Chips and Cheese

The PC market is one of the toughest areas for a CPU designer to compete in. Consumers in the PC segment expect high performance across a wide range of applications, and famously expect their devices to reach beyond a constrained, curated set of use cases. Microsoft’s own Surface RT prominently failed more than a decade ago because it could not run the programs that PC users ...

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While Arm’s last announcement was about their new datacenter focused CPU, the Arm AGI CPU. Their latest set of announcements bring a much wider focus. The incoming C2-Ultra CPU and G2-Ultra NX GPU IP will see broad use across flagship phones, with latter G2 Ultra already shipping in Xiaomi’s XRING O3 chip that launched on August 24th. Whil...

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Today we're at Hot Chips 2026! We join IBM to talk about their just revealed Dual-ISA z/ architecture + ARM design with Christian Zoellin, the Core Design Team Leader and Christian Jacobi, the CTO of Systems Development!

Hope y’all enjoy!

The transcript below has been edited for conciseness and readability.

Memory expansion has been attractive for years, and is more relevant than ever because ML models have an insatiable appetite for memory capacity. In response, XCENA has worked with Samsung to create a CXL memory expansion device that can also host SSDs and do compute. The device is called MX1, where MX stands for “Memory Xcelerator”.

In-memory compute has been an attractive proposition for many years because compute within a memory chip can exploit its higher internal bandwidth. Additionally, in-memory compute avoids the long latency path between DRAM and traditional compute cores. At Hot Chips 2026, Samsung discusses their continued pursuit of in-memory compute with their PIM (Processing-in-Memory) push....