The Hot Take: I don't think so much ARM as AMD.
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 Intel’s Q2 earnings call, which saw the company report $16.1 billion revenue – a 25 percent year-on-year increase. “Q2 was another quarter of solid execution,” the CEO said. “Revenue, gross margin, and earnings per share were above our guidance. This marks the seventh consecutive quarter of exceeding our financial expectations.” Yet it didn’t 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 Intel’s prospects, thanks to the AI boom spurring demand for many of its products, and its foundry service. “Our core server CPU franchise is growing faster than ever,” the CEO said, before observing the Xeon 6 range “continues to be one of the fastest-ramping products in Intel's history.” That may be the case, but Intel’s 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. Intel’s 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 Intel’s forthcoming Clearwater Forest, Diamond Rapids, and Coral Rapids processors as evidence the company is creating products that can compete with anyone. “Some areas we are still behind,” he admitted, “but 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.” Tan is also pondering time in terms of how component shortages impact the company’s sales and revenue. “The industry is facing one of the most severe supply constraints in its history, across leading-edge logic silicon wafers, memory, and substrates,” he said. “These shortages will persist for the foreseeable future.” 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 “are trending ahead of targets.” The CEO also said, “supply 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.” He had slightly better news about Intel’s foundry business, which is developing an advanced manufacturing process called 14A that could make Chipzilla a more formidable competitor to TSMC. “We 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,” Tan said. Intel’s current flagship 18A process is also going well. “In our core PC client segment, Intel 18A is now in volume production across multiple commercial and consumer products,” Tan said. “Our 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.” The CEO added his view that “We 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.” So important that Intel recently renamed its PC business the “Client Computing and Physical AI Group” (CCPG). That change is more than cosmetic, because CFO David Zinsner said Intel believes “the edge and physical AI opportunity is likely to at least match the client TAM [total addressable market] over time.” That would make edge and physical AI an $8 billion business, given that in this quarter Intel said ten percent of CCPG’s $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 “softer” in part due to “the memory dynamics in the marketplace,” and predicted Q3 performance will fall. ®
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The Hot Take: Well there goes CPU stocks.
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 led to Intel […]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/intel-and-amd-lock-in-year-long-cpu-deals-with-chinese-ai-firms-as-prices-surge-40/
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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 million for the second-gen NVIDIA Rubin rack As we explained in a […]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/amd-is-reportedly-pricing-its-helios-rack-40-above-nvidias-second-gen-rubin-confident-that-customers-will-pay-the-premium/
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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...
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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,
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The Hot Take: We'll see how long before they go to Intel because TSMC is filled up in Arizona FABs.
Nvidia will stay TSMC’s biggest customer in 2027, but AMD’s 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 TSMC’s largest CoWoS customer in 2027. TSMC is expected to reach wafer capacity of 200,000 wafers a month that year.
Nvidia is using TSMC’s CoWoS packaging for two main product families. CoWoS-L is for AI GPUs such as Blackwell and Rubin, while CoWoS-R is for Vera CPUs.
CoWoS-L capacity is expected to hit about 910,000 units, up 40 per cent year on year. Vera shipments are expected to double, which would help Nvidia lift data centre revenue by 52 per cent.
Morgan Stanley said:“Nvidia uses TSMC’s CoWoS-L as the single source for all its AI GPU products (e.g. Blackwell and Rubin). Its 2027 CoWoS-L consumption could reach ~910k, up ~40 per cent year on year. Strong CoWoS-R bookings by Nvidia suggest room for AI GPM products (such as doubling). Taken together, we estimate Nvidia’s 2027 forecast for Nvidia’s data centre revenue to rise 52 per cent year on year.”
Nvidia has been pivoting harder into CPUs to claw back China revenue after GPU restrictions. Several customers have shown interest in Vera CPUs.
The company has hand-delivered the first Vera CPUs to Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX and Oracle. Nothing says “agentic AI era” like an expensive chip being passed around the usual suspects.
The problem for Nvidia is that AMD is not politely standing at the back. Its next-generation EPYC Venice platform is already in volume production at TSMC.
Venice is based on AMD’s upcoming Zen 6 architecture and is expected to deliver better performance and efficiency. It targets both AI and HPC, while Vera is being pitched squarely at agentic AI.
Morgan Stanley projects Nvidia’s Vera CPUs could reach 5.75 million units by 2027. AMD’s EPYC Venice, though, could reach 6.75 million units in 2027. That is 17 per cent more than Vera and 5.4 times its expected 2026 volume.
“Based on our CoWoS consumption forecasts, Nvidia’s 5nm Vera CPU could grow to 5.75mn units in 2027, while AMD’s 2nm Venice CPU may reach 6.75mn units in 2027 vs. ~1.25mn in 2026,” the beancounters said.
AMD has another advantage on paper, with Venice using TSMC’s advanced 2-nanometre process. Vera is based on a 3-nanometre process. The real headache for both companies may not be each other. It is custom silicon, where the cloud crowd is deciding that buying chips off the shelf is for the riffraff.
OpenAI, Google, Amazon and others are either talking up custom chips or already building them. That turns the AI supply chain into a fight between outside suppliers and in-house silicon vanity projects.
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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.
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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 AMD’s next workstation generation has become tangible for the first time. An entry for “TR6 Mustang Peak” has appeared in AMD’s […]
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The Hot Take: Making the CPU important again on the x86 platform.
ACE, the upcoming set of x86 Extensions defined by both AMD & Intel, has seen the latest spec release, focusing on AI acceleration. AMD & Intel Focus on AI Acceleration Through Next-Gen x86 Architectures That Are ACE Compliant Last year, Intel and AMD partnered to strengthen the x86 ecosystem through their "x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group" initiative. The plan was to offer a standardized set of features across architectures to make x86 accessible, scalable, and compatible with future requirements. Four key features were announced: FRED, AVX10, ChkTag, and ACE. Now, the latest ACE "AI Compute Extensions" specifications have been published by AMD […]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/amd-intel-arm-x86-with-ace-matrix-multiply-engines-low-precision-ai-formats-future-cpus/
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The Hot Take: CISC muscle on display... When you don't care about how many watts your cpu consumes ARM/RISC will never touch the raw throughput of these chips.
AMD has shared the first official results for its 256-core EPYC Venice CPU, saying it beats Nvidia's Vera by 3.3x in a rack-level deployment.
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