The Hot Take: Interesting...
Qualcomm has introduced its first-ever CPU designed for Data Centers, the Dragonfly C1000, which leverages the Oryon architecture. Qualcomm Enters The Agentic AI CPU Race With Dragonfly C1000 Chip, Oryon-Based With Over 5 GHz Clocks, Over 250 Cores, & Aims To Achieve Single-Core Leadership One of the biggest announcements by Qualcomm today was its first release of a CPU for the data center segment, called the Dragonfly C1000. This is a chip purpose-built for Agentic AI & General-Purpose workloads, delivering best-in-class power efficiency and TCO. As per Qualcomm, the Dragonfly C1000 is based on a custom-designed Oryon core architecture that [âŚ]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/qualcomm-single-core-leadership-first-server-cpu-dragonfly-c1000-250-cores-5-ghz-2028/
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The Hot Take: ARM seems to be breaking out from everywhere. Fujitsu, Nvidia, AWS and ARM. Qualcomm seems to be playing catch up in the server market from the looks of it.
AWS has provided a first look at its next-generation Graviton5 processor, a custom server CPU developed by Annapurna Labs for deployment across the company's cloud computing platform and AI inference infrastructure.
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The Hot Take: I'm interested in the Surface with this chip to get a decent GPU on an ARM setup and play with ARM Windows more personally. Only professionally worked with it and that was only an inch deep.
Computex 2026 and GTC Taipei will go down in history as the moment NVIDIA used to officially announce its entrance into the PC market. During his keynote at the Taipei Music Center, CEO Jensen Huang announced the RTX Spark â formerly codenamed N1 and N1X â which will power an array of premium laptops and small form factor systems coming this
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The Hot Take: Will have to see what the final products show us.
The N1X reportedly comes in two SKUs: a top-end 20-core option with 6,144 CUDA cores matching the desktop RTX 5070, and a cut-down 18-core option with 5,120 CUDA cores. The standard N1 also has two configs, one with a 12-core CPU and 2,560 CUDA cores and a 10-core model with 2,048 CUDA cores.
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The Hot Take: Only time will tell on this one. I don't think so but we'll see here soon enough.
A new report from GF Securities (via SeekingAlpha) claims NVIDIA is gearing up to use its June 1st Computex keynote to pitch its upcoming Arm-based Vera CPU as an x86 killer. The financial analysts claim NVIDIA will boast that Vera delivers up to "1.5x faster speeds, 2x the performance, and 4x the density per rack," as compared to traditional
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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: Have they given up in trying to infiltrate the WinTel market to go for them Ai dollars?
The strategic significance of Arm's current transformation lies in its transition from a volume-dependent mobile component provider to a value-driven infrastructure architect. As the global smartphone market faces structural saturation, the organization is pivoting toward Agentic and Physical AI to redefine its commercial relevance. The core of this strategy is to increase the average selling price per chip by packing higher complexityâmeasured in core density and orchestration capabilitiesâinto each unit, thereby ensuring revenue growth even as hardware shipment volumes stabilize.
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The Hot Take: So was ARM not breaking into the WinTel market so they shifted to Ai market or are they just chasing the highest dollars?
Investment bank UBS reckons agentic AI will send CPU demand soaring, with Arm and AMD best placed to grab the spoils.
UBS analysts believe the growth of agentic AI software will drive strong demand for CPUs in the AI era. The bank said agentic AI increases processor workloads and favours chips with higher core counts and better power efficiency.
That view gives Arm the biggest potential upside, followed by AMD. Intel could benefit too, since a growing total addressable market tends to lift more than one silicon boat.
In fresh coverage of British chip design house Arm, UBS said CPU demand is surging. The bank said agentic AI computing will favour chips with higher core counts and a bias towards power efficiency.
UBS reckons the total server market could grow five times by calendar year 2030. It put the figure at $170bn, up from $30bn in calendar year 2025.
Within that market, UBS expects Arm to benefit the most. The bank said Arm could potentially grab as much as 40-45 per cent of the total share, which would make the x86 crowd choke on its roadmaps.
The bankâs report cited expert comments behind three main themes explaining the surge in CPU demand. The first is that agentic AI workloads rely more heavily on CPU cores.
That shift is expected to require a three- to fivefold increase in CPU core counts per user and per GPU. Servers with standalone CPUs will need more chips, which is the kind of problem chip sellers enjoy having.
UBS said that demand for agentic AI will push some workloads to local PCs. It pointed to Anthropicâs Claude Code as an example.
The need for higher core counts and power efficiency should tilt demand first towards Arm and then AMD. That sounds grim for anyone still selling yesterdayâs watt-guzzling boxes as tomorrowâs AI answer.
Chipzilla could still serve this market through its Coral Rapids platform, according to UBS. The catch is that benefiting from a bigger market and winning the best bits of it are not quite the same trick.
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The Hot Take: Interesting, is this feedback because people STILL want high performance parts? To me it looks like they've all been trying to push us to mid-range devices that we're not supposed to own either.
NVIDIAâs plans to enter the APU market are becoming clearer, as new leaks outline the specifications and timeline for its upcoming N1X SoC. The chip represents a shift for NVIDIA, combining an Arm-based CPU with a Blackwell GPU in a single package aimed at high-performance laptops and compact desktop systems.
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