The Hot Take: Performance and less hybrid coming back to x86.
Intel's next-generation desktop platform is apparently going to persist for approximately three and a half full CPU generations if you include the mobile-only Titan Lake. That's just one of the major details released by serial leaker Moore's Law is Dead in a new video that also includes the claims that upcoming Intel CPUs will not only skip
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The Hot Take: Just WOW.
AMD has announced that its 6th Gen EPYC processor, codenamed Venice, has entered production ramp on TSMC's N2 process in Taiwan.
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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 world’s 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 world’s 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: “Vera 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.”
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 Vera’s 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.
“The 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 we’ll sell millions of Rubins, and every two of them is connected to a Vera. And of course, we price those too. And they’re properly priced. And so that’s number one use case.” 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 we’ll be supply-constrained throughout Vera Rubin’s 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 don’t rent cores. They just want the work to be done fast. The economics of the past was dollars per core,” Huang said.
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The Hot Take: Just what we need Ai specific instructions for them to gobble up all the CPU's now.
APX or Advanced Performance Extensions are the next evolution of x86 as Intel & AMD co-develop new standards for the architecture. APX Expands the x86 Instruction Set, Bringing Faster Performance & New Features That Will Benefit Both Intel and AMD's Next-Gen Chips Two days ago, we talked about ACE (AI Compute Extensions), which is a unified instruction set that aims to increase matrix-multiply performance for next-gen x86 chips. ACE is just one part of the grander scheme in which both Intel and AMD are working together to evolve the x86 architecture under a single unified framework through the recently established […]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/intel-amd-work-on-apx-the-next-major-step-in-the-evolution-of-x86-architectures/
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The Hot Take: This reminds me of the days with L3 Cache for CPU's. Just the next iteration.
Intel Nova Lake-S "bLLC" cache configurations have been detailed, revealing a maximum of 288 MB of cache for next-gen desktop CPUs. Intel Nova Lake-S Desktop CPUs Will Feature Up To 288 MB of bLLC Cache, 80 MB More Than 9950X3D2 Once again, more Nova Lake-S CPU details have been revealed by Jaykihn, this time focusing on the bLLC parts. While we know that the bLLC or Big Last Level Cache die variants will feature up to 144 MB in single and 288 MB in dual tile configurations, the insider has spilled the beans on the max caches of each bLLC […]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/intel-answer-to-amd-x3d-nova-lake-bllc-cpus-pack-38-percent-more-cache-vs-9950x3d2/
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The Hot Take: ARM has a awakened and re-newed Intel to start competing with.
Intel has just launched its highly anticipated Wildcat Lake "Core Series 3" SoCs, designed for everyday PCs & a strong competitor to MacBook Neo. Intel Wildcat Lake vs Apple MacBook Neo Laptop Battle Is Something To Look Forward To As Chipzilla Brings Panther Lake's Goodness To Mainstream Users The Panther Lake "Core Ultra Series 3" lineup took the laptop market by storm, offering unprecedented levels of efficiency, battery times, and graphics performance. While the laptop designs were great, these products were mainly positioned in the high-end category with only a few options within the sub-$1000 segment. Then came Apple's MacBook […]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/intel-launched-its-macbook-neo-competitor-wildcat-lake-for-everyday-pcs/
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The Hot Take: Wow, intel has to speed up catch up from the looks if it.
AMD's next-generation EPYC Venice "Zen 6" CPU samples have leaked, giving us an early look at the SP7 platform & performance. AMD SP7 Platform Leak Reveals Congo, Kenya, Nigeria Test Boards, Featuring Up To 192 Core EPYC Venice "Zen 6" CPUs Venice is the codename for AMD's 6th Gen EPYC family, which replaces the 5th Gen "Turin" lineup. The lineup will feature the brand new Zen 6 core architecture with up to 256 cores, and some big platform updates. Currently, AMD is shipping out its first Venice samples to customers, and some of these have now appeared within the openbenchmarking […]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/amd-epyc-venice-zen-6-192-128-64-core-cpu-leak-sp7-congo-kenya-nigeria-platforms/
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The Hot Take: The Ai "Shortages" are impacting it all.
The new Core Ultra 200S Plus series has received widespread acclaim within the community, and we liked it as well for rejuvenating Intel's otherwise underwhelming CPU generation. Part of the reason they're getting good reviews is their excellent price-to-performance ratio, which seems to be slightly undone at the moment.
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The Hot Take: AMD appears to have per-countered intel, sad this won't come out. Granted we can't get any of the other chips at this point.
Intel has officially confirmed that the Core Ultra 9 290K Plus will not be released, ending months of speculation around what many expected to be the flagship model in the company’s Arrow Lake Refresh desktop lineup.
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The Hot Take: This Ai shortage things is getting ridiculous.
Many PC manufacturers are facing challenges in acquiring inventory of Intel and AMD CPUs, saying that there is not enough supply to meet consumer demand.
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