lewis urged investors to vote against the compensation plan,…

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Motorless solid-state cooler uses heat to cool itself; could recycle processor heat into cooling — shape-memory alloy films could turn data center exhaust into refrigeration

The Hot Take: This type of tech needs to step up with the IC's producing so much focused heat in smaller and smaller spots.

A team of scientists in Germany and Japan has demonstrated a solid-state cooling system that uses heat to generate the mechanical work required for refrigeration, potentially opening a route to processors and data centers that recycle some of their own waste heat for cooling. Developed by researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the University of Tsukuba, the system — detailed in Nature Energy on August 28 — replaces the electrically powered actuator normally required for elastocaloric cooling with a heat-responsive…

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NVIDIA Game Ready Driver 616.56 Reportedly Breaks 8-Bit Monitors, But Switching To 10-Bit Color Fixes The Flickering Instantly

The Hot Take: Quirky issue.

You might face some display flickering issues if you have installed the latest NVIDIA Game Ready Driver, but there is a fix. Game Ready Driver 616.56 Reportedly Causes Display Flickering at 8-Bit; NVIDIA Says it's Investigating the Issue NVIDIA rolled out the latest Game Ready Driver 616.56 a few days ago, and it was one of the most powerful updates, bringing a significant performance boost in synthetic apps. However, it's becoming common to see NVIDIA drivers infested with bugs, causing problems for regular users, and the latest driver update…

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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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