204 posts
The Hot Take: We are going to need all the fabs we can get here.
ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet said on Wednesday that he has spoken directly with Elon Musk about the TeraFab semiconductor project.
Read the full articleThe 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.
Read the full articleThe Hot Take: Can't have other countries get there first. Nat Sec vulnerability for sure.
The US government has taken $2 billion worth of equity stakes in quantum computing companies, including one linked to the Trump family.
Read the full articleThe 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.
Read the full articleThe 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
Read the full articleThe Hot Take: Sub 1000 notebook competition is getting heated.
Intel today unveiled its "Project Firefly" initiative in China, which aims to bring the supply chain together to allow cost-effective & standardized Wildcat Lake laptop designs. Intel Wants A Coherent Design & Pricing Structure Across Its Wildcat Lake Laptops & That's Exactly What "Project Firefly" Aims To Ensure Intel hosted an event today in China where the company formally launched its Core Series 3 SoCs for laptops, codenamed Wildcat Lake. These SoCs aim to bring better value and a unified design across a range of mainstream and entry-level PCs, which we are already seeing on the market. Announced by Intel's […]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/intel-drags-partners-into-a-unified-wildcat-lake-blueprint-as-project-firefly-standardizes-laptop-designs-to-tackle-macbook-neo/
Read the full articleThe 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/
Read the full articleThe Hot Take: All while the consumer market is high and dry.
Micron has started to ship its fastest DDR5 RDIMM memory modules, which feature 256 GB capacities & up to 9200 MT/s speeds. Micron Offers 40% Boost Vs Current "In-Volume" DDR5 RDIMM Memory Modules, Brings 256 GB Capacities With 9200 MT/s Speeds As Agentic AI requirements grow, memory makers are rolling out faster and higher-capacity memory kits to meet the demands of AI firms. JEDEC is also pushing the DDR5 MRDIMM standard up to 12,800 MT/s, and today, Micron has announced that it is sampling its 256 GB DDR5 RDIMM modules with up to 9200 MT/s speeds. The main highlights include: […]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/micron-doubles-down-on-ai-memory-256-gb-ddr5-rdimms-hitting-9200-mtps/
Read the full articleThe Hot Take: AMD seems to be out performing Intel & Nvidia on the market, while Nvidia is still the preferred Ai holy-grail? Just seems odd.
While Nvidia has dominated the "infrastructure boom" since 2022's launch of ChatGPT and "the generative AI craze," CNBC writes that "This week offered the starkest illustration yet of what MIzuho analyst Jordan Klein said could be a 'changing of the guard in AI.'" Chipmakers Advanced Micro Devices and Intel notched gains of about 25%, while memory maker Micron jumped more than 37% and fiber-optic cable maker Corning climbed about 18%. All four of those companies have more than doubled in value this year, with Intel leading the way, up well over 200%. Nvidia, meanwhile, is only slightly ahead of the Nasdaq in 2026, gaining 15% for the year, aided by an 8% rally this week. In spreading the wealth to a wider swath of hardware companies, investors are clearly betting that the bull market in AI has long legs and that data centers are going to need a wider array of advanced components for years to come. Memory has been the biggest theme of late due to a global shortage that's driven up prices and turned Micron, a 47-year-old company tucked in a sleepy corner of the semiconductor market, into one of the hottest trades over the past 12 months. Micron blew past an $800 billion market capitalization for the first time this week, and the stock is now up over 750% in the past year. CEO Sanjay Mehrotra told CNBC in March that key customers are only getting "50% to two-thirds of their requirements" because of supply issues. The memory market is largely dominated by Micron, along with Korea-based Samsung and SK Hynix, which are also both in the midst of historic rallies... Bank of America estimates the data center CPU market could more than double from $27 billion in 2025 to $60 billion in 2030. AMD's quarterly results this week underscored the emerging trend, as earnings, revenue and guidance sailed past estimates on strong data center growth. The company has long led the CPU charge, and CEO Lisa Su said on the earnings call that AMD now expects 35% growth over the next three to five years in the server CPU market, up from a forecast of 18% growth that the company provided in November. The article cites two other big movers: Intel "is in the midst of a revival sparked by a major investment from the U.S. government last year. Intel's stock had its best month on record in April, more than doubling, and has continued notching massive gains, rising 33% in the early days of May." Nvidia still remains the world's most valuable company "and is expected to show revenue growth of 70% this fiscal year," the article points out — adding that companies like Corning are also benefiting from Nvidia partnerships. "Glass maker Corning, which celebrated its 175th anniversary this week, signed a massive deal with Nvidia on Wednesday that involves the development of three new U.S. factories dedicated entirely to optical technologies... likely a major step in Nvidia's move away from copper cables and towards fiber-optic cables as it builds out its rack-scale systems." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read the full articleThe Hot Take: On the heals of 7.0 looking to be just finalized.
PCI-SIG has released the first public draft of the PCI Express 8.0 specification, outlining the next major evolution of the industry-standard interconnect technology.
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