In AMDâs 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 Nvidiaâs $20 billion licensing deal with Groq last December: make high-performance âpremiumâ inference services prized for AI agents, like code assistants, faster and cheaper to run. AMD didnâtâŚ
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.
âThis was to avoid the risk of declining product competitiveness and market share loss from a hasty price adjustment during a period of demand pressure,â Harukaze5719 wrote on X.
AMD has already warned manufacturers about a price rise of âat least 10 per centâ across all products. The increase isâŚ
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 YetâŚ
Intel and AMD are signing long term agreements with Chinese data center firms to provide them with CPUs for AI computing, says a report from Reuters. CPUs in AI computing rose to prominence earlier this year after agentic AI demand reshaped the market. Agentic computing places a greater emphasis on CPUs, and according to the sources, the deals are motivated by the rapid price rise due to high demand. AMD & Intel Set To Cover A Year's Worth Of CPU Supplies To Chinese AI Data Centers, Says Report The surge in AI demand for CPUs has also ledâŚ
The Hot Take: Will have to take this with a bit rock of salt until we see the benches and real world performance. Just a price grab or actual performance?
AMD is apparently no longer satisfied with being perceived as a perennial underdog, and is reportedly choosing to make a bold statement by pricing its Helios rackscale solution at a hefty premium to NVIDIA's Rubin. What's more, AMD has reportedly managed to rope in Microsoft as the product's first confirmed client, demonstrating the utility that Helios offers even at its supposedly elevated price point. Futurum believes AMD will price Helios at $5 million to $5.5 million per rack, versus an expected retail price of $3.5 million to $4 millionâŚ
The Hot Take: I really wonder if this will deflate the Ai bubble even a little bit.
The x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group led by Intel and AMD recently firmed up the AI Compute Extensions (ACE) specification for optimizing x86 for AI computation tasks around matrix multiplication and the like for machine learning workloads. The cross-vendor ACE extension is ultimately a successor to Intel's Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX). Posted to the GCC mailing list today by Intel engineers are the initial patches in preparing the compiler support for ACE...
The Hot Take: Oh so the Ultra series aren't just crap then? /smh
It's curious to call this one a leak, exactly, since the original source is direct from AMD and live on the web, but here we go: AMD's Vishal Badole submitted a patch for the Linux Kernel that he describes as adding support for "a Low Power core type, in addition to the existing Performance and Efficiency types." That's pretty clear-cut.
Now,
The Hot Take: We'll see how long before they go to Intel because TSMC is filled up in Arizona FABs.
Nvidia will stay TSMCâs biggest customer in 2027, but AMDâs EPYC Venice could pinch the CPU bragging rights.
TSMC is seeing rising demand for 2.5D advanced packaging as CPUs become more important in the agentic AI bunfight. Apparently, GPUs alone are no longer enough to feed the machine.
Morgan Stanley reckons Nvidia will remain TSMCâs largest CoWoS customer in 2027. TSMC is expected to reach wafer capacity of 200,000 wafers a month that year.
Nvidia is using TSMCâs CoWoS packaging for two main product families. CoWoS-L is for AI GPUsâŚ
The Hot Take: Why did it disappear in the first place?
AMD has confirmed that it will restore Transparent Secure Memory Encryption (TSME) support on consumer Ryzen processors after previously removing the feature through AGESA firmware updates.
The Hot Take: AMD getting ready for Intel refocus on HPDT?
With Threadripper, it has always been a bit like heavy-haul transport on the motorway: massively overdimensioned for normal users, but for certain workloads exactly the kind of tool where every additional lane matters. Now AMDâs next workstation generation has become tangible for the first time. An entry for âTR6 Mustang Peakâ has appeared in AMDâs [âŚ]