The Hot Take: Everyone is joining the ARM SoC Server party! To sad they don't know that Fujitsu has already been ruling that with a Top 500 server running them. Better late than not paid I guess?
Qualcomm is rumored to be preparing a brand new datacenter CPU, which will be just in time to power growing Agentic AI needs. Rumors that Qualcomm's New Datacenter CPU is just a few months away may not sound crazy, given the demand there is for agentic AI There's a rumor going around that Qualcomm is working on its very own "dedicated" Datacenter CPU based on the Arm architecture. Qualcomm making its own Datacenter CPU at some point was expected, but what the new rumor is suggesting is that we could see that chip being announced as early as June this […]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/qualcomm-datacenter-cpu-launch-in-june-as-agentic-ai-goes-in-hyperdrive-mode/
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The Hot Take: Great news as we need healthy competition for x86 in a world being crowded by ARM SoC chips. We'll see soon which architecture wins out but we still have RISC-V around the corner, where intel is a board member of that ISA. I feel this limiting ram on devices might be to push in ARM/RISC into acceptance...
Demand for Intel's products exceed expectations and supply, but Intel is still bleeding money.
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The Hot Take: HBM competitor would be good bringing Ai accelerator competition for RAM. Intel bringing it should help Intel to catch up in the Ai game for sure.
Japan’s SaiMemory, a SoftBank subsidiary collaborating with Intel, has secured NEDO funding to develop Z-Angle Memory (ZAM), a next-gen DRAM architecture addressing HBM limitations
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The Hot Take: When do we start spinning up class action on this price rigging game?
SSD prices are already daft, and Samsung and Kingston have decided that now is the perfect time to whack them up by about 10 per cent.
Those Micro Centre shelves stacked with high-end drives costing thousands of dollars are heading for even sillier price tags, and budget gaming PC builds are getting mugged.
Samsung has sent out a price adjustment notice for SSD products, with increases said to exceed 10 per cent.
It has told three major domestic distributors that its cost prices have formally risen.
IT Home Source Bobantang wrote: “At the same time, Kingston announced yesterday that all SSD products across its lineup will implement a unified price increase starting this week, with adjustments of no less than 10 per cent.”
It said that supply chain chatter indicates Samsung and Kingston have issued official notices covering their whole SSD line-ups.
The expectation is at least a 10 per cent bump, which is a polite way of saying your next upgrade is going to sting.
That puts drives like the Samsung 990 PRO 1 TB, already priced at $300 to $330, on track to hit nearly $330 to $360.
A 1 TB 990 Pro used to sit for less than $100 last year, and now it is pushing three to four times that, like nothing happened.
This is being pitched as the second quiet price nudge this month, with Samsung and Western Digital previously hiking high-end M.2 SSD pricing hard.
Prices jumped fast worldwide, and some 8 TB models are reportedly selling for more than $4,000.
The story being whispered is NAND flash supply constraints, because retail demand alone does not usually pull this sort of stunt.
That would explain why every refresh feels like someone is charging rent on your PCIe lanes.
The knock-on effect is ugly for gamers, who do not want to settle for sub-1 TB of storage, even if they are willing to skimp on RAM.
OEMs are already leaning on higher SSD and RAM costs to bump system pricing, with LG’s Gram laptops getting hit by as much as $400.
AI infrastructure demand keeps warping the storage market, with vendors chasing server orders instead of shoppers trying to build a decent rig without selling a kidney.
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The Hot Take: The more the merrier!
Elon Musk's SpaceX set to produce 'own GPUs' at its own multi-billion fab as the company warns that it may be unable to purchase all the silicon it needs to meet its goals.
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The Hot Take: Again the people out there are calling this cheating. I say if you optimized for your hardware how is it cheating????
While everyone wants faster hardware, Intel says the answer lies in software optimization, and the P and E cores are almost identical in gaming performance. Robert Hallock Says E-Cores Don't Degrade Gaming Performance and PC Enthusiasts are "Underestimating" the Importance of Software Intel might not have been able to deliver X3D-equivalent performance in gaming with its latest Core Ultra 200 series, but it has gotten closer with the Plus variants. While still noticeably behind when it comes to the leading gaming performance, Intel blames this regression more on the "software" optimization than the hardware itself. In an interview with PC […]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/intels-hallock-blames-software-not-silicon-for-gaming-gap-claims-30-performance-is-hiding-behind-poor-optimization/
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The Hot Take: Interesting move, consolidate down to a single chip set. Less time to develop, they going to do disabling features at the firmware level to get more skus at different price points?
Intel's upcoming Z970 motherboards for Nova Lake-S Desktop CPUs will replace both high-end Z890 and mainstream B860 options. Intel Z970 Motherboards To Cover An Extensive Market With Both High-End & Mainstream Options For Nova Lake Builders Intel's 900-series motherboards will have a wide range of options for PC builders. The flagship Z990 chipset will be the recommended choice for enthusiast Nova Lake Desktop CPUs, featuring a dual compute tile configuration, while the Z970 chipset will retain a primary focus on the high-end market. Based on a new post by Jaykihn at X, it looks like the Z970 chipset may not […]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/intel-z970-chipset-cover-both-z890-high-end-b860-mainstream-tiers-for-nova-lake/
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The Hot Take: We all desperately need this to not be vapor-ware!
A relatively unknown U. S. -based startup, Bolt Graphics, has announced that it has successfully taped out the first test chip of its Zeus GPU architecture. The company positions Zeus as a disruptive compute accelerator, previously claiming performance up to 150% higher than an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 while consumi ...
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The Hot Take: How far up the supply chain does this go? All the way to Nvidia? Only time will tell.
Following the recent smuggling indictment involving Supermicro co-founder Wally Liaw and others, Nvidia has significantly upgraded its global supply chain monitoring practices in recent months, according to an industry source. Already maintaining high visibility over customer lists, Nvidia now enforces stricter controls on shipments and transshipment processes, prompting multiple suppliers to expand their legal teams to comply with the intensified audits.
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The Hot Take: Intel needs this licensing support as other law suits are back in court with patent trolls....
Elon Musk reveals details about TeraFab: Intel provides technology, Tesla builds pilot line, SpaceX constructs high-volume fab.
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