The Hot Take: Will only complicate shortages once this hits.
The seemingly never-ending bonus-related saga at Samsung is now spurring a chain reaction across Asia's industrial heartland, with some TSMC employees now actively advocating for the tactics employed by Samsung's unions in recent days to counter the management's penny-pinching ways. TSMC Employees are increasingly coalescing around the idea of threatening Samsung-style strikes to defend their wage-related perks A lot of TSMC employees appear to be venting their rage in recent days on select Facebook pages, honing in on persistent rumors that TSMC might cut employee bonuses. Of course, TSMC has a special place within Taiwan's discourse, with the company often […]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/tsmc-employees-are-exploding-with-rage-over-rumored-bonus-cuts-despite-a-58-profit-jump-and-are-coalescing-around-samsung-style-strikes/
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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: 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 […]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, […]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 company’s 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 Supermicro’s ARS-221GL model with an Nvidia Grace processor. The document offers slightly contradictory advice to the effect that “Arm 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.” 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 “the 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.” 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: “As development environments diversify, cross-architecture connectivity is essential.” VMware hasn’t offered a timeline to get ESX on Arm ready for a full release, but the company has previously told us it’s 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 Broadcom’s licensing regime isn’t to their liking. Platform9 last week debuted “Platform9 OS”, a cut of Linux that encapsulates its Private Cloud Director in an appliance-like format so that users don’t need Linux administration skills to adopt its stack. Platform9 is going after VMware’s top 10,000 customers with a promise it won’t 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. ®
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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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