By ckasprzak | TkOut | September 9, 2026 | CPU, Hardware, x86
The Hot Take: Are we going to have a third player in the x86 market? Reminds me of the days Cyrix 686's back in the day if so. Would help push competition and Intel with an injection of licensing cash.
The mystery deepens around an x86 implementation from a corporate entity other than AMD and Intel and has been making some very intriguing changes for coming from a seeming start-up. Beyond 16 tile and 32 tile AMX implementations that already surpass Intel's current Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) capabilities in shipping Xeon CPUs, new disclosures were made today concerning Advanced Performance Extensions (APX), Flexible Return and Event Delivery (FRED), and even x86S as the effort that Intel previously stopped for cleaning up the x86ā¦
The Hot Take: Intersting move, I haven't looked into how low level Rust gets compared to C++. Something I need to do I guess.
Phoronix reports:
AMD is building out what they are describing as an "elite" team of developers for driving Rust code "deep into the GPU stack" from firmware to drivers, shader compilers, and other GPU software in Rust. AMD Senior Fellow Harsh Meno posted this week to LinkedIn about this new effort...
And note this AMD job posting that's active for hiring a software development engineer to work on Rust code...
"We are building next-generation systems software for AMD GPUs with Rust as a core technical direction. Theā¦
By ckasprzak | TkOut | September 5, 2026 | AMD, GPU, Hardware
The Hot Take: AMD going to make a push for more than mid-range?
New leak points towards noticeably higher frequencies for AMD's next-generation graphics architecture. AMD RDNA 5 GPUs Could Target Up To 3.4 GHz Clock Speeds, Putting the Architecture up to 14% Ahead of RX 9070 XT's Boost Clock AMD's next-generation graphics architecture, RDNA 5, is still far away from the official launch, but we already have some early leaks pointing to the architecture's capabilities. As you might know, the RDNA 5 architecture is going to power AMD's next-gen graphics stack, including dedicated graphics cards and iGPUs onā¦
The Hot Take: Suddenly we explain this to the world, is this to head off all the questions on where the DRAM supply is going?
The silicon industry has arrived at a consensus that the HBM pathway to unlock incremental AI compute is stalling, especially as converting silicon wafers into an HBM stack yields far less usable capacity than commodity DRAM, prompting the wider industry to start experimenting with SRAM-only decode, Processor-In-Memory (PIM) within LPDDR, CXL pooling, and 3D DRAM. Of course, it is the 3D DRAM architecture that is considered somewhat of a panacea at the moment, as highlighted by AMD's recent admission as to its phenomenal energy efficiency.ā¦
The Hot Take: Lets hope Intel can fully recover and start chewing back that x86 market or I fear with get pushed into ARM SoC mediocrity.
Intel seems to have staged a decisive turnaround in the second quarter of the ongoing year, with its data center revenue up a very healthy 59 percent year-over-year. Yet, Intel's inertia is still working against it, as clearly demonstrated within a new report from Mercury Research, which has tallied that Intel's share of the CPU market has fallen to levels last seen in 1995 even as AMD remains perched on an ascendant trajectory. After accounting for the fact that AMD does not count embedded CPUs it ships for networking and storage applicationsā¦
Many cybersecurity exploits have been deemed The One Ring To Rule Them All, but that moniker is rarely as true as a literal bit that disables the memory mapping on some AMD CPUs, granting access to normally inaccessible areas. With just one instruction, you can access off-limits software like Platform Security Processor (PSP) where the fTPM runs, the System Management Mode (SMM), microcode patch RAM, and other various sundries ā in other words, full hardware-level control.The exploit is called Skitter Creek Bath Salts (Skitter), and wasā¦
In AMDās latest bid to upset Nvidia's dominance in AI hardware, the House of Zen has acquired AI chip company Taalas, which bakes model weights directly into silicon in a process that promises to boost inference performance by an order of magnitude or more. The deal, announced at market close on Thursday, appears to be framed in much the same context as Nvidiaās $20 billion licensing deal with Groq last December: make high-performance āpremiumā inference services prized for AI agents, like code assistants, faster and cheaper to run. AMD didnātā¦
The Hot Take: So when is there going to be a price fixing class action for GPUs?
AMD is reportedly preparing to jack up graphics card prices after waiting for Nvidia to blink first.
According to PC Gamer the word comes from industry watcher Harukaze5719 who reckons AMD was holding fire until Nvidia pushed up its own prices.
āThis was to avoid the risk of declining product competitiveness and market share loss from a hasty price adjustment during a period of demand pressure,ā Harukaze5719 wrote on X.
AMD has already warned manufacturers about a price rise of āat least 10 per centā across all products.Ā The increase isā¦
Intel and AMD are signing long term agreements with Chinese data center firms to provide them with CPUs for AI computing, says a report from Reuters. CPUs in AI computing rose to prominence earlier this year after agentic AI demand reshaped the market. Agentic computing places a greater emphasis on CPUs, and according to the sources, the deals are motivated by the rapid price rise due to high demand. AMD & Intel Set To Cover A Year's Worth Of CPU Supplies To Chinese AI Data Centers, Says Report The surge in AI demand for CPUs has also ledā¦
The Hot Take: Will have to take this with a bit rock of salt until we see the benches and real world performance. Just a price grab or actual performance?
AMD is apparently no longer satisfied with being perceived as a perennial underdog, and is reportedly choosing to make a bold statement by pricing its Helios rackscale solution at a hefty premium to NVIDIA's Rubin. What's more, AMD has reportedly managed to rope in Microsoft as the product's first confirmed client, demonstrating the utility that Helios offers even at its supposedly elevated price point. Futurum believes AMD will price Helios at $5 million to $5.5 million per rack, versus an expected retail price of $3.5 million to $4 millionā¦