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, […]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: 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 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: NICE, Intel you can send me samples too! :D
Intel’s 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 Intel’s 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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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 […]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/
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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 […]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/intel-resurrects-on-package-memory-with-razor-lake-ax-to-hunt-down-amd-medusa-halo/
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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: […]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/micron-doubles-down-on-ai-memory-256-gb-ddr5-rdimms-hitting-9200-mtps/
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