The Hot Take: Race to the ST champion on next architecture has begun.
AMD's Zen 6 processors are out! Well, the EPYC 9006 family of server CPUs is out, anyway. These aren't chips that mere mortals like you and I can reasonably acquire, so there aren't really many third-party benchmarks out there yet, but somebody ran GeekBench 7 on one, and you know what that means: time for some wild speculation, such as the supposed 15% single-threaded IPC increase you might have seen reported this week. However, it isn't quite that clear yet. Well-known enthusiast and occasional leaker HXL (@9550pro) spotted the EPYC 9996ā¦
AMD's first Arm-based CPUs in over a decade, codenamed Soundwave, are heading to Surface laptops from Microsoft. AMD Soundwave APUs To Bring Arm's Competitive Value To Surface Laptops As Apple's Pressure Mounts on Microsoft The AMD Soundwave SoCs were first spotted back in 2024, when they were listed as a next-generation 3nm APU design. Few details were known back then, but a year later, we learned about Soundwave being AMD's attempt at the Arm ecosystem. Initially primed for a 2026 launch for Microsoft's 2026 Surface lineup, the plans changedā¦
The Hot Take: Doubling the CPUs in the rack yes will be better performance per watt, but is also stacking it against the competition. If you focus on CORE vs CORE, AMD and CISC/x86 still beats it in my eyes.
Arm claims its AGI CPU delivers nearly twice AMDās EPYC Turin performance per rack, thanks to its higher server density.
Research outfitĀ Signal65Ā tested early Arm systems against AMDās Zen 5-based EPYC 9755 across seven workloads. Arm commissioned the study, and it seems reasonably pleased with its purchase.
The headline result is an average of 1.99 times the modelled performance per rack, with individual results ranging from 1.43 to 3.19 times AMDās performance. That distinction between measured processor results and modelled racksā¦
By ckasprzak | TkOut | October 1, 2026 | AMD, GPU, Hardware
The Hot Take: If true, definitely an opportunity for AMD to take the performance crown for a time.
With GPUs and memory chips in incredibly high demand, 2027 is shaping up to be one of the more unusual graphics card release cycles. NVIDIA has been dominating the segment for years, but if recent rumors suggesting that the RTX 60 series is delayed until 2028 turn out to be true, AMD could find itself in a unique position to lure users toward its upcoming cards.
The Hot Take: Will have to see how this works and if the fidelity is good.
Ā AMDĀ has shown a ray tracing trick that slashes memory and acceleration-structure costs while keeping hundreds of millions of animated triangles moving in real time.
AMD Fellow Holger Gruen demonstrated the technique using a terrain scene containing about 25,000 independently animated plants. At maximum level of detail, the vegetation represents roughly 2.8 billion triangles.
After level-of-detail selection, the system ray-traces about 500 million animated triangles each frame using primary and shadow rays. AMD says the scene runs at moreā¦
The Hot Take: As expected, while they continue to squeeze out every dollar from Ai.
Both GPU giants are expected to skip 2027 for their next-generation of graphics cards, and only one configuration is expected to see its debut next year. Leaker Claims AMD and NVIDIA Planning to Launch Their Next-Gen Graphics Cards in 2028 While RDNA 2 AT2 GPU Launches in 2027 We have previously heard reports claiming that AMD is reportedly planning to launch its next generation of graphics cards in late 2027. Some reports claimed that the launch could be delayed until early 2028. Looks like we aren't getting the complete GPU family out untilā¦
The Hot Take: Intersting move, I haven't looked into how low level Rust gets compared to C++. Something I need to do I guess.
Phoronix reports:
AMD is building out what they are describing as an "elite" team of developers for driving Rust code "deep into the GPU stack" from firmware to drivers, shader compilers, and other GPU software in Rust. AMD Senior Fellow Harsh Meno posted this week to LinkedIn about this new effort...
And note this AMD job posting that's active for hiring a software development engineer to work on Rust code...
"We are building next-generation systems software for AMD GPUs with Rust as a core technical direction. Theā¦
By ckasprzak | TkOut | September 5, 2026 | AMD, GPU, Hardware
The Hot Take: AMD going to make a push for more than mid-range?
New leak points towards noticeably higher frequencies for AMD's next-generation graphics architecture. AMD RDNA 5 GPUs Could Target Up To 3.4 GHz Clock Speeds, Putting the Architecture up to 14% Ahead of RX 9070 XT's Boost Clock AMD's next-generation graphics architecture, RDNA 5, is still far away from the official launch, but we already have some early leaks pointing to the architecture's capabilities. As you might know, the RDNA 5 architecture is going to power AMD's next-gen graphics stack, including dedicated graphics cards and iGPUs onā¦
The Hot Take: Suddenly we explain this to the world, is this to head off all the questions on where the DRAM supply is going?
The silicon industry has arrived at a consensus that the HBM pathway to unlock incremental AI compute is stalling, especially as converting silicon wafers into an HBM stack yields far less usable capacity than commodity DRAM, prompting the wider industry to start experimenting with SRAM-only decode, Processor-In-Memory (PIM) within LPDDR, CXL pooling, and 3D DRAM. Of course, it is the 3D DRAM architecture that is considered somewhat of a panacea at the moment, as highlighted by AMD's recent admission as to its phenomenal energy efficiency.ā¦
Many cybersecurity exploits have been deemed The One Ring To Rule Them All, but that moniker is rarely as true as a literal bit that disables the memory mapping on some AMD CPUs, granting access to normally inaccessible areas. With just one instruction, you can access off-limits software like Platform Security Processor (PSP) where the fTPM runs, the System Management Mode (SMM), microcode patch RAM, and other various sundries ā in other words, full hardware-level control.The exploit is called Skitter Creek Bath Salts (Skitter), and wasā¦