The Hot Take: So when is there going to be a price fixing class action for GPUs?
AMD is reportedly preparing to jack up graphics card prices after waiting for Nvidia to blink first.
According to PC Gamer the word comes from industry watcher Harukaze5719 who reckons AMD was holding fire until Nvidia pushed up its own prices.
“This was to avoid the risk of declining product competitiveness and market share loss from a hasty price adjustment during a period of demand pressure,” Harukaze5719 wrote on X.
AMD has already warned manufacturers about a price rise of “at least 10 per cent” across all products. The increase is said to kick in from the start of August, which is handy timing if you enjoy paying more for the same silicon.
“The price positioning is expected to be similar to that of the Nvidia series graphics cards,” Harukaze5719 wrote.
Last week, Nvidia was said to be preparing graphics card and component price rises of 20 to 30 per cent. Samsung was tipped for similar rises on memory units, because apparently the hardware industry looked at gamers and decided they had too much rent money left.
The main culprit is the AI data centre feeding frenzy. Those outfits are hoovering up components and cutting fat deals to grab stock before consumer buyers get a sniff. Harukaze5719’s analysis pointed to a current “weak recovery phase in the consumer graphics card market”.
It cited “high price sensitivity at the end-user level” and “existing inventory still needing to be digested” as reasons AMD had been cautious. The mess is spilling into consoles too. For decades, console prices usually fell after launch as production matured and platform holders chased a wider audience. Now Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft have all raised console prices since release, sometimes more than once.
They have warned that more increases could follow, which is lovely news for anyone still pretending gaming hardware is a cheap hobby. The knock-on effect could push next-generation consoles close to £1,000, about €1,170, for the first time.
A thousand-quid console used to sound like satire. Now it looks like a PowerPoint target somewhere in procurement.
The Hot Take: This is the biggest limitation to ARM SoC's as their GPU's are mid-range. So acceptance from gamers will require ability to get high end GPU for performance.
The Snapdragon X2 Elite might have doubled down on compute performance, but a multitude of tests show that its GPU continues to be one of the weakest links of the SoC. Fortunately, a user shows that the RTX Spark driver has introduced unofficial eGPU support through a USB4 connection, allowing you to experience competitive shooters like Overwatch at upwards of 200FPS. Redditor shares “simple to follow” instructions on how to bring eGPU support to Snapdragon X2 Elite laptops Notebooks like the ASUS Zenbook A16 offer a solid configuration to help ARM laptop owners enjoy AAA and competitive titles without relying on […]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/snapdragon-x2-elite-egpu-support-nvidia-rtx-spark-driver/
The Hot Take: Is ARM going to shine or show it's mid-range performance?
The NVIDIA N1X is surely powerful enough for the Windows-on-Arm market, but the current prototype software prevents it from reaching its full potential. User Puts Microsoft's Unreleased NVIDIA N1X-Equipped Surface Laptop Ultra To Test; Discovers Chip Being Held Back by Unfinished Drivers The NVIDIA RTX Spark laptops will debut in the coming weeks, and if you were wondering about their performance numbers, here is an early sneak peek by a TechPowerUp user, who got his hands on an early prototype from Microsoft. The user "Fouquin" says he found the Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra with NVIDIA's RTX Spark N1X on the […]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/nvidia-rtx-spark-shows-strong-potential-but-early-prototype-leaves-plenty-of-performance-on-the-table/
The Hot Take: Again, Nvidia doing anti-competitive practices?
Nvidia’s graphics card prices are reportedly jumping again as memory costs rise and retailers start clearing shelves in panic.
With Samsung reportedly raising DRAM prices by about 20 per cent for the current quarter, Nvidia appears to have decided customers can pay. The result is another price rise for consumer graphics cards, the third such inflationary episode this year, according to the reports.
This one has reportedly emptied store shelves as distributors shift into full panic mode.
Unlike Nvidia’s May price rise, the latest bout appears to cover far more consumer graphics card models.
According to Taiwan’s Economic Daily, Nvidia has increased prices on consumer-facing graphics cards by between 20 per cent and 30 per cent. That follows a price rise of between 10 per cent and 15 per cent in January 2026.
The May increase was aimed mainly at high-end cards such as the GeForce RTX 5090 series. The latest hike, therefore, looks like Nvidia’s third attempt to test how much pain gamers and system builders can absorb this year.
BenchLife claims Nvidia’s price notices to downstream supply chain partners now cover entire GPU bundles. That means the GPU itself and the GDDR memory are being lumped together on the same grim little invoice.
The notices, helped along by runaway rumours, have reportedly triggered a proper panic among retail channel distributors.
One major Chinese e-commerce platform went so far as to remove many mainstream Nvidia graphics cards from sale last week. Retailers that have already adjusted prices are showing a chunky difference.
The 16GB GDDR7 Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti is now selling for 10,700 yuan (€1,389, $1,581), up from 9,299 yuan (€1,207, $1,374) last week.
In November 2025, the same card was selling for 7,200 yuan (€934, $1,064). The price rises are producing some daft results in the GDDR market as well.
Standard 2GB GDDR7 video memory now sells for $20, while a 3GB chip costs between $60 and $70. That means the 3GB GDDR7 part offers just 50 per cent more video memory but costs more than three times as much.
The Hot Take: Still not buying the ARM SoC's are better than discrete system CPUs. We'll have to see how Intel/AMD ACE instructions far against this.
NVIDIA has started using clusters of its own Vera processors to develop future CPUs, GPUs, and AI accelerators. The company says initial electronic design automation testing shows performance improvements of up to 1.
The Hot Take: USA domestic manufacturing is blowing up and saving Intel.
Intel Foundry might be heading into a big deal with NVIDIA, as the company is expected to offer packaging and wafer support for next-gen Feynman GPUs. NVIDIA Feynman GPUs Could Be Intel Foundry's Biggest Win To Date With Chipzilla Providing Both Packaging & Wafer Supply A deal between Intel and NVIDIA won't be a major surprise for those following our previous reports, but it is definitely a big win for Intel's Foundry business. Earlier this year, we reported that NVIDIA might be looking into Intel's upcoming process & advanced packaging technologies for its next-generation GPUs, codenamed Feynman. Well, according to […]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/intel-foundry-nvidia-feynman-gpu-wafer-packaging-deal/
The decision to employ older Cortex-X925 and Cortex-A725 cores on the RTX Spark to form a 20-core CPU configuration will probably haunt NVIDIA because a new Cinebench 2026 leak reveals that the chipset produces subpar multi-core results, despite Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Ultra housing the SoC set to the ‘High Performance’ profile. Fortunately, the RTX Spark manages to retain some dignity in the single-core benchmark. High Performance mode on Surface Laptop Ultra isn’t enabled by default, but hidden configuration allows RTX Spark’s Cortex cores to pull nearly 50W in new test We’ve previously reported that the altered Cortex-X925 cores running RTX Spark were […]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/rtx-spark-cinebench-2026-disappointing-multi-core-results/
The Hot Take: We'll have to see, they just keep milking Ai at the cost of liquidating a whole other industry.
The GeForce RTX 50-series desktop graphics lineup has remained unchanged for just over a year now (since the introduction of the RTX 5050), and none of the conversations we've had at major trade shows suggests that a mid-cycle Super refresh will occur any time soon. But there are still signs that such an update could still happen at some point, and the latest sign comes from Seasonic, which has listed an RTX 5080 Super, an RTX 5070 Ti Super, and RTX 5070 Ti Super in its PSU wattage calculator. Go deeper with TH Premium: GPUs(Image credit: Noctua)Desktop RoadmapEnterprise RoadmapRubin in-depthThe Stout Owl: The ultimate Noctua G2 PCYou can click through the calculator and assemble a hypothetical system with these unannounced products inside. To be useful, this calculator also provides board power numbers for these as-yet-unreleased cards, and that gives us another bit of juicy info. Given that no official specifications for these GPUs exist, it's impossible to say whether these figures are accurate. But it does allow us to speculate a bit on how they might stack up to existing products. Unannounced RTX 50 Super-series TGPsGraphics CardTotal Graphics Power (W)% ChangeRTX 5070250--RTX 5070 Super275*10% RTX 5070 Ti300--RTX 5070 Ti Super350*17%RTX 5080380--RTX 5080 Super415*15% *As listed in Seasonic PSU calculator. Unconfirmed by Nvidia. Seasonic gives this purported RTX 5080 Super a board power of 415W in its calculator, or 15% higher than the existing RTX 5080's 360W envelope. That makes sense, because the RTX 5080's GB203 GPU is already fully enabled, so any Super version of that card would have to lean on higher power limits and more aggressive clock speeds to see any baseline performance benefit. That figure could also partially account for slightly higher power usage from 8 GB more GDDR7 memory on such a card. Past RTX 50 Super-series rumors have suggested that Nvidia will boost VRAM capacity on those products by moving to higher-density GDDR7 modules with 3GB of capacity each. GDDR7's power consumption as part of the overall board picture is relatively small, but more of it will still matter. If Seasonic's figures are accurate, we should also expect a similarly sized TGP increase out of the RTX 5070 Ti Super, whose 350W rating is 17% higher than that of the RTX 5070 Ti. The RTX 5070 Super, meanwhile, gets only a 10% TGP bump over the RTX 5070, from 250W to 275W. Both of these cards rely on GPUs that are slightly cut down from their full available resources, so it's possible that Nvidia could boost their performance through a balance of enabling more Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs) in addition to boosting clocks through higher power envelopes. Beware of extrapolating performance improvements directly from these percentages, though. Our own testing has shown that any real-world performance benefits from these power limit increases are likely to be smaller than those figures would suggest. As our review of the MSI RTX 5090 Lightning Z showed, the largest performance boosts from higher power limits are likely to be concentrated in ray-traced and path-traced games, whose computational intensity is significantly higher than pure raster titles and is more likely to run the GPU into its power limits. In any event, we shouldn't expect to see these products any time soon. Nvidia has instead been focused on getting more out of existing Blackwell silicon with software improvements such as DLSS 4.5 upscaling and Multi-Frame Generation multipliers up to 6X. These technologies enable higher output frame rates and image quality with lower input resolution than past DLSS technologies, and the boost to both performance and image quality from those technologies in tandem has certainly made existing Blackwell products more appealing than they were at launch.But as monitor refresh rates continue to climb thanks to ongoing improvements to OLED and LCD panels, and next-generation HDMI 2.2 connectors looming over 2027, a hardware update of some kind that boosts baseline performance and potentially implements support for those standards seems practical at some point. Given these primarily consumer-focused improvements, an announcement at CES 2027 or Computex 2027 might make sense. As with any future product rumors, however, only time will truly tell.
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.
The Hot Take: It seems Nvidia is hedging two architectures against each other. x86 vs ARM. They've been working with MediaTek to create the Spark SoC.
According to an exclusive report by VideoCardz, Intel's first x86 system-on-chip (SoC) integrating an Nvidia RTX GPU has been added to its internal product roadmap and is expected to launch in the first quarter of 2028, potentially making its public debut at CES 2028.