SK hynix detailed H-TPU, tiny in-house cores that offload routine I/O from the Arm CPUs in its next enterprise SSD controllers.

Back in the now distant 2018, the semiconductor industry had three major players in contract leading-edge node manufacturing: TSMC, Samsung, and GlobalFoundries. At that time, Intel did not accept external clients. However, as node design became increasingly expensive—requiring multi-billion dollar investments—and more complex, with many players encountering yield and manufacturing difficulties, GlobalFoundries announced that it was stopping its 7 nm node development indefinitely. This left only two companies in the leading-edge race, but GlobalFoundries continued to develop unique semiconductor solutions that did not focus on smaller transistor sizes.

Microsoft has officially unveiled Azure Maia 300, its next-generation custom silicon designed to power internal and partner AI workloads at multi-gigawatt scale.

Vince "KINGPIN" Lucido has blamed NVIDIA for the troubled launch of the EVGA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti KINGPIN, the last graphics card to carry his name. In the first video on his new Overclocking Kingpin YouTube channel, the overclocker said he wanted the card to have two 12VHPWR power connectors, while NVIDIA wanted it limited to just one. The disagreement, in his words, "really screwed up the production timeline", and he also holds it responsible for how few units were made afterward. The card did eventually ship with both 16-pin connectors when it went on sale for $2,500 with a bundled 1600 W power supply, about three months after the RTX 3090 Ti itself came out. This is only Lucido's side of the story, and it isn't clear why NVIDIA pushed for a single connector.

Micron has warned investors that global RAM shortages will persist into 2028, with CEO Sanjay Mehrotra pointing to AI-driven demand for high-bandwidth memory.

Taiwanese semiconductor giant TSMC is considering collaborating with Elon Musk's Terafab project to establish advanced end-to-end semiconductor manufacturing in the United States. According to an exclusive report from Tim Culpan's Culpium newsletter, later confirmed by Elon Musk on X, the two companies are in discussions about a joint venture to boost American semiconductor manufacturing. The plan involves TSMC potentially developing its own semiconductor manufacturing capabilities, with Terafab providing financial backing, equity participation, purchase agreements, and other necessary steps to keep the new fab capacity operational. As some managers believe that Intel might not come through with its promises, Terafab would need to dual-source expertise.

Be your own AppleCare.

Archived version: https://archive.is/newest/https://www.theverge.com/tech/990436/fairphone-6-plus-review

Chinese AI labs are increasingly ordering domestic AI accelerators, and one of the leading AI labs, DeepSeek, has reportedly placed an order for 160,000 Huawei Ascend 950DT chips. Late last year, Huawei revealed that the company is preparing a series of chips and rack-scale solutions to meet domestic AI demand, and now we are seeing large orders starting to materialize. For reference, the Huawei Ascend 950DT AI accelerator has a memory capacity of 144 GB, built on Huawei's own HBM memory design. This in-house solution delivers a bandwidth of nearly 4 TB/s, aligning perfectly with Huawei's vision. The chip can achieve about one PetaFLOP of FP8 peak compute, or about two PetaFLOPS of FP4.

GPU prices just climbed 15% in a single month, according to fresh pricing data tracked across 10 countries by TechSpot. When averaged across all graphics card models, the market now sits 28% above launch MSRP, excluding the RTX 5090. TechSpot excluded the RTX 5090 because it is an extreme outlier, and they say it's not really a gaming GPU. NVIDIA still lists it at $1,999, but the cheapest available model in the US now costs nearly $5,000, or 145% above MSRP domestically and 136% globally.

Aside from the pricey ASUS ROG Falcata and Sunder keyboard line-up, there are very few split, ergonomic, Hall effect keyboards for gamers who either want the comfort of a split keyboard for everyday use or want a small form factor that allows them to keep just one half of the keyboard on the desk at a time. Now, thanks to a new open-source project, there is at least one third option available in the Silakka54 HE project, which is an adapted version of the popular, affordable Silakka54 split mechanical keyboard.

Repo: https://github.com/Hanthebot/silakka54-HE

Nanya Technology Board of Directors announced on August 5 that the company has launched its largest investment program, committing up to NT$346.6 billion (around $10.7 billion) to its Fab5A facility through 2026-2029. The project covers 10 nm-class processes from 1b through 1e nodes and introduces EUV lithography. Nanya has also increased its 2026 capital expenditures budget by 34% to NT$69.7 billion (around $2.16 billion). The extra NT$17.7 billion is going toward advance payments for equipment to keep Fab5A on schedule. The production roadmap has wafer starts being produced in the second half of 2027, reaching 30,000 wafers per month in 2028 and 35,900 in 2029. The maximum planned capacity is around 45,000 wafers monthly. The 1c pilot production has already begun, while the 1d node is under development and expected to enter pilot production soon. Nanya Fab5A investment, when completed, is estimated at roughly $16 billion, deployed in phases based on market demand.

Another modern maker discovers the charms of 1950s-era magnetic core memory.

South Korean giants Samsung and SK hynix have announced plans to invest about 1,350 trillion won, roughly $870 billion at the time of writing, into expanding semiconductor manufacturing capacity and data centers over the next ten years. This ten-year plan includes memory, storage, and logic, which both companies produce. For SK hynix, this investment will cover DRAM and NAND Flash, while for Samsung, it will cover DRAM, NAND Flash, as well as logic for its LSI division. The investment is so comprehensive that it will include more than just creating new fab production capacity for increased wafer output. For example, it will also encompass AI data centers, batteries, display manufacturing, chip-making tools, etching, photomasks, and much more.

It comes as regional rivals like Taiwan, China and Japan are investing heavily in chip factories and other technology.

Following the recent updates to the Keychron wireless keyboard line-up, with new ZMK firmware and mechanical and Hall effect models reaching gamers, Keychron has started to tease an upcoming version of its V6 keyboard that it is calling a next-gen keyboard architecture. The post on X revealing the keyboard's design and existence reveals that it will have TMR sensing technology, which is known to be more efficient than Hall-effect sensors, and a "Nova Socket architecture," with a hybrid platform. This all suggests that Keychron, which has long used TMR sensors in its wireless "HE" keyboard series, will leverage TMR sensors in order to support both mechanical and analogue magnetic switches.

Coming full circle LMAO

This is an abridged version of 2026 RISC-V Market Report and Ecosystem Guide by the SHDgroup, provided at no charge thanks to the support of their sponsors. An unabridged version is also available with over 200 pages and comes with a spreadsheet containing over 300 tables of detailed information. In both versions, the intention is to provide a comprehensive examination of the rapidly expanding semiconductor market, including how it is evolving alongside the concurrent emergence of RISC-V and the influence of AI. The accelerating build-out of data centers for AI inferencing and training and Large Language Models (LLMs) is having a profound impact on semiconductor revenues worldwide. This impact extends to the adoption of the RISC-V ISA in an increasing number of SoCs aimed at including some level of AI functionality in the silicon solution. These impacts also extend to the Semiconductor Intellectual Property (SIP) vendors as they look to accommodate the acceleration of the different Neural Networks being used and EDA Tool vendors as they look to infuse AI functionality into their EDA tools to aid the productivity of silicon designers.

The introduction of RISC-V has fueled extensive CPU architectural exploration, visibly impacting device revenues, unit shipments, design starts, business models and IP licensing revenues on a global basis. The pervasive integration of AI across applications is a primary catalyst in today's semiconductor market. The RISC-V architecture has notably influenced SoC designers and architects and is poised to drive a substantial share of designs, revenues, and unit shipments in the coming years.