By ckasprzak | TkOut
| May 21, 2026 | ARM, CPU, Hardware
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.
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 worldâs 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 worldâs 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: âVera 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.â
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 Veraâs 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.
âThe 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 weâll sell millions of Rubins, and every two of them is connected to a Vera. And of course, we price those too. And theyâre properly priced. And so thatâs number one use case.â 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 weâll be supply-constrained throughout Vera Rubinâs 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 donât rent cores. They just want the work to be done fast. The economics of the past was dollars per core,â Huang said.
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The Hot Take: NICE, Intel you can send me samples too! :D
Intelâs 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 Intelâs most aggressive swing at the high-end PC market in years, with performance claims that sound almost exaggerated until you remember
The Hot Take: Been saying it for years, Microsoft is pulling Linux into windows on bite at a time. This probably I would assume only accelerates.
Microsoft is turning Azure Linux into a general-purpose, Fedora-based cloud distribution available to all Azure customers, while also productizing Flatcar as Azure Container Linux for immutable container hosts. "When Microsoft joined the Linux Foundation, there was this big conspiracy theory that somehow the Linux Foundation was undermining open source in partnership with Microsoft, and now you announce that you're shipping a Linux distribution," Jim Zemlin, the Linux Foundation's CEO, said in response to Microsoft's surprise announcement. "That's amazing." ZDNet reports: Until now, [Lachlan Everson, Microsoft's Principal Program Manager on Azure's open-source team] noted, "we had Azure Linux only available to third-party customers through AKS specifically, and that was Azure Linux 3.0." Going forward, this will be ACL. Everson emphasized that Azure Linux 4.0 is the culmination of years of internal usage and the evolution of the earlier Mariner distribution. "So we've been running Azure Linux for many years internally, and we got through to 3.0, and we only allowed it on as a container host on AKS. What we've done is make it a general-purpose, so this is all the learnings that we've had in the heritage of Mariner."
Under the hood, Azure Linux 4.0 is based on Fedora Linux and is delivered as an open distribution on GitHub. This code is available now. Yes, Red Hat knows that Microsoft has done this. Everson continued, "So, we made a decision to use Fedora as an upstream, so it's using RPMs in the Fedora ecosystem. Microsoft curates the packages and the supply chain to fit Azure's cloud platform." Microsoft also created "it to be purpose-built for Azure, which integrates vertically into all of our infrastructure to give you the best Azure Linux experience on Azure." While Azure Linux will ship as a VM image, Microsoft is already preparing a developer-friendly path onto Windows desktops: "And as of today, we have it as a VM image for your VM host on Azure. We're going to announce WSL images as well."
While developers will be able to run Azure Linux locally through WSL, Microsoft is not positioning it as a traditional desktop Linux. Asked whether he could run it on his laptop, Everson said: "I will be able to run it on my laptop, or what have you. Yes, on Windows 11." However, when pressed about a desktop experience, Everson was clear that there are "no plans" for a graphical environment. "It's optimized for server-side in the cloud," he said, adding that even on a developer machine, users should expect a lean environment. "Minimal packages, yeah. The idea is that we offer you a consistent experience to do your development on your machine, and that you can take your workloads as you develop them on your machine and run them with VS Code. You can run your applications on that, and know that the platform is the same that you're running on the cloud, so that you have that kind of consistency between environments."
Flatcar itself remains the upstream project, but Microsoft is packaging it for Azure customers. Everson described Flatcar as "purpose-built, immutable, secure by default, production-ready operating system, and Azure Container Linux is the productization of that, but we're still investing in the upstream Flatcar ecosystem and pulling that downstream into a productized exterior experience just for container workloads, so it's a container hosting in AKS." To underscore the immutable model, he added that "Everything's baked in, so there is no package manager. We bake the bits into the immutable, and they're in the immutable version. So Azure Container Linux is the immutable version. So you shouldn't be changing any system packages or any application packages. Anything that you need to change is customer workloads run in containers."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The 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 [âŚ]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/
The Hot Take: SMS/TXT is going to cause some pain for sure.
For years, typing in a six-digit code sent to your phone has been the universal standard for verifying your identity online. But that era is officially coming to an end in the Windows ecosystem.
In a statement to Windows Latest, Microsoft independently confirmed that itâll stop sending SMS codes for personal accounts.
Now, first spotted by Windows Latest, Microsoft has officially announced that it is pulling the plug on SMS codes for personal accounts. According to a support document quietly published earlier this year, the company is actively phasing out text messages as a method for both two-factor authentication and account recovery.
While the tech giant subtly hinted at this shift in a previous security advisory earlier this year, stating it was âcommitted to advancing security standards,â the newly released documentation explicitly confirms the end of SMS verification.
Moving forward, Microsoft is forcing a transition to passwordless alternatives, mandating the use of passkeys, authenticator apps, and verified secondary email addresses.
Why Microsoft is abandoning SMS authentication
Redmondâs decision to kill off SMS verification comes down to the undeniable fact that text messages are no longer a secure way to protect your digital identity.
In their official advisory, Microsoft states that âSMS-based authentication is now a leading source of fraud.â
âMicrosoft is committed to advancing security standards, and as such, we will start phasing out SMS as a method of authentication and account recovery for personal Microsoft accounts,â Microsoft noted in an advisory spotted by Windows Latest. âMicrosoft believes that the future of authentication is passwordless, secure, and user-friendly.â
Text messages were never designed with modern cybersecurity in mind. They are transmitted in plain text across vulnerable cellular networks, making them highly susceptible to interception.
Furthermore, hackers frequently use SIM-swap attacks, a tactic where a malicious actor tricks your mobile carrier into transferring your phone number to a device they control. Once the transfer is complete, the hacker instantly receives all of your SMS two-factor authentication codes, allowing them to easily hijack your accounts.
To combat this, Microsoft believes the future of account security is entirely passwordless. The company is replacing SMS with passkeys, which are a modern, phishing-resistant security standard.
Unlike traditional passwords or text codes that can be intercepted, passkeys use your deviceâs built-in biometric hardware.
When you sign in using a passkey, you authenticate your identity using Windows Hello facial recognition, a fingerprint scanner, or a localized device PIN. This creates a cryptographic key pair where the private key never leaves your physical hardware, rendering remote phishing attacks virtually impossible.
Depending on your setup, passkeys can be device-bound, meaning the private key never leaves the physical hardware (like your laptopâs TPM chip), or they can be synced across your devices via services like Apple iCloud Keychain or Google Password Manager. This cross-device compatibility ensures that if you lose your phone, your verified email and synced passkeys will still allow you to recover your account safely.
The problem of a forced passwordless transition
On paper, eliminating vulnerable SMS codes in favor of biometric passkeys is an objective win for global cybersecurity. In my daily workflow, the passwordless ecosystem is genuinely fantastic. I use Microsoft Edge, Microsoft Password Manager, and the Microsoft Authenticator app across all my devices. Thanks to the IR camera on my Lenovo laptop, Windows Hello face recognition makes logging into my personal Microsoft account a breeze.
However, Microsoftâs forced transition may cause significant headaches for power users.
As a Windows Insider, I constantly spin up, configure, and manage new virtual machines (VMs) to test software builds.
When I attempt to log into my Microsoft account within these isolated, nested environments, the passkey experience falls apart. Biometric hardware wonât be available on a VM, for obvious reasons, and I do not have access to security keys either. When trying to log in with passkeys via PIN, Iâm always shown an error.
In these highly technical, edge-case scenarios, requesting an SMS code was the ultimate, foolproof fallback. It just worked.
Passwords and SMS codes are ubiquitous. Typing in a six-digit text code is an instinctive, habitual behavior for billions of people. To successfully change a deeply ingrained habit, the replacement technology must be utterly flawless across every conceivable scenario.
Microsoft could drop the forced Microsoft account sign-in during Windows 11 setup; now thatâs one less place where youâll need to sign in!.
Either way, Microsoft will soon begin prompting all personal account holders with a âSign in faster with your face, fingerprint, or PINâ screen, urging them to set up a passkey and verify a backup email address. While losing the convenience of SMS codes may be a bitter pill to swallow for some, it is a necessary step to secure Windows 11 against modern threats.
The post Microsoft is killing SMS codes for Microsoft account sign-in, aggressively pushes passkeys on Windows 11 appeared first on Windows Latest
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 [âŚ]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/intel-resurrects-on-package-memory-with-razor-lake-ax-to-hunt-down-amd-medusa-halo/
The 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: [âŚ]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/micron-doubles-down-on-ai-memory-256-gb-ddr5-rdimms-hitting-9200-mtps/