The Hot Take: Well was the shortage planned to hasten this?
Chinese memory has apparently started making its way to global vendors, as Corsair's DDR5 modules have been spotted with CXMT DRAM. CXMT Takes Charge of The Global DDR5 Memory Supply Chain As Taiwanese & US Firms Lock In DRAM Supply Towards AI There has been a lot of talk going around CXMT and YMTC flooding the global markets with DRAM and NAND chips, as the AI supercycle has created a tight supply chain around commodity memory and SSDs. There were already reports that the major PC manufacturers have started exploring the integration of Chinese memory into their products due to [âŚ]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/chinese-memory-enters-global-markets-corsair-ddr5-modules-spotted-with-cxmt-dram/
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By ckasprzak | TkOut
| May 21, 2026 |
Hardware
The Hot Take: When these start getting traction we'll get GPUs to drop in price.....
While AI GPU giant NVIDIA's chips are widely believed to offer superior total cost of ownership (TCO) compared to custom AI chip alternatives, analysts from Evercore ISI believe that AI engineers are unimpressed by them. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has defended his firm's AI chip price points on multiple occasions by claiming that they offer better performance efficiency compared to peers. However, according to the Evercore report, AI engineers are also focused on other metrics, such as the cost of cooling the chips, when deciding which products to use. Power Consumption & Cooling Are Important For NVIDIA's AI Chip Costs, [âŚ]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/nvidia-loses-ground-with-ai-engineers-as-cooling-and-power-costs-push-hyperscalers-toward-custom-asics-evercore-warns/
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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 are going to need all the fabs we can get here.
ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet said on Wednesday that he has spoken directly with Elon Musk about the TeraFab semiconductor project.
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The Hot Take: So many software updates, seems like they're milking current silicon or having issues with new silicon?
NVIDIA is preparing to showcase a new rendering technique that could move real-time path tracing another step closer to wider game-engine adoption. Scheduled for presentation at the ACM conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques in May, the companyâs latest research focuses on improving ReSTIR PT, a ...
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By ckasprzak | TkOut
| May 21, 2026 |
Software
The Hot Take: We'll have to see if this take off.... With ARM just entering the market with nvidia we'll have to see if it gains traction.
VMware has quietly debuted a technology preview of its flagship ESX hypervisor that is capable of running on Arm processors and servers. The virtualization giant teased its new tech in a Xeet which piqued our interest and led to the discovery of this document [PDF] on the public internet that explains the hypervisor supports guests running RHEL, Ubuntu, and SUSE, on servers from HPE and Gigabyte powered by Ampere processors, or Supermicroâs ARS-221GL model with an Nvidia Grace processor. The document offers slightly contradictory advice to the effect that âArm host clusters must be managed by a separate, standalone vCenter running on x86. We do not recommend managing x86 installations and Arm installations from the same vCenter.â The tech preview appears to be a very basic affair, as it lacks support for vSAN hyperconverged storage, NSX virtual networking, and plenty of other features VMware offers in its x86 hypervisor and Cloud Foundation (VCF) private cloud suite. VMware has also made it possible to access Arm guests from its desktop hypervisors. As disclosed last week in release notes for new versions of the Workstation and Fusion products that add âthe ability to connect to remote ARM-based ESXi, allowing users to manage VMs on remote ARM servers directly from VMware Workstation or Fusion on any supported platform.â Virtzilla is therefore making good on its promise to bring its hypervisor and VCF to the Arm architecture. The Broadcom business unit is porting its products because it thinks customers will increasingly turn to Arm servers on the network edge, perhaps for AI workloads. VMware is also aware that Arm processors can be more energy-efficient than x86 CPUs, and must also know that its hyperscale partners AWS, Microsoft, and Google aggressively promote their home-brew Arm processors as delivering superior performance-per-watt. In its announcement of its new desktop hypervisors, VMware offers another reason: âAs development environments diversify, cross-architecture connectivity is essential.â VMware hasnât offered a timeline to get ESX on Arm ready for a full release, but the company has previously told us itâs in no rush because customers are currently Arm-curious rather than in a rush to shift workloads onto the architecture. While VMware explores a new architecture, its rivals continue to prepare products they hope will prize away some users who feel Broadcomâs licensing regime isnât to their liking. Platform9 last week debuted âPlatform9 OSâ, a cut of Linux that encapsulates its Private Cloud Director in an appliance-like format so that users donât need Linux administration skills to adopt its stack. Platform9 is going after VMwareâs top 10,000 customers with a promise it wonât try to lock them in with licensing or restrictive hardware compatibility lists. Australian outfit Netframe takes a similar approach with its wares and has chosen to walk down a well-worn path by creating a free version of its eponymous product that allows users to run up to three hosts. The company thinks that offering will attract home lab operators and small shops who will be sufficiently impressed by the product to upgrade and sign up for support. ÂŽ
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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.
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The Hot Take: Can't have other countries get there first. Nat Sec vulnerability for sure.
The US government has taken $2 billion worth of equity stakes in quantum computing companies, including one linked to the Trump family.
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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 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
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