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 âsimple to followâ 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 [âŚ]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/snapdragon-x2-elite-egpu-support-nvidia-rtx-spark-driver/
The Hot Take: They just said that iPhone model loss would be off set by datacenter sales. So i guess they'll be hurting for a bit.
Qualcomm has predicted its entry to the datacenter market will yield $15 billion of annual revenue by FY 2029 â huge growth, but also a modest number compared to its more established rivals. The chip design firm dangled the $15 billion figure on Wednesday along with its Q3 results, which included a warning that revenue from its business selling modems to Apple is about to crater. Execs told investors that supply chain constraints mean Qualcomm expects âan acceleration in the step down of Apple product revenuesâ as its contribution to the next iPhone âis expected to be materially lower than our prior estimate of 20 percent.â Apple has spent years working on its own modems, a shift Qualcomm has long acknowledged. Now the House of the Snapdragon has advised investors to expect less than $2 billion in sales to Cupertino next year. âThis obviously accelerates kind of the exit of Apple revenue out of our model,â said CFO Akash Palkhiwala. Qualcomm has a plan to replace Appleâs cash, by diversifying away from smartphones. Execs said the company thinks it will sell $40 billion a year of products not tied to handsets in FY 2029, with $10 billion of automotive sales and revenue from internet of things devices hitting $14 billion. The company sold $3.3 billion on non-smartphone kit in Q3 and previously forecast $22 billion of non-phone revenue in 2029. Growing its datacenter business from zero to $15 billion in a few years is impressive, but itâs worth comparing Qualcommâs plans to current results from its rivals like AMD and Intel, both of which won over $16 billion in datacenter revenue in FY 25 and are growing fast. And then thereâs Nvidia, which is on track to post over $250 billion annual datacenter revenue. Qualcommâs datacenter products compete directly with AMD and Nvidia. $15 billion of annual revenue in 2029 will mean Qualcomm is a minor player, suggesting its focus on cheaper inferencing wonât have wide appeal. Execs could at least point to initial sales of datacenter kit arriving just in time to replace revenue it used to win from Apple. On the companyâs earnings call, Qualcomm CEO and president Cristiano Amon foreshadowed price rises across the companyâs range and said he doesnât expect that decision will hurt the already-depressed smartphone market. âEven a double-digit price increase, which is just a pass-through of the input costs increase and wafer price increases, it actually is small when you compare it to the order of magnitude of the memory bill of materials,â he said, after blaming slow handset sales on the cost of RAM. Indeed, Qualcomm is banking on increased revenue from sales of its products for use in Android handsets, helped by a resurgent Chinese market. Amon thinks Middle Kingdom smartphone sales will rebound now that vendors have sold all the stock they warehoused and are set to launch new models featuring agentic AI. Q3 revenue came in at $9.95 billion, a four percent year-over-year dip. Net income fell 25 percent to $2 billion. Those figures werenât far off the companyâs predictions. Qualcommâs share price dropped by about five percent in after hours trading. ÂŽ
The Hot Take: Is ARM going to shine or show it's mid-range performance?
The NVIDIA N1X is surely powerful enough for the Windows-on-Arm market, but the current prototype software prevents it from reaching its full potential. User Puts Microsoft's Unreleased NVIDIA N1X-Equipped Surface Laptop Ultra To Test; Discovers Chip Being Held Back by Unfinished Drivers The NVIDIA RTX Spark laptops will debut in the coming weeks, and if you were wondering about their performance numbers, here is an early sneak peek by a TechPowerUp user, who got his hands on an early prototype from Microsoft. The user "Fouquin" says he found the Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra with NVIDIA's RTX Spark N1X on the [âŚ]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/nvidia-rtx-spark-shows-strong-potential-but-early-prototype-leaves-plenty-of-performance-on-the-table/
The Hot Take: Still not buying the ARM SoC's are better than discrete system CPUs. We'll have to see how Intel/AMD ACE instructions far against this.
NVIDIA has started using clusters of its own Vera processors to develop future CPUs, GPUs, and AI accelerators. The company says initial electronic design automation testing shows performance improvements of up to 1.
The Hot Take: Interesting, we'll see if they get the ext GPU with the SoC internal GPU issues worked out but I'm still thinking Risc-V may do it better.
Windows on Arm systems were long regarded as an interesting alternative to conventional PCs, but they were significantly limited when it came to demanding hardware support. A current test now shows that this situation is gradually changing. A notebook with Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite could be successfully operated with an external NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060, [âŚ]
Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan has acknowledged that the semiconductor giant must catch up to rivals AMD and Arm, and said it now assumes edge AI and robotics will be a business as big as PCs. Tan made those remarks during Intelâs Q2 earnings call, which saw the company report $16.1 billion revenue â a 25 percent year-on-year increase. âQ2 was another quarter of solid execution,â the CEO said. âRevenue, gross margin, and earnings per share were above our guidance. This marks the seventh consecutive quarter of exceeding our financial expectations.â Yet it didnât deliver a profit as Intel reported a GAAP loss of $11 billion (and a non-GAAP loss of $2.2 billion). Tan remained optimistic about Intelâs prospects, thanks to the AI boom spurring demand for many of its products, and its foundry service. âOur core server CPU franchise is growing faster than ever,â the CEO said, before observing the Xeon 6 range âcontinues to be one of the fastest-ramping products in Intel's history.â That may be the case, but Intelâs hyperscale customers have designed their own Arm-powered CPUs and are deploying so many that analyst firm IDC recently found non-x86 servers now account for almost half of all sales. Intelâs great rival, AMD, has grown its market share to a third of the x86 server market. During the earnings call, Morgan Stanley analyst Joe Moore asked Tan how he plans to regain market share. Tan pointed to Intelâs forthcoming Clearwater Forest, Diamond Rapids, and Coral Rapids processors as evidence the company is creating products that can compete with anyone. âSome areas we are still behind,â he admitted, âbut we are catching up very fast and we try to leapfrog some of the CPU architecture, and we are putting major effort into it. Time will tell.â Tan is also pondering time in terms of how component shortages impact the companyâs sales and revenue. âThe industry is facing one of the most severe supply constraints in its history, across leading-edge logic silicon wafers, memory, and substrates,â he said. âThese shortages will persist for the foreseeable future.â Intel is of course a big player in the semiconductor supply chain, and Tan offered the happy news that wafer output across its major manufacturing nodes exceeded expectations from 90 days ago, and that yields from its leading-edge 18A process âare trending ahead of targets.â The CEO also said, âsupply remains very tight and the near-term linearity of our supply growth is more skewed towards the end of Q3 and into Q4, especially for servers.â He had slightly better news about Intelâs foundry business, which is developing an advanced manufacturing process called 14A that could make Chipzilla a more formidable competitor to TSMC. âWe remain on track for 14A risk production for our internal products in the second half of 2027, and we made the decision in Q2 to fully commit to high volume ramp in 2028,â Tan said. Intelâs current flagship 18A process is also going well. âIn our core PC client segment, Intel 18A is now in volume production across multiple commercial and consumer products,â Tan said. âOur factory output continues to increase sequentially every month. The successful high volume ramp of 18A for our internal products provides important validations as Intel Foundry engages with external customers.â The CEO added his view that âWe still have work to do to establish a strong footprint in the edge and physical AI ecosystem but see this opportunity as an important future growth driver.â So important that Intel recently renamed its PC business the âClient Computing and Physical AI Groupâ (CCPG). That change is more than cosmetic, because CFO David Zinsner said Intel believes âthe edge and physical AI opportunity is likely to at least match the client TAM [total addressable market] over time.â That would make edge and physical AI an $8 billion business, given that in this quarter Intel said ten percent of CCPGâs $8.9 billion revenue came from edge products. Overall CCPG revenue rose 13 percent year-over-year, growth that Intel found pleasantly surprising. Zinsner said the PC market is âsofterâ in part due to âthe memory dynamics in the marketplace,â and predicted Q3 performance will fall. ÂŽ
The decision to employ older Cortex-X925 and Cortex-A725 cores on the RTX Spark to form a 20-core CPU configuration will probably haunt NVIDIA because a new Cinebench 2026 leak reveals that the chipset produces subpar multi-core results, despite Microsoftâs Surface Laptop Ultra housing the SoC set to the âHigh Performanceâ profile. Fortunately, the RTX Spark manages to retain some dignity in the single-core benchmark. High Performance mode on Surface Laptop Ultra isnât enabled by default, but hidden configuration allows RTX Sparkâs Cortex cores to pull nearly 50W in new test Weâve previously reported that the altered Cortex-X925 cores running RTX Spark were [âŚ]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/rtx-spark-cinebench-2026-disappointing-multi-core-results/
Qualcomm has introduced its first-ever CPU designed for Data Centers, the Dragonfly C1000, which leverages the Oryon architecture. Qualcomm Enters The Agentic AI CPU Race With Dragonfly C1000 Chip, Oryon-Based With Over 5 GHz Clocks, Over 250 Cores, & Aims To Achieve Single-Core Leadership One of the biggest announcements by Qualcomm today was its first release of a CPU for the data center segment, called the Dragonfly C1000. This is a chip purpose-built for Agentic AI & General-Purpose workloads, delivering best-in-class power efficiency and TCO. As per Qualcomm, the Dragonfly C1000 is based on a custom-designed Oryon core architecture that [âŚ]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/qualcomm-single-core-leadership-first-server-cpu-dragonfly-c1000-250-cores-5-ghz-2028/
By ckasprzak | TkOut | June 17, 2026 | ARM, Hardware
The Hot Take: I question this very much.
Servers employing x86 chips from AMD and Intel now account for little more than half of server revenue, according to the latest figures from IDC. In its Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker for Q1 2026, the analyst firm says that non-x86 server revenue hit $58.7 billion, representing a startling increase of 107 percent over the same period last year. The results mean that those non-x86 servers make up 47.9 percent of the market revenue, closing in rapidly on the amount of cash spent on x86 boxes. The growth in non-x86 turnover is likely thanks to systems powered by Nvidiaâs AI chips featuring Arm cores. Although there is high demand for these, they also cost a pretty packet compared to an average datacenter box. In fact, IDC noted a stark divide shaping the worldwide server market, which reached $122.6 billion in vendor revenue during this period, a 30.4 percent increase year-on-year. On the one hand, AI infrastructure investment from hyperscalers and large cloud providers is ârunning at a scale that shows no sign of plateauing,â while everything else - the non-accelerated segment - faces a supply-constrained environment, thanks largely to that AI infrastructure spending. As Reg readers will know, memory chipmakers are prioritizing manufacturing capacity for higher margin products for AI servers and GPUs, starving the rest of the market of supply. Component availability, particularly DRAM and NAND flash, is limiting near-term shipment volumes from vendors, IDC says, though order pipelines are strong. Supply of the right chips is therefore the chief limiting factor on server market growth. Revenue for x86 servers still reached $63.9 billion, but this was a decline of 2.9 percent due to those component supply constraints impacting shipment volumes. GPU accelerated servers pulled in $68.9 billion for the vendors, up nearly 25 percent year-on-year, while other accelerated servers surged a massive 122 percent to $17.7 billion. The latter category represents AI systems configured with FPGAs or ASICs rather than GPUs. IDCâs spin on the data is that AI infrastructure adoption is no longer limited to hyperscalers, thanks to developments such as government-led sovereign AI initiatives, while the non-accelerated segment tells a more nuanced story. Although revenue here declined, underlying demand remains strong, but many enterprise customers are holding out against elevated component prices. âCompanies arenât pulling back from infrastructure investment; theyâre just not getting servers as fast as they need them. Longer term, emerging workloads, including agentic applications and physical AI ecosystems, will keep demand elevated well beyond the current cycle,â commented IDC research director Juan Seminara. The firm says it expects to see supply normalization beginning in 2027, with capacity relief coming as chipmakers bring new fabrication plants online. Across the last two decades, non-x86 servers accounted for less than ten percent of revenue, and most of that went to IBM which emerged as the last vendor of proprietary servers as Oracle lost interest in Sun and the likes of HPE decided they couldn't sustain businesses built on exotic architectures. ÂŽ
The Hot Take: ARM seems to be breaking out from everywhere. Fujitsu, Nvidia, AWS and ARM. Qualcomm seems to be playing catch up in the server market from the looks of it.
AWS has provided a first look at its next-generation Graviton5 processor, a custom server CPU developed by Annapurna Labs for deployment across the company's cloud computing platform and AI inference infrastructure.