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Arm faces US antitrust probe after announcing plan to design its own chips

The Hot Take: Licensee's mad? I think so.

Arm was notified by the US Federal Trade Commission in early 2026 that it was the subject of an antitrust investigation after the chip designer said it would begin engineering its own processors, according to Bloomberg. The FTC is examining whether Arm used its dominant position in chip licensing to deny or downgrade the quality of CPU blueprints it licenses to others in order to disadvantage rivals. The regulator asked Arm to cooperate and preserve related documents.

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Nvidia eyes CPU crown

The Hot Take: We shall see. ARM busting in on this market too for servers at least. Nvidia is doing both Desktops and Servers with the world just waiting for its desktop SoC.

NVIDIA claims that the demand for Vera is so bonkers that it could become the world’s top GPU and CPU supplier this year. Nvidia recently said its Vera CPUs were in full production, with the first CPU racks hand-delivered to OpenAI, SpaceX, Anthropic and Oracle. For those who came in late, Vera is a key part of the Extreme Co-Design ecosystem powering Rubin, but it drags Nvidia into the standalone CPU market for the first time. The Arm-based chip uses 88 custom Olympus cores and is built for agentic AI and inference workloads. Nvidia says Vera offers 50 per cent better performance, twice the performance per watt and four times the rack density of traditional x86 CPUs. It handles orchestration, tool calling, reinforcement-learning workloads, data analytics, agent sandboxing, and long-context state management. The chip is aimed at AI labs, cloud providers and enterprises running agentic AI at scale. Its core specs include 88 custom Olympus cores, 1.2TB/s memory bandwidth and 50 per cent faster per-core performance under full load. Nvidia claims Vera opens a new $200 billion total addressable market. The company expects nearly $20 billion in CPU revenue this year, mostly driven by Vera. That would put Nvidia on course to become the world’s leading CPU supplier, surpassing AMD and Intel, both of which are seeing strong CPU demand from agentic AI workloads. Nvidia said Vera was co-designed with Rubin GPUs and NVLink to deliver up to 1.5 times faster per-core performance. It claims Vera delivers twice the performance per watt and four times the density per rack compared with x86-based alternatives. Nvidia chief financial officer Colette Kress said: “Vera CPU opens a brand new $200 billion town for NVIDIA, a market we have never addressed before, and every major hyperscale and system maker is partnering with us to get it deployed. We have visibility to nearly $20 billion in total CPU revenue this year, setting us up to become the world-leading CPU supplier.” The more interesting bit is that the $20 billion number is not for every Vera CPU use case. It applies only to the standalone CPU. Vera will be used as the host CPU for Rubin racks, with two Vera chips connected to four GPUs. Nvidia has entry-level NVL4 racks that use Intel Xeon CPUs. The company says it will ship millions of Rubin GPUs, which are now in full production, with first shipments planned for the third quarter of 2026. Then there is Vera with CX9 for storage and Vera with CX9 for security. The standalone CPU is the piece counted in the $20 billion figure, which puts it ahead of AMD EPYC and Chipzilla Xeon CPU figures for this year. There are some awkward constraints in Vera’s way. Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said Vera Rubin will be supply-constrained throughout its life. The other big choke point is memory, because Vera leans heavily on LPDDR5X, which is already being gobbled up by the AI supercycle. Nvidia is investing heavily to ease those constraints, but demand keeps swelling and both Vera and Vera Rubin need plenty of memory. “The 20 billion is for a standalone CPU. And remember, we have Vera, which is used in three ways as a standalone CPU, and four ways. Let me just start with the one that you already know. The first way is Vera Rubin. And we’ll sell millions of Rubins, and every two of them is connected to a Vera. And of course, we price those too. And they’re properly priced. And so that’s number one use case.” Huang said. The second use case is Vera standalone CPU. The third is Vera with CX9 and the storage software stack. And then Vera, with CX9, a software stack for security, compute isolation, and confidential computing. And so each one of those use cases is built on Vera. And my sense is that we’ll be supply-constrained throughout Vera Rubin’s entire life. And Vera was designed to be an agentic CPU. The CPUs of the past were designed to have many cores so that it could be easily rentable. People rented cores. Well, agents don’t rent cores. They just want the work to be done fast. The economics of the past was dollars per core,” Huang said.  

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Intel Nova Lake Samples Reportedly Begin Shipping With Huge Multi-Core Gains

The Hot Take: NICE, Intel you can send me samples too! :D

Intel’s next desktop CPU family is apparently hitting shipping lanes, albeit as early engineering samples. Nova Lake is expected to be a much bolder reset than merely a routine refresh and could become Intel’s most aggressive swing at the high-end PC market in years, with performance claims that sound almost exaggerated until you remember

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Intel Resurrects On-Package Memory With Razor Lake-AX, Loading Up LPDDR6 to Hunt Down AMD’s Medusa Halo by 2028

The Hot Take: APU's competition starting to heat up for that Ai dollar.

Intel's next-generation Razor Lake-AX chips will compete directly against AMD's Medusa Halo while featuring on-package memory. Intel Is Bringing Back On-Package Memory With Its Next-Gen Razor Lake-AX Chips That Fight Against AMD's Medusa Halo On-Package Memory was last used by Intel for its Lunar Lake SoCs. These SoCs were aimed at low-power mobile platforms, and while the chips themselves offered solid performance in a 30W budget, Intel's next on-package memory solution will be a big one. As per Haze2K1 on X, Intel Razor Lake-AX SoCs will feature on-package memory. This is a big deal as moving the DRAM closer to […]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/intel-resurrects-on-package-memory-with-razor-lake-ax-to-hunt-down-amd-medusa-halo/

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Intel Roadmap Leak Details Nova Lake, Razor Lake, and Titan Lake CPUs

The Hot Take: This gives me hope that the DIY market isn't dying. As it looks like it's dying a slow death with lack of refresh updates and availability due to "Ai Demand".

A new supply chain report has revealed what appears to be Intel’s processor roadmap through 2028, outlining several upcoming CPU architectures including Nova Lake, Razor Lake, Titan Lake, and Moon Lake.

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Intel & AMD Work On APX, The Next Major Step In The Evolution of x86 Architectures, Adds More Performance Without Requiring More Die Area & Power

The Hot Take: Just what we need Ai specific instructions for them to gobble up all the CPU's now.

APX or Advanced Performance Extensions are the next evolution of x86 as Intel & AMD co-develop new standards for the architecture. APX Expands the x86 Instruction Set, Bringing Faster Performance & New Features That Will Benefit Both Intel and AMD's Next-Gen Chips Two days ago, we talked about ACE (AI Compute Extensions), which is a unified instruction set that aims to increase matrix-multiply performance for next-gen x86 chips. ACE is just one part of the grander scheme in which both Intel and AMD are working together to evolve the x86 architecture under a single unified framework through the recently established […]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/intel-amd-work-on-apx-the-next-major-step-in-the-evolution-of-x86-architectures/

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Intel’s Arc G3 Extreme Handheld Chip Crushes Ryzen Z2 Extreme by 25% In Benchmark Leak, Rocks The Powerful B390 iGPU

The Hot Take: Getting confusing with weather they are dropping their GPU's.

Benchmarks of Intel's upcoming and fastest gaming handheld SoC, the Arc G3 Extreme, have been leaked, surpassing the Ryzen Z2 by 25%. Intel Packs Its Strongest Battlemage GPU, & 14 CPU Cores Inside the Arc G3 Extreme Gaming Handheld SoC We recently covered Intel's first Arc G3 gaming handheld, which has been listed by online retailers. While the retailer listing was void of details for the SoC itself, we now have more specs and even benchmarks of the upcoming chip & they look phenomenal. Starting with the CPU, the Intel Arc G3 Extreme is going to be the top offering […]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/intels-arc-g3-extreme-handheld-chip-crushes-ryzen-z2-extreme-benchmark-leak/

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Intel’s Diamond Rapids Xeon Slips to 2027 With 512 Cores and 16-Channel Memory, Coral Rapids Brings Back SMT in 2028

The Hot Take: It appears they definitely woke a sleeping giant....

Intel's next-gen Xeon "Diamond Rapids" CPUs will offer up to 512 cores, while Coral Rapids will bring back SMT on 8-channel platforms in 2028. Intel Diamond Rapids 16-Channel Slips Into 2027, Features Up To 512 Cores Intel Diamond Rapids "Xeon" CPUs were going to launch this year, but delays in plans have pushed it to 2027. The delay can be attributed to several reasons, such as yields and the fact that the 8-channel line was cancelled. Now, Intel plans to launch Diamond Rapids "Xeon" CPUs in 2027. As per Jaykihn, Intel's mid-2027 plans for Diamond Rapids include a volume launch […]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/intel-diamond-rapids-xeon-2027-512-cores-16-channel-memory-coral-rapids-smt-in-2028/

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Qualcomm’s Datacenter CPU Rumor Comes Just In Time As Agentic AI Goes In Hyperdrive Mode

The Hot Take: Everyone is joining the ARM SoC Server party! To sad they don't know that Fujitsu has already been ruling that with a Top 500 server running them. Better late than not paid I guess?

Qualcomm is rumored to be preparing a brand new datacenter CPU, which will be just in time to power growing Agentic AI needs. Rumors that Qualcomm's New Datacenter CPU is just a few months away may not sound crazy, given the demand there is for agentic AI There's a rumor going around that Qualcomm is working on its very own "dedicated" Datacenter CPU based on the Arm architecture. Qualcomm making its own Datacenter CPU at some point was expected, but what the new rumor is suggesting is that we could see that chip being announced as early as June this […]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/qualcomm-datacenter-cpu-launch-in-june-as-agentic-ai-goes-in-hyperdrive-mode/

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