• AMD guided Q4 2026 revenue to about $17 billion, above Intel's $15 to $16 billion forecast, which would make it the larger company in terms of raw revenue for the first time
• Data center sales nearly doubled to $8.5 billion in Q3 as Instinct MI455X GPUs and Helios racks started shipping
• The lead, interestingly, is in revenue, not volume: Intel still ships about two-thirds of x86 CPUs, and AI accelerators are set to outsell Epyc inside AMD this quarter

AMD has told investors to expect fourth-quarter 2026 revenues of around $17 billion, plus or minus 3%.

If that lofty forecast holds, AMD would bring in more money than Intel in a single quarter for the first time in the two companies' decades-long rivalry.

For context, AMD's outlook arrived with a record third quarter in which revenue rose 45% year over year to $13.4 billion, even as Intel, which reported a week earlier, has guided to between $15 billion and $16 billion for the same three months.

A numbers game in revenue, not volume as data centers do the heavy lifting

Using the midpoint of both companies' estimates and assuming both predictions come true, AMD is essentially set to generate $1.5 billion more in revenue than its traditional chipmaking rival.

Much of this comes from AMD's data center gains: Data center revenue climbed 97% to a record $8.5 billion, or 64% of total sales, up from 47% a year earlier, with the segment's operating margin widening to 34%.

AMD CEO Lisa Su said Q3 was the first quarter AMD shipped Instinct MI455X accelerators and Helios racks for revenue, with Anthropic, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and Oracle bringing their first racks online.

Revenue shipments of 2nm Epyc "Venice" processors also began, although, as TechRadar Pro reported at launch, the full Venice stack will not ship until 2027, so there is potentially more uplift in the pipeline assuming demand remains on track.

The picture elsewhere was mixed at best: Client revenue rose 7% to $2.9 billion, gaming fell 40% to $773 million on weaker console chip sales, and embedded grew an impressive 29% to $1.1 billion.

For Q4, CFO Jean Hu guided data center revenue up about 50% sequentially, which Tom's Hardware puts at roughly $12.8 billion, with client and gaming down more than 20% and embedded up by double digits. She added that Q4 will be the first quarter in which AMD's data center AI business, meaning Instinct GPUs and racks, outsells its server CPUs, and by a wide margin.

Intel's numbers, on the other hand, are not essentially a clean baseline, even if AMD comes out ahead regardless: Its outlook accounts for lost output from the October 14 explosion at Fab 28 in Kiryat Gat, Israel, which killed two workers and shut the plant for around two weeks. "Our guidance includes an impact of roughly $300 million to revenue," CFO Dave Zinsner told analysts, according to Calcalist, almost all of it in 10nm server products. Add that back to Intel's high end, and you get $16.3 billion, still below AMD's estimated floor.

The crossover does not seem to have been on the cards so soon, however: Wall Street was looking for about $17.05 billion from Intel, according to Futurum, and around $16.2 billion from AMD, per Opening Bell Daily. As recently as April, consensus estimates had AMD surpassing Intel in revenue in 2027, and AMD's moves seem to have been considerably ahead of analyst estimates, resulting in the stock surging more than 100% YTD despite a steep AI selloff lately.

The move is a revenue milestone, not a volume one; Intel still ships most x86 processors, holding 65.9% of the market in Q2 2026, according to Mercury Research figures reported by HotHardware. AMD's revenue also includes businesses Intel does not run at comparable scale, from Xilinx-derived embedded chips and console silicon to, above all, Instinct accelerators, making for a skewed direct comparison between the two, especially as the latter is reaping AI bonuses at a scale the former cannot currently hope to match.

In fairness, AMD's data center segment has outearned Intel's equivalent group before: TechRadar Pro reported the first such quarter in Q3 2024, when AMD's $3.5 billion edged past Intel's $3.3 billion, but its recent revenue explosion has carried AMD into what seems to be an insurmountable short-term lead. In Q3 2026, it was $8.5 billion, compared with $7.3 billion for Intel's Data Center and AI group. But with GPUs set to overtake Epyc inside AMD this quarter, the overall crossover owes more to a market Intel has barely entered than to the CPU fight that defined the rivalry. Intel's own data center accelerator, the GPU D-series formerly codenamed Crescent Island, is still upcoming.

Other factors

It would also be a mistake to read Intel's forecast as an exodus of customers: Intel's Q3 revenue rose 21%, and its data center group grew 78%, and CEO Lip-Bu Tan said the immediate priority is to "unlock additional supply to meet extraordinary demand for our Xeon family."

Part of Intel's problem is capacity, layered on top of a PC slump that is hitting both firms: AMD is planning for PC unit shipments to fall by a double-digit percentage in 2027.

AMD CEO Lisa Su was candid about the fact that AMD cannot build everything it could sell. "It is true that demand is higher than supply," she told analysts.

The Q4 forecast rests on a roughly 50% sequential jump in data center sales, much of it from a rack platform that shipped for revenue for the first time last quarter.

That ramp has costs: Inventory rose about $3 billion to $11.5 billion, and free cash flow was a relatively measly $554 million. AMD's biggest AI deals also come with customer warrants, which produced a $1.1 billion non-cash charge in Q3 that the company expects to grow. Likewise, revenue is concentrated in a handful of frontier labs and hyperscalers even as circular financing concerns continue to grow.

AMD now expects data center sales to make up more than 80% of revenue in 2027 and server CPU revenue to double. Delivering that depends on partners such as HPE, which became Helios' first major OEM backer and has since said Vultr will deploy the first Helios systems it builds. It also depends on the extra capacity Su has promised for 2027, which TechRadar noted is aimed at AI rather than consumer chips.

If both companies land inside their ranges, AMD will have outearned Intel for the first time. The more telling story is where that money comes from: not a knockout in the old CPU war, but a shift in the industry's revenue toward accelerators and racks that now fill data centers.

I’ve been a PC gamer since the early 1990s, and over the past three and a bit decades I’ve never once regretted my allegiance to those awkward beige boxes that have brought so much joy into the lives of myself and so many other people.

Yes, they can be expensive. Sure, they're more complex and frustrating than consoles. There have been times I’ve sat down to play a game, only for hours to pass as I try to fix game-breaking crashes, reinstall drivers, or just generally swear at Windows; but at the end of the day, I was always convinced that the PC remained the greatest gaming platform in the world.

PCs (and I’m including my beloved Amiga A500+ here) were always miles ahead of consoles when it came to graphics and audio, and the ability to upgrade components meant you could remain at the cutting edge for years. Upgrading and even building your own PC was fiddly and expensive, but it was also fun and rewarding. I still get a thrill when I first power-up a newly built rig and see it successfully boot.

The openness of the platform (despite Microsoft’s best efforts) meant I could buy games from where ever I wanted (one of the main reasons, I believe, why PC games are usually cheaper than console games), and play obscure indie games that would never be published on consoles due to licensing costs (which is another reason why PC games are cheaper); and, with some tweaking and a bit of (perfectly ethical and legal) emulation, backwards compatibility has never been a problem. The likes of GOG should get a shoutout as well for keeping very old PC games running on new hardware.

And right now in 2026, I'm lucky enough to have access to the most powerful PC gaming hardware ever, on which to play some of the best and most graphically impressive PC games ever made. I should be feeling like there’s never been a better time to be a PC gamer. Instead, however, it feels like PC gaming has never been worse.

Thanks for the memory

Why am I so down on the current state of PC gaming? For a start, while PC gaming hardware has never been better, it’s also never been so expensive — and that makes it less accessible for most people. The price of graphics cards has skyrocketed, and SSDs and RAM, once two of the cheapest and most effective ways of upgrading your PC, are now ridiculously expensive.

According to PC Part Picker, the average price of two sticks of 16GB DDR5 memory has leapt from around $150 to over $600 in the space of 18 months. Meanwhile, 64GB of the stuff has gone from around $250 to over $1,250 — and this isn’t even for the fastest models.

Even older DDR4 isn’t immune, with 16GB rising over 18 months from $50 on average to around $170, again according to PC Part Picker.

People are getting priced out of PC gaming, or being prevented from even considering it; and as a PC gamer, that’s heart-breaking. I’m incredibly fortunate that my job has enabled me to build a PC with an RTX 5090 and 96GB of DDR5 RAM, but there’s no joy in writing about things that so few people will be able to experience.

With prices of gaming components, PCs, laptops, and even consoles climbing ever higher, sales are understandably dropping. And with the costs of developing games exploding, we’ve also seen huge amounts of very talented game developers lose their jobs, and entire companies, such as BioWare, close down.

Perhaps worst of all, this past week I’ve found myself agreeing with something Elon Musk — someone I genuinely think is an awful human being — said. I need a lie down. And a pint (probably not in that order). I’m in a PC gaming funk, but who — or what — is to blame?

AI. It’s AI’s fault

Now it would be far too easy, simplistic, and perhaps even lazy to say this is all AI’s fault. But it’s all AI’s fault. Screw AI.

The AI goldrush has seen an explosion in the number of data centers required to run and train large language models (LLMs) used by AIs, and these need a lot of memory, which has led to a global shortage and made prices for components that use memory, such as RAM, graphics cards and storage, skyrocket.

I, like many other PC gamers, have been watching all of this in horror for a while now, but things really came into sharp relief this week when Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, one of the biggest culprits of the RAMpocalypse, was quoted as saying on the Cheeky Pint podcast (via IGN) that "it's quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer."

A lot of people took that as Altman accusing us PC gamers of being greedy by wanting RAM for our rigs, and to say that didn’t go down well would be an understatement.

Now, I usually have a policy of ignoring the rubbish Altman spews out (it does wonders for my blood pressure); but I have to admit, when I saw the quote, it riled me up. PC gamers having to endure the RAMpocalypse is bad enough, but to be blamed for it, especially when all we want to do is play games, was too much.

Then, in a real-life example of the ‘worst person you know just made a great point’ meme, the world’s richest man, terrible Diablo player, and failed truck salesman, Elon Musk, piped up to say “The people deserve to have their RAM too!”

I’m not naïve enough to think that Musk is seriously on the side of ‘the people’, but when one of the most widely-mocked individuals on the internet gets some begrudging props for coming out against something you said, that’s not a good sign.

Sure enough, Altman backpeddled, saying he was “taken out of context”, and he was actually complaining about people running local AI models. In a way, I’m inclined to believe that — as CEO he has a vested interest in stopping people using their own models and instead using OpenAI’s, but the damage was done.

Regardless of context, it was a tone-deaf thing to say — almost as bad as Nvidia’s 'GeForce 8800 GTX — 20 Years of a Legend' tech demo, which was released this week. Nvidia once was loved, or at least respected, by a lot of PC gamers for making genuinely excellent graphics cards and pushing the PC gaming industry forward with various innovations over the years.

Sadly, it has also become incredibly successful due to AI — so successful that it often feels like it's lost interest in the PC gaming industry that made its name, with rumors swirling that it’s ending production of the RTX 5090, while doing nothing about the rising costs of its components thanks to an AI bubble which it's benefitting from and contributing to.

So, when it launched a demo that invited players to relive a time when PC gaming was actually fun and affordable, by allowing them to virtually install its iconic GeForce 8800 GTX graphics card into a retro Windows Vista PC, it felt like Nvidia had misjudged the mood. To make matters worse, Nvidia recommends you have an RTX 5080 to play it — a GPU that is incredibly expensive and hard to find due to the memory shortage, and which is also rumored to be for the chop.

“Oh well,” some of us PC gamers might have thought, “at least we still have perpetual underdog AMD in our corner.” Except, AMD CEO Lisa Su has just been quoted as saying that “We are a data center first company.”

As Nvidia’s closest competitor, AMD was supposed to keep Team Green on its toes, while having a more consumer-friendly approach (being more open to open-source, and not limiting its latest tech to just its own GPUs, for example). Instead, it looks like AMD has had a heel-turn worthy of WWC’s most dramatic betrayals.

To be honest, I’ve been wondering what’s going on with AMD for a while, as it was rather quiet this year in the consumer GPU space; but this turn to the AI-powered dark side still hurts.

Could we really see the two major GPU makers stop making graphics cards altogether? It’s too bleak a future to imagine, but after a week like this, I can’t help but wonder.

What can we do?

I don’t want this to just be a wall of depressing text that would make even Roger Waters think ‘that’s a bit much’, so is there a glimmer of hope to be had? Is there anything any of us can do?

At Computex 2026 this year in Taiwan, I was perplexed by how almost every PC maker was going on about AI-in-everything with a fervor that I’ve just not seen replicated by consumers. I was worried that I was just out of touch.

But there’s been a growing backlash against rampant AI that’s given me hope. I’m not against all forms of AI, but AI that takes work from humans, that plagiarizes human art (including depressing walls of texts written by aging tech journalists), that diminishes creativity and sucks up resources… that AI I would love to see the end of, and I’m not the only one.

Boycotting games made with AI, and avoiding companies that don’t use AI responsibly, can hopefully show companies that this isn’t a magic money tree that they should neglect their customers for. Look at what’s happening with the current stock-market rout on AI companies, where it seems voters were rebelling against rampant AI data center expansion and an administration that seemed all too happy to let tech companies cross lines and drop ethics all in the name of AI (sorry, SI) supremacy.

I don’t want to seen an economic meltdown; but a wake-up call to the likes of Nvidia and AMD, to let them know that the customers who made them — primarily PC gamers like me — aren’t to be taken for granted, would certainly be welcome.

• AMD's CEO has said that it's a "data center first company"
• Lisa Su observed that: "I see AI and super intelligence becoming more and more essential to every aspect of our lives"
• The CEO predicted a double-digit fall in PC sales next year, and gamers aren't happy at all with what they see as an abandonment by Team Red

AMD's chief executive hasn't been making many friends in the PC gaming community this week, having offered up a telling admission, alongside an ominous sales prediction, all off the back of the firm's latest financial results.

In an interview with Brian Sozzi, who is Yahoo Finance's Executive Editor, Lisa Su made it clear that AMD is a company with a lot of resources to expand its supply and the "ability to help our customers", but sadly the customers in this case are data centers, not consumers.

Su then delivered a frank admission: "We are a data center first company."

AMD's CEO also again underlined that AI is very much the future, and that "over the horizon I see AI and super intelligence becoming more and more essential to every aspect of our lives."

On top of this, as OC3D spotted, during AMD's earnings call for Q3 2026 (which was all about bumper profits), Su said that "PC sell-through slowed late in the quarter as higher memory and component costs weighed on demand," while forecasting that next year wouldn't be a good one for desktop computers and laptops.

The CEO observed: "In 2027, we are planning for PC market unit shipments to decline by a double-digit percentage."

In other words, an over 10% slump. The chief exec added this caveat: "In this environment, we expect to outperform the market as we deliver our Ryzen roadmap and grow our commercial footprint."

That presumably refers to the launch of Zen 6 processors for consumers (and businesses), the next-gen Ryzen family, which is expected to arrive early in 2027 and should obviously stoke some interest.

Analysis: dark times for the PC

It's no surprise that AMD has 'followed the money', as the old saying goes, because this is how businesses work, and profits reign supreme. Data center GPUs are way more profitable than consumer models.

If we look at the amount of revenue that AMD raked in from its data center business in this latest quarter, it very nearly doubled year-on-year and was up 97% to $8.5 billion. That dwarfed client and gaming (Ryzen and Radeon, mostly consumer) revenue, which was $3.7 billion (down 8%).

Looking at the balance sheet, it's clear enough AMD is a data center-first company — but actually saying this out loud, in no uncertain terms, sends out further signals about where Team Red wants to be, along with all the messaging that AI is the future.

Is it any wonder that gamers feel bitter about this? Hardly. Back at the start of 2024, AMD's consumer revenue was actually more than data center, albeit only marginally, but still — that picture has shifted massively over the past couple of years.

And with the prices of consumer GPUs shooting up as graphics chip production is increasingly prioritizing AI accelerators for data centers, there's a lot of bad feeling for obvious reasons. Nvidia's graphics card business is the same story too, of course, and GPU price hikes have been getting out of hand in the past few months for GeForce and Radeon cards alike.

Given clear negative predictions about the PC market next year — with AMD joining in on that — and the company's equally clear unwillingness to do anything about that with its plentiful resources, consumers are looking at a dismal future. One in which I fear that GPU price hikes are going to follow in the footsteps of steep RAM and SSD inflation, which has become beyond painful at this stage. Many forecasts point to the RAM crisis getting worse in 2027, of course.

All of which means it's hardly surprising that there's a profound sense of disappointment in AMD on social media, given this fresh data center comment from Lisa Su.

One Redditor declared: "AMD was a lot of people's last hope, but looks like PC gaming is over."

Dramatic? Well, yes, it is, but nonetheless, every single metric, forecast, and piece of analysis is strongly suggesting 2027 will be a desperately bleak time for the PC, and I have a hard time disbelieving that this is the truth. I've recently written about GPU pricing and how Black Friday could be your last chance to get an upgrade at a relatively reasonable price, if you need one.

• Tiny Corp's $30,000 tinybox Red Kimi pairs four Radeon AI Pro R9700 GPUs (128 GB GDDR6) with sixteen 1 TB NVMe SSDs
• A tinygrad driver lets the GPUs read the 238.4 GB/s SSD array directly to run Moonshot's 2.8-trillion-parameter Kimi K3
• Tiny claims 40 tokens per second, but the math involves caching nearly all of each token's weights in VRAM

There is nothing tiny about Tiny Corp's latest tinybox, the tinybox Red Kimi: It costs a mammoth $30,000 and pairs four AMD Radeon AI Pro R9700 graphics cards with sixteen 1 TB NVMe SSDs, all with one goal in mind: running Moonshot AI's 2.8-trillion-parameter Kimi K3 on a desk rather than in a data center.

Each R9700 carries 32 GB of GDDR6 at 640 GB/s, giving the four cards 128 GB of GPU memory and 2,560 GB/s of aggregate bandwidth to go with a system built on Tiny Corp's G5 platform, with a 32-core AMD Epyc Genoa processor whose exact model the tinybox configurator doesn't name, and a modest 32 GB of DDR5 system memory in tow.

Tiny Corp claims the machine can run Kimi K3 at 40 tokens per second, a figure nobody outside the company has tested yet.

Sixteen drives, four GPUs and an AMD EPYC CPU rule the roost

The storage in play is the unique selling point for Tiny Corp's behemoth: its 16 drives form a RAID array rated at 238.4 GB/s, and Tiny Corp says its tinygrad software now includes a driver that lets the AMD GPUs control the NVMe drives directly, rather than routing every read through the CPU.

Sharing the system's topology on X, the company pitched the result as "frontier models at home at usable speeds for a good price."

The rationale comes down to capacity. Moonshot's model card shows Kimi K3 ships with native MXFP4 weights, and Hyperstack measured the published checkpoint at roughly 1.56 TB. The four GPUs can hold about 8% of that, so the rest has to live somewhere, and Tiny Corp has picked considerably cheaper flash over DRAM.

The concept isn't entirely new: Researchers from Nvidia and the University of Illinois presented GPU-initiated SSD access in the BaM system architecture at ASPLOS 2023, treating storage as another tier of accelerator memory. Tiny Corp's offering, however, is a working version on AMD workstation cards, inside a box you can actually order.

The configurator's own code estimates the Red Kimi's installed weight at around 56 pounds, in a chassis 12 inches wide, 19.25 inches tall, and 18 inches deep. It also raises the noise rating from under 50 dB to under 60 dB for R9700 builds, warning that the cards' blower fans are "audible".

Kimi K3 is a mixture-of-experts model that activates 16 of its 896 routed experts, plus two shared experts, for 104 billion active parameters per token. At MXFP4's effective 4.25 bits per weight, that means reading at least 55 GB of weights for every token generated.

If every one of those bytes were read from the SSDs, the array would manage only about four tokens per second. Reaching 40 tokens per second means moving roughly 2.2 TB/s of weights, about 86% of the four GPUs' combined memory bandwidth, while the SSDs could contribute at most about 6 GB per token, or around 11% of what each one needs.

In a nutshell, the claim only works if the GPUs' 128 GB already contains nearly everything each token touches, even though it fits less than a tenth of the model. That is achievable if expert selection is predictable enough to cache well, or if Tiny Corp is running a lower-precision quantization than Moonshot's native format, speculative decoding, or a mix of the three.

Tiny Corp hasn't published the precision, context length, batch size, or method behind its number, and it would be prudent to treat it as a manufacturer claim at best. The aggregate bandwidth figure also assumes the workload is split evenly across four cards that communicate over PCIe.

A pricey proposition that goes neck and neck with Apple's Mac Studio

At $30,000, the Red Kimi is a lot of money for a desktop computer, but the alternatives for running a 2.8-trillion-parameter model locally aren't cheaper. Apple's Mac Studio with M5 Ultra and 512 GB of unified memory starts at $22,299 and reaches $29,799 with a 16 TB SSD, Macworld reports, just $201 shy of Tiny's box. It offers four times the fast memory at 1.2 TB/s, according to Apple, but 512 GB still can't hold K3's native checkpoint.

Nvidia's GB300-based DGX Station went on sale for almost $91,100 with 748 GB of memory, which also falls short. AMD's Threadripper Halo Station, with up to 2.6 TB of combined memory, would fit the model comfortably, but it isn't due until 2027, and industry estimates put a full system at around $150,000.

Against such prolific (and pricey) competition, the Red Kimi is the cheapest way to maintain Kimi K3's native precision on a single desk. The catch is that it gets there by asking flash to do the job of memory, and every token per second it delivers depends on how well that bet pays off. Until someone outside Tiny Corp runs the numbers, "usable speeds" is a promise rather than a result.

• Nvidia's RTX 5080 Super was rumored for January 2027, but fresh gossip suggests it's delayed
• Meanwhile, a new report on GPU prices observes a hefty price jump month-on-month
• Even lower-end GPUs are getting more costly at a faster pace, and the high-end is a nightmare — with no RTX 5080 Super riding to the rescue, it seems

Nvidia's RTX 5080 Super has been strongly rumored of late, but there's now been a cloud of doubt cast over this potential addition to the Blackwell range — just as we've got more evidence of how dire the situation with GPU price hikes has recently become.

VideoCardz spotted the latest from the rumor mill on the RTX 5080 Super, a graphics card that supposedly packs 24GB of video RAM, with Taiwanese tech site Benchlife reporting that Nvidia has delayed the GPU (assuming it's a real product in the first place, of course).

We were told via other rumor peddlers that the 24GB spin on the RTX 5080 is theoretically planned for a January 2027 launch, but Benchlife asserts that the release date "remains unclear" and that Nvidia's board manufacturing partners have yet to receive any design details for the new model.

Given that, according to Benchlife, the "probability is extremely high" that the RTX 5080 Super won't debut in January, considering that board makers were expecting to receive the mentioned design info back in October.

This pushes the rumored GPU back at least a month, very probably more, and the idea of that is hardly surprising given the ongoing RAM crisis, which has been getting worse as 2026 rolls on.

That affects video RAM, and it's the main driver of price spikes with graphics cards, which are starting to get out of hand, as evidenced by TechSpot's latest monthly report highlighting the current cost of GPUs across various regions.

What TechSpot's monitoring data for October 2026 shows is that, as we already knew, high-end pricing has gone even further off the rails. The RTX 5080 is up 39% in the US and 40% in Germany month-on-month, for example, which is ludicrous, frankly — in the US it's now 120% over the MSRP at $2,200. The UK has seen an 8% hike over the past month, with this GPU now 40% over its MSRP in the country. Globally, it's 77% over Nvidia's recommended price on average.

The RTX 5090 is even sillier, as we've seen for some time now, and stands at $9,400 in the US in October, some 370% over the already very expensive MSRP. If you can find the Blackwell flagship at all, that is.

What's really worrying is that TechSpot's data shows lower-tier GPUs are now seeing some major price bumps. Want a humble RTX 5050 in the US? It's gone up 35% over the past month (an increase of over $100), so you'll now pay 68% over the MSRP.

The RTX 5060 is creeping up in price in some European countries, too — it's up 7% in the UK and 13% in Germany. The RTX 5060 Ti 8GB has gone up more, with this GPU getting hiked by 10% in the UK, so it's now £440 compared to £350 back at the start of 2026. The 5060 Ti 8GB went up 6% in the US, too, so it's now 40% over the MSRP in total.

There are hikes across the board for Nvidia, and AMD's Radeon GPUs are getting more expensive at an even faster rate currently. Again, lower-end graphics cards are suffering, such as RX 9060 XT models being up 10% on average month-on-month. The RX 9070 XT is also up 10% in the US since last month, and the increase in Canada has been a sickening 30% — in just one month.

Analysis: a deteriorating situation for GPUs

What does all this tell us? That spiralling graphics card prices are very real, with some huge ongoing hikes for higher-end models — but this isn't just a top-end GPU problem any longer. The real concern is that lower-tier boards are also seeing more price inflation, and I don't think this is a problem that's going away.

Indeed, based on the weighty amount of chatter about the memory crisis continuing to get worse in this final quarter of 2026 and into next year, there's every reason to believe that GPU prices could keep going up. That's why I've been advising PC owners thinking of a GPU upgrade to treat Black Friday as a prime (pun not intended) opportunity to get in and buy a graphics card before any more hikes.

With the RTX 5090 reportedly effectively discontinued — something Nvidia strenuously denies, but the stock situation speaks for itself in countries like the US — and the RTX 5080 pricing itself well out of the range of the vast majority of consumers, those who were anticipating the RTX 5080 Super to ride to the rescue have suffered a fresh blow here, too.

I never thought that was a realistic proposition anyway, mind, but still, it's clear enough that the GPU market is in trouble, and Nvidia seemingly doesn't have any answers in the short term for the upper echelons of its Blackwell range. As noted, though, the real worry is that there's more pain coming to the more affordable end of the graphics card spectrum, where mainstream buyers make their purchases.

• VZMORE iX9 Max pairs a Core Ultra 9 185H with 24GB of soldered LPDDR5 and a 1TB SSD for $949, after a $50 off code
• Its 14 ports include dual USB4, dual 2.5GbE, two HDMI 2.0 outputs, and an SD 4.0 reader, but no front USB-C or OCuLink
• The aging 185H launched in December 2023 with its 11 TOPS NPU, which falls well short of Copilot+ requirements even as compliant Panther Lake mini PCs are already shipping

VZMORE only made its public debut at IFA in early September 2026, but has already put its first Intel-based mini PC on sale.

The iX9 Max pairs Intel's Core Ultra 9 185H with 24GB of LPDDR5 memory and a 1TB SSD inside an aluminum chassis measuring 5.31 x 5.19 x 2.27 inches, and it comes in exactly one configuration at $949 (or $899 with an accompanying discount code at the time of writing).

The price allows users to tap into a generous amount of I/O, albeit at a the cost of a slightly dated 65W 16-core Intel Core Ultra 9 mobile chip under the hood.

Fourteen ports, a 2023 flagship mobile CPU and a late 2026 box

By our count, the iX9 Max offers 14 data and A/V ports before you even get to the power jack. The front panel carries four 10 Gbps USB-A ports, one of which keeps charging devices when the machine is off, plus a 3.5mm headset jack.

Around the back sit two 40Gbps USB4 ports with DisplayPort 2.0 alt mode, another 10Gbps USB-A port, a USB 2.0 port for keyboards and dongles, two HDMI 2.0 outputs, and a pair of 2.5GbE Ethernet jacks. To top it off, an SD 4.0 card reader lives on the side.

That is theoretically enough to drive four displays, hang a NAS off one network port and a home lab off the other, and still have USB ports to spare. One of the USB4 ports also supports 100W of USB-C power input, so a decent GaN charger can replace the bundled 120W brick.

Interestingly, both HDMI ports on the unit are HDMI 2.0, which supports 4K output but not the 120Hz that HDMI 2.1 would offer. With no USB-to-HDMI 2.1 adapter in the box, users looking to run things at 4K 120Hz might be disappointed, even though VZMORE's AMD-based AX9 Max ships with HDMI 2.1, according to our review of that machine. The unit also skips a front USB-C connector, which could be annoying or a potential dealbreaker for some users.

The processor, despite its age (released at the tail end of 2023), is no slouch either: The Core Ultra 9 185H was the top chip in Intel's first Core Ultra generation when it launched in December 2023, with 16 cores (six performance, eight efficient and two low-power efficient), 22 threads, a 5.1GHz boost clock, and an eight-core Arc integrated GPU. It is rated at 45W base power and up to 115W turbo, and VZMORE lets you choose between 20W, 40W, and 65W modes.

At 65W, 16 cores remain plenty for heavy spreadsheet work, code compilation, virtual machines, and photo editing. But this chip is hardly new to mini PCs. We first reviewed it in one, the Minisforum AtomMan X7 Ti, back in 2024, and Intel's Panther Lake parts have been turning up in compact desktops such as Asus' NUC 16 Pro since CES 2026.

The AI story here might be a bit thin, but it's still a viable avenue; the 185H's NPU tops out at 11 TOPS, well short of the 40 TOPS threshold Intel set for next-generation AI PCs, which has become the bar for Copilot+ certification. The "local AI capabilities" in VZMORE's marketing will instead rely primarily on the CPU and GPU.

VZMORE's own marketing seems a bit cherry-picked: The company claims the iX9 Max renders 45% faster under thermal stress than a "base-configured M3 system," based on its own Cinebench 2026 testing. It does not say which M3 machine it used, and the comparison pits a 16-core chip at 65W against an eight-core Apple part from 2023.

VZMORE's performance pitch rests on its cooler offering: it claims its V-Cooling vapor chamber offers 40% more heat-spreading area and 50% better heat transfer than a conventional dual-heat-pipe design, and that the iX9 Max can sustain 65W while staying under 38dB.

If you want a quiet, well-connected desktop PC with a three-year warranty, plenty of RAM, US shipping, and no plans to open it up, the iX9 Max ticks plenty of boxes. The port count really is generous, and a 65W Core Ultra 9 is still a capable workstation chip in late 2026.

But $949 is a lot to ask for a processor that turns three next month, in a design that appears to share most of its DNA with a cheaper Geekom offering that you can get for as little as $750 a pop. It might be wiser to wait and watch for a few third-party reviews to emerge before taking the plunge on a sub-$1000 mini PC, especially since upgrades are increasingly expensive, should one need to switch things up sooner rather than later.

• Intel and AMD discuss cooperation without revealing the project's purpose
• Intel's existing x86 partnership with AMD already supports shared processor standards
• AMD's ZenDNN optimizations are entering Intel's oneDNN software library

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan has discussed potential cooperation with AMD CEO Lisa Su, but neither executive has disclosed what the two companies might develop together.

Intel is pursuing customized processors, new semiconductor technologies, and external manufacturing contracts, and Tan is looking to strengthen these businesses.

Both companies already cooperate on processor standards and AI software, although their latest discussions could involve different technologies or commercial arrangements.

Existing partnerships provide several possibilities

Intel and AMD established the x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group in October 2024 alongside other technology companies to coordinate improvements to their shared processor architecture.

The initiative addresses compatibility across x86 processors, helping software developers support products from both manufacturers while the companies continue competing for customers.

Their cooperation has also extended into AI software, with AMD integrating its ZenDNN optimizations into Intel's open-source oneDNN library for CPU-based PyTorch inference.

They have also worked on Advanced Matrix Extensions and other x86 capabilities, providing established examples of cooperation between competing processor manufacturers.

During a chat with Chinese American Semiconductor Professional Association President Jimmy Cheng, Tan discussed his plans to strengthen Intel's processor business.

“We have to reclaim the leadership in CPU. That is something that I am very determined to do,” said Lip-Bu Tan, Intel CEO.

“I'm modifying it for customer needs, and so that, to me, is a fast-growing area, and I'm double, triple down on it.”

He also described a shift towards accommodating individual customer requirements rather than relying exclusively on Intel's existing processor designs.

Intel's foundry business offers another potential area

Intel's manufacturing operations provide another possible area for cooperation, although no announcement has confirmed that AMD intends to manufacture chips through Intel's foundry business.

Tan said Intel's 18A manufacturing process had entered volume production, while development of its next-generation 14A technology continued.

The company has released version 0.5 of its 14A process design kit, with version 0.9 expected before version 1.0 becomes available for volume production in early 2027.

In January, two prospective customers were evaluating 14A test chips, with firm supplier decisions expected during the second half of 2026 and first half of 2027.

Tan said several customers wanted to expand their businesses through Intel's manufacturing services, but he did not identify them or disclose potential order sizes.

His strategy also includes application-specific integrated circuits, co-packaged optics, advanced packaging, and physical AI, with two or three of these businesses expected to contribute approximately 10% of Intel's revenue individually.

Customer confidence remains important to Intel's manufacturing ambitions because chip designers depend on reliable production schedules and manufacturing quality when developing commercial products.

According to Tan, a customer waited for six to eight months for him to become CEO and then raised 15 areas where Intel had fallen short.

The company said all the complaints were tackled effectively, after which the customer agreed to expand its relationship with Intel.

Tan's account appears intended to reassure prospective foundry customers that Intel can resolve manufacturing problems and retain business, but it does not confirm that AMD will use Intel's manufacturing process.

Via Tom's Hardware

• Tiny Corp's Tinybox configurator is now AMD-only, after a new commit titled "rip nvidia" removed every Nvidia option and the Tinybox Pro
• The six-GPU, 192GB Radeon AI Pro R9700 build rose from $19,000 to $22,000, and a lower-end four-card, 128GB version now starts at $17,000
• For those wanting Nvidia only, a $91,000 tinybox green v2 with four RTX Pro 6000 cards is still listed in the company's Shopify storefront, about 40% above the $65,000 it charged in May

When TechRadar Pro covered Tiny Corp's relaunched Tinybox on October 13 2026, the headline figure was $11,000 for a server-grade workstation pairing a 32-core AMD EPYC processor and DDR4 memory with four Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics cards.

Less than two weeks on, that configuration is still listed at the same price, but what surrounds it has changed considerably.

Tiny Corp's online configurator is now AMD-only, according to the configurator itself and the public commit history of its website; the RTX 5090 options disappeared on October 11, and the $19,000 RTX 6000 was marked out of stock on October 21, while those thinking this was just a temporary setback were greeted by a commit titled "rip nvidia" that deleted every remaining Nvidia option, along with the $32,000 tinybox pro platform.

AMD GPUs galore?

The AMD side has moved in the opposite direction: Tiny Corp added a six-GPU build based on AMD's Radeon AI Pro R9700, with 192GB of GPU memory, on October 13. It raised each card from $2,000 to $2,500 on October 23 and added a four-card version the next day.

The cheapest six-card build, the "tinybox red flash" preset that the configurator now opens on, has gone from $19,000 to $22,000. The other two presets ship with no GPUs, described as "Bring your own GPUs."

The new Tinybox launched on October 8 with a short GPU list: four RX 9070 XT cards at $1,000 each, or one or two RTX 6000 cards at $19,000 apiece. RTX 5090 options at $8,000 per card were added a day later and were gone by October 11, removed in a commit with the message "rtx5090s aren't made anymore."

Nvidia disputes this, however: at an event in Taipei, Nvidia's Jeff Fisher said that despite a seemingly massive shortage of the chip on multiple US storefronts, "it has not been discontinued."

Fisher's comments followed a leak claiming Nvidia would divert its GB202 silicon to RTX Pro cards, and a warning from custom PC maker StinceBuilt that "Retail GPU pricing is expected to climb significantly," as we reported on October 12.

Tiny Corp's list included Nvidia's 96GB RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell workstation card, and its price has followed a curve similar to the RTX 5090 on consumer storefronts. It launched at $8,565 in March 2025, reached $13,250 on Nvidia's own marketplace by June, according to Tom's Hardware, and hit $16,000 there in August, per TweakTown.

Nvidia hasn't completely disappeared from Tiny Corp's storefront; The company's Shopify store, still linked from its FAQ, lists a tinybox green v2 with four RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell cards and 384GB of GPU memory at $91,000, made to order in two to eight weeks.

The website's own history shows Tiny Corp listing the same configuration at $65,000 as recently as May, which puts the current price about 40% higher. The store also still lists the $32,000 Tinybox Pro, but its description tells buyers to use a configurator that no longer offers it, suggesting potential orders may not be processed.

There is some irony here: in 2024, Tiny Corp put its AMD-based box on hold over unstable firmware and launched an Nvidia version, telling customers, "If you want 'it just works,' buy green," as The Register reported. The October 24 commit scrubbed green from the configurator right down to its stylesheet, deleting the green preset label and Nvidia's accent color.

Each R9700 carries 32GB of GDDR6 with 640GB/s of bandwidth and a 300W board power rating, according to AMD, so six of them provide 192GB and 3,840GB/s in aggregate.

Tiny Corp caps each card at 225W in the six-card build, and the arithmetic suggests why: six cards at their full rating could draw up to 1,800W on their own, more than the Tinybox's 1,700W power supply, while the cap brings them down to 1,350W. The four-card build has no cap, so the same math applies: four cards at 300W total 1,200W.

The price rise is steep, but not completely unwarranted. Partner versions of the card were listed between $1,244 and $1,277 when it first went on sale in July 2025; AMD later set a $1,299 retail price, and one buyer's guide recorded street prices of roughly $1,400 to $1,900 when it rechecked them in September. At $2,500 per card, Tiny Corp now charges nearly double the official price.

Despite using an older 'G4' configuration locked to PCI-E 4.0 speeds, DDR4 memory, and an older 32-core EPYC CPU, the configuration can, when you plug in the maximum number of configurable GPUs and memory, cost as much as $25,000 without any RAID configuration memory whatsoever.

That is a long way from the first Tinybox, a $15,000 box of six Radeon RX 7900 XTX cards that drew 583 preorders in 2024. The FAQ still says the goal is to "commoditize the petaflop and enable AI for everyone."

The configurator now offers that through three AMD GPU options and no Nvidia ones, while a $91,000 Nvidia box sits in the shop, but it is unclear if such orders will be honored. Whether that reflects Nvidia's supply squeeze, the years Tiny Corp has spent building its own AMD software stack, or both, a two-word commit message doesn't convey well enough, one way or another.

• A new Windows 11 feature is in testing, but it doesn't work yet
• It's an option to enable Intel's 'Advanced Performance Extensions' or APX to boost the performance of some apps
• This will benefit Intel's next-gen CPUs, and AMD's processors will be in line for this speed boost eventually, too

There's a new Windows 11 feature to boost the performance of apps that's been spotted in testing, but only PCs with Intel's next-gen desktop CPUs (codenamed Nova Lake) will benefit from this initially.

Windows Latest noticed that a regular Windows 11 watcher, XenoPanther on X, posted a screenshot of an option for 'Advanced Performance Extensions' (APX) which is present in a recent preview release of Microsoft's OS (build 29695).

Intel explains that APX "expands the entire x86 instruction set with access to more registers and adds new features that improve general-purpose performance."

This means that app developers can take advantage of this feature to speed up the performance of their software. How much of a boost any given app might get is, as ever, going to be variable, but some applications might end up with a nice performance bump (games probably won't get much benefit, in case you were wondering).

There are a couple of catches here, however, including that apps will have to be recompiled to take advantage of APX, although Intel observes that actual changes to the application's code aren't expected to be necessary.

It's worth noting that Linux already added support for APX some time back.

Analysis: there are barriers to entry – but AMD chips will get this

Right now, this APX toggle is present in Windows 11 test builds, but it doesn't do anything at all, which is hardly surprising given that there aren't any Intel CPUs which support the feature yet. What this shows is that Microsoft is preparing the ground for this capability, which will be supported with Intel's next generation of desktop silicon. These Intel Core Ultra Series 4 processors are expected to debut early in 2027, so they are still some way off.

Existing generations of silicon from the Intel Core Series 3 families and earlier won't ever get the benefit of APX, as this is something that needs to be baked into the chip at production. So, existing PCs will not get the speed boosts from this feature, which is a shame.

Theoretically, this could be an additional reason to upgrade your CPU, but there's another catch here in that Intel's Core Series 4 CPUs require a new processor socket, and therefore a new motherboard for your PC. So that means an extensive upgrade for a desktop PC – or an impossible one for laptop owners – meaning that both Intel and Microsoft could be hoping that APX is another way to shift some new laptops in difficult conditions when the market is dipping.

How about AMD processors? This is an Intel technology, as noted, so you might assume you can forget about seeing APX with a Ryzen CPU, but actually as Windows Latest points out, Team Red is collaborating with Team Blue to get the benefit of this feature.

With AMD involved, it's more likely that developers will use the feature, and that'll help Intel's case for its usefulness. However, again, the support needs to be baked into the chip, so the earliest this might happen on the Ryzen side would be the Zen 6 family – or possibly the following generation (rumors seem to favor the latter). At any rate, support is coming for AMD chips as well.

Meanwhile, some of the online commenters remain skeptical. One Redditor observes of this potential speed boost: "I'll believe it when I see it!"

Others aren't happy about the support here, and the need for an upgrade, complaining: "Imagine locking a performance boost behind a platform..."

But as noted, this is a feature that requires new hardware in the chip itself, it's not something that can be added to finished silicon.

As far as Windows 11 itself is concerned more broadly, Microsoft is busy working to boost performance in all kinds of ways, including applying a couple of new tricks to speed up the launch times of apps and menus. There's also a major goal to ensure that Window 11 runs better on 8GB of RAM, too.

• Arm’s AGI CPU nearly doubles AMD’s modelled rack-level performance across seven workloads
• A 24-kW rack accommodates up to 23 Arm servers under the assessment’s assumptions
• Arm’s rack-level advantage reaches 3.19x in the strongest individual workload

Arm’s AGI CPU has recorded nearly twice the modelled rack-level performance of AMD’s EPYC 9755 across seven workloads designed to evaluate agentic artificial intelligence.

The assessment, conducted by Signal65 with Arm’s cooperation, compared measured processor results before estimating performance across racks operating within a fixed power budget.

The findings rely partly on power-based modelling, while testing on final production hardware remains outstanding.

Rack density gives Arm a substantial advantage

The assessment examined workloads involving software tools, autonomous task execution, information retrieval, and support for AI model serving, including Terminal-Bench 2 and SWE-bench.

Across the seven tests, Arm’s processor achieved an average performance ratio of 1.99x, with individual results ranging from 1.43x to 3.19x compared with AMD’s EPYC 9755.

The modelled advantage partly comes from differences in server power consumption, allowing more Arm systems within the same electricity allocation.

A 24 kW rack could accommodate 21 to 23 AGI CPU servers, compared with 13 dual-socket EPYC 9755 systems.

That configuration provides between 5,712 and 5,888 physical cores for Arm, compared with 3,328 for AMD, although the comparison depends on the rated power assumptions.

Individual server power ranges from 950 to 1,050 watts for Arm’s systems, while AMD’s dual-socket configurations carry a rated consumption of 1,700 watts.

Across workload categories, Arm recorded modelled rack-level advantages averaging 1.7x for tooling, 2.0x for agentic workflows and 2.2x for reasoning and planning.

The report also estimated that database and vector-search operations could require 30% to 35% fewer racks for equivalent processing workloads.

Faster sandbox creation and the x86 challenge

Separate testing compared Arm’s processor against AMD’s EPYC 9965 using Sandbench, which measures the time required to establish isolated execution environments.

Arm completed cold starts 45% faster, warm starts 27% faster, and its worst-case scenario under fourfold oversubscription 41% faster.

These improvements matter because AI agents frequently create execution environments while accessing services, running code, and processing information.

Faster setup can reduce delays, although the results do not demonstrate equivalent gains across all applications or complete data center deployments.

Arm executive vice president for Cloud AI Mohamed Awad said, “The industry needs to measure how well systems handle the work agents actually complete,” describing the need for workload-specific performance evaluation.

The company developed its evaluation framework with support from Fujitsu, Meta and OpenAI, while Signal65 independently verified the reported processor results.

Arm also acknowledged that further testing on final production systems would cover additional workloads and competitive comparisons.

For AMD and Intel, the findings suggest that Arm-based servers could challenge x86 infrastructure in agentic AI deployments where rack power limits constrain computing capacity.

Higher rack-level performance could let operators accommodate more AI workloads within existing power allocations.

However, the benchmark does not establish that Arm will outperform x86 across general-purpose computing or justify replacing existing servers across entire data centers.

Software compatibility, deployment costs and real-world operating conditions will influence whether the modelled advantage translates into wider adoption.

• AMD's proposed rack combines 32,768 CPU cores with 16 AI accelerators
• Traditional data centers may need new power and cooling infrastructure
• AMD divides agent workloads into personal, enterprise, and technical computing categories

AMD is developing a rack-scale computing system for artificial intelligence agents, with configurations designed for personal, enterprise, and technical workloads.

Dubbed Helion Agentic AI Rack, it supports up to 32,768 Zen 6 x86 CPU cores, 16 Instinct MI350P accelerators, and 74 petaflops of FP4 computing performance.

The proposed platform also supports 102 Tbps of networking bandwidth and uses modular hardware designed for different agent computing requirements.

A rack built around three kinds of AI agents

AMD groups agent workloads into three categories: personal assistants, enterprise applications, and technical computing, each with different processing requirements.

Personal agents need dense, energy-efficient servers; enterprise applications require a balance between agent capacity and performance; while technical workloads prioritize processing speed.

AMD allows operators to customize CPU core density, processing performance, and power consumption according to their workloads.

The hyperscale configuration uses CPU-only infrastructure, while the enterprise version combines processors and graphics accelerators within an integrated rack.

For personal agents, the system uses 256-core Venice processors operating at 400W, prioritizing processing density and power efficiency.

Enterprise workloads use the 256-core Venice processors rated at 600W, while technical computing uses 96-core, high-frequency Venice processors.

The enterprise configuration separates agent execution, inference, and general-purpose computing into distinct server nodes.

CPU sandbox nodes handle agent execution, Instinct MI350P accelerators support inference, and general-purpose servers accommodate databases, storage, and technical computing.

AMD also includes an integrated token router for directing agent model requests across frontier and open-source models.

The rack supports programmable networking, an open-source software ecosystem, and ORv3 44OU hardware compliant with Open Compute Project specifications.

Why traditional data centers may need substantial changes

Traditional data centers are built for standard cloud or legacy enterprise computing, not racks packing up to 32,768 Zen 6 CPU cores alongside heavy GPU configurations.

Therefore, facilities built around existing server arrangements may lack the appropriate combination of power delivery, cooling capacity and network infrastructure for these configurations.

Workload diversity creates another challenge because personal agents, enterprise applications and technical computing require different processing characteristics.

AMD's proposed rack mixes dense 256-core processors with 96-core high-frequency systems, requiring infrastructure that can accommodate different server types and operating requirements.

This creates a planning challenge for data centers, which must allocate rack space, power, and cooling to different server configurations instead of deploying identical systems.

Operators may need to modify existing infrastructure if it cannot support the selected combination of high-core-count and high-frequency servers.

Networking introduces an additional consideration because the rack supports up to 102 Tbps of bandwidth and integrates a programmable token router.

Existing facilities may need compatible networking equipment and software to support this throughput and route model requests across different AI systems.

The Helion Agentic AI Rack is scheduled for availability in November 2026, but AMD has not disclosed complete facility upgrade costs or cooling requirements.

• Asus confirms the ProArt GR1X will use the 20-core RTX Spark N1X, mainly in 64GB and 128GB configurations, shipping before year-end via premium retailers
• The GR1X matches Asus's Ascent GX10 on size, weight, fans, and power brick, and joins RTX Spark boxes from Microsoft, Dell, Acer, Honor, amongst others
• The GR1X still has no price, while Microsoft's Dev Box lists at $5,999, DGX Spark at $6,950, and GMKtec's 192GB EVO-X5 Pro at $6,599

Asus has filled in more of the blanks on the ProArt GR1X, the RTX Spark-powered mini PC it first showed at Computex 2026.

The company now says it will sell the machine mainly in 64GB and 128GB unified LPDDR5X memory configurations through a limited set of premium retailers before the end of 2026, according to its recent launch announcement.

Reports also confirm a 240W USB-C power supply built to the USB Power Delivery 3.1 EPR specification, a weight of 1.48kg (3.26lb), and a chassis of 150 x 150 x 51mm, or roughly 1.1 liters.

Plenty of details sans a price tag

The same reporting claims that the GR1X will rival the Mac Studio, even as the published spec sheet now points to a single-chip option: the 20-core RTX Spark N1X with a 6,144-core Blackwell GPU and a 140W TDP.

Asus announced the device on June 1 as the ProArt Mini PC, with up to the same 20-core chip, up to 128GB of memory, and up to 140W of thermal headroom, and promised availability from Fall 2026, but it has yet to publish a price tag, even in recent updates.

In the recent update, it has solidified the specifications on offer; when Asus renamed the machine in late August 2026, it suggested several RTX Spark chip options, dropped the 140W reference, and listed 180W of USB-C power delivery. The 140W figure has returned as a TDP, the power input has risen to 240W, and the cut-down 18-core N1X appears to be reserved for laptops, which matches Nvidia's RTX Spark spec table, which lists only the 20-core part for desktops.

This might not be a completely new product, though, but rather something of a reskin: Asus's Ascent GX10, its Linux-based take on Nvidia's DGX Spark, also measures 150 x 150 x 51mm, weighs 1.48kg, and ships with a 240W adapter. Asus's October 5 release for a 64GB GX10 describes two 140 x 80mm fans, the same fan size the GR1X page lists.

The overlap runs deeper than the chassis: RTX Spark is based on the same GB10 silicon as DGX Spark, as The Register has noted, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in September 2025 that the N1 processor was "going to go into the DGX Spark."

None of the GR1X's headline performance numbers have been independently tested yet; its 1 petaflop of FP4 performance is a sparse figure, to say the least. Nvidia's DGX Spark datasheet, Asus's own GX10 release, and Microsoft's Surface RTX Spark Dev Box announcement all footnote it as relying on sparsity, while the GR1X page carries no such caveat. Dense FP4 throughput will be lower.

The promise of 120-billion-parameter models with up to 1 million tokens of context is conditional too, and Asus's October 8 release concedes that what fits depends on model architecture, quantization, and context length. How quickly those models run depends mostly on memory bandwidth, which Asus's product page doesn't list, even as competitors already offer nearly 1.5x the memory.

A beefed up threat from a rebadged APU?

ASUS's most direct competition does not come from Nvidia's partners at all, but from AMD. Its Ryzen AI Max+ 395, better known as Strix Halo, has been the default chip for 128GB mini PCs for some time, including AMD's own Ryzen AI Halo developer platform, which went on sale through Micro Center in June for $3,999.99.

Like RTX Spark, it pairs a 16-core CPU with a large integrated GPU, in this case a 40-CU Radeon 8060S, and a single pool of LPDDR5X, but its 256GB/s of bandwidth trails Nvidia's chip.

Its successor, Gorgon Halo, narrows the bandwidth gap and opens a capacity lead. The Register describes the Ryzen AI Max+ 495 as "essentially a factory-overclocked version of the Strix Halo APU," with clocks about 100MHz higher, but it supports up to 192GB of LPDDR5X-8533 at 273GB/s, matching DGX Spark and, by extension, ASUS's own offering. Up to 160GB of that can be allocated to the GPU, according to Framework and GMKtec, which is more than the entire memory pool of any RTX Spark machine currently being sold.

Unlike ASUS's offering, Gorgon Halo boxes are arriving with pricing in tow, and they are not cheap. GMKtec's EVO-X5 Pro sells for $6,599 with 192GB and 2TB, against a listed regular price of $6,799. Peladn's YO2 495 costs CNY 49,999 (about $7,454) in China, and Lenovo's ThinkCentre X Ultra starts at $3,699 when orders open in November, with up to 128GB and support for clustering up to four units. Framework's 192GB Desktop is still listed as coming soon, however.

The silence on pricing is the GR1X's biggest open question, and the memory market is not helping. Nvidia has raised its own 128GB DGX Spark to $6,950, nearly 75% above its launch price, while partner 64GB GB10 systems are expected to sell for around $4,999.

AMD's machines have followed the same curve. According to The Register, a 128GB Strix Halo box cost between $2,000 and $3,000 a year ago, and around $4,000 by the time AMD's own workstation launched this summer.

Asus's ProArt laptops start at $2,599.99, and Asus offers them in memory tiers as low as 24GB. The GR1X, by contrast, targets the 64GB and 128GB tiers, making Microsoft's $5,999 Dev Box, Nvidia's DGX Spark, and GMKtec's $6,599 EVO-X5 Pro its direct competition.

Until Asus publishes a price, confirms a bandwidth figure, and commits to a date, and reviewers can test its thermal and gaming claims, a 20-core chip and 128GB of memory are the least surprising things about the ProArt GR1X.

• A PC maker in the US says 'retail GPU pricing is expected to climb significantly'
• A further rumor suggests AMD just put up the cost of VRAM, which will affect the prices of graphics cards
• Rounding off a trio of fresh rumors is a claim that Nvidia has discontinued the RTX 5090

There have been a few developments in the GPU world over the weekend — and none of them bode well for the prices of graphics cards down the line.

For starters, Wccftech reports that according to the Board Channels — a reliable enough forum for chatter from the supply chain over in China — AMD has increased the cost of the GDDR6 video RAM it sells to board-making partners. This means that those graphics card makers will inevitably pass that cost on to consumers — if this rumor is accurate of course.

Bench Life further observes that more expensive VRAM isn't the only upward pricing pressure here, and that the cost of other graphics card components — including the main circuit board itself — is also rising.

Secondly, as Wccftech also noticed, we have a custom PC maker in the US, StinceBuilt, informing us on X that it is "starting to see increasing supply constraints on graphics cards" and that, "Retail GPU pricing is expected to climb significantly, and these elevated prices could stick around for quite some time."

Finally, VideoCardz highlighted another post on X from regular leaker MegaSizeGPU, who claims Nvidia will not allocate any more GB202 (Blackwell) chips to make the RTX 5090, and that all this silicon is going to be used in RTX Pro (AI) graphics cards.

In theory, that means it's the end of the line for the flagship RTX 5090, with its replacement (the RTX 6090 in theory) still quite some way off in the distance (a more recent rumor indicates that it's probably due to land in 2028).

Analysis: a cacophony of warning bells

Of all those sentiments, the last one needs the most seasoning, although it's believable enough that Nvidia is essentially canning the RTX 5090. By that I mean that if this is true, I don't think this will be an official (announced) discontinuation, but the way it'll play out is that Nvidia will allocate so few chips for the GeForce flagship that stock will effectively dwindle to next to nothing.

Arguably we're already seeing some evidence of this, certainly in the US where at Newegg, for example, you can't buy an RTX 5090 directly from the retailer, but only from third-party sellers (often in Asia). And the cost of the graphics card is tipping up towards $9,000, such is its scarcity — and you'll pay from £6,000 upwards in the UK, although at least stock is available to buy directly from retailers in that country. Still, I wonder how long that will last; and the idea of Nvidia pulling the plug on the RTX 5090 in a stealthy behind-the-scenes manner certainly feels like it's possible.

Meanwhile, the suggestion of AMD's Radeon GPU price rises backs up similar recent rumors, and the warning from the PC maker in the US that price tags are set to 'climb significantly' is another ominous addition to the warning bells that have been sounded of late.

I'm still very much of the opinion that it's a good idea to buy sooner rather than later, even though GPUs are already overpriced, because I fear that the situation could get substantially worse in 2027, as the grapevine indicates.

The key question is how long a recovery from these pricing pressures might take in the case of GPUs. Again, I have a suspicion that it might take a lot longer than we might hope.

• AMD's CEO said that the company plans to 'substantially increase' its chip supply in 2027
• Sadly this is chips for AI and data center usage, not consumer products
• If anything this is bad news for Radeon GPUs and Ryzen CPUs, as it's AMD underlining its commitment to the AI sphere

AMD's CEO has assured us that the company is going to increase chip production in 2027, but while that might sound great on the face of it, this isn't good news for consumers.

That's because CEO Lisa Su was talking about making chips for AI usage in data centers, not consumer processors or graphics cards.

Yahoo Finance reports that AMD has been expanding its chip production for AI and that Su said: "We've been able to increase our supply as we've gone through 2026, and we're going to substantially increase our supply in 2027."

This was a comment made to the press during a visit to Taiwan, and the chief executive made it clear that part of the reason for her trip – which included a visit to Foxconn and TSMC – was to make sure AMD's supply of CPU and GPU production could be increased to meet greater AI demand.

The next stop on the CEO's trip is South Korea, where Su will look to shore up memory chip supplies and is set to meet with Samsung and SK Hynix.

On the broader topic of how AI is impacting us all, Su said that it could be "incredibly good for the world" while at the same time cautioning on the risks and the need to cooperate on the safety of this technology.

Analysis: consumers in the cold

There's no mention of consumer products – Radeon GPUs and Ryzen CPUs – here, and the fact that AMD is clearly focused on beefing up AI supply is bad news for the typical PC owner. If anything it might mean that next year is an even leaner time for chip supply for consumer products, especially given all the negative chatter there's been of late talking about memory chip supply in particular looking like it'll considerably worsen next year.

Of course, none of this is surprising – there's a lot more profit in AI accelerators (graphics cards), of course, and as a business, Team Red can hardly afford to ignore that. But it does underline AMD's commitments, and PC owners on Reddit have voiced their displeasure in no uncertain terms.

As one Redditor put it: "Yeah I have a feeling the consumer market will end up being 'whatever the data centers consider obsolete' soon. We might have to contend with buying used data center CPUs and GPUs soon."

Okay, so that's going a bit far. And yes, others are quick to note that you can't just stick an old data center GPU in a PC and run it – there are issues around the implementation and cooling, display output (which isn't needed for a data center card), and the fact that many of these AI GPUs simply can't run games at all. But the point remains: consumers are indeed getting the short end of the stick due to the AI boom, and that's been the case since the invention of the likes of ChatGPT and other LLMs.

It doesn't sound like the situation is going to get any better next year, and that's just another worry to throw on the towering pile of memory price concerns that has been steadily growing in height as this year progresses.

• AMD's full EPYC 9006 price list tops out with the 256-core, 600W EPYC 9996 at $14,904 on a per-1,000-unit basis
• The CPU, which costs ~$58 per core or $29 per thread, is narrowly more expensive ($91) than its own older Turin flagship, which clocked in at $14,813
• While PCIe 6.0 is forecast to reach PCs around 2030, MRDIMM, a registered server module that specifically caters to AI memory bandwidth needs, may never make the jump

AMD has published specifications and 1,000-unit pricing for all 31 processors in its 6th Gen EPYC 9006 "Venice" family, and the top-of-stack chip sets a new high for the company on multiple fronts.

The AMD EPYC 9996 combines 256 Zen 6c cores and 512 threads with 1,024MB of L3 cache and a 600W default power rating on AMD's new SP7 socket, and it lists at $14,904, according to a full SKU sheet reported by StorageReview and corroborated by TechPowerUp.

The price is the highest for a single CPU that AMD has ever charged, as it continues to leverage its CPU lead and GPU business to carve itself a piece of an increasingly lucrative AI pie.

A measly pricing record coupled with plenty of real upgrades under the hood

When AMD's Turin launched in October 2024, it listed the 192-core EPYC 9965 at $14,813; our TechRadar Pro coverage described it previously as its most expensive processor to date.

Fast forward two years, and we have a CPU that costs $91 more but adds 64 Zen 6c cores, with benchmarks pointing to it as a significant performance upgrade for only a 1% increase in cost.

Hyperscalers willing to pay $77 a core for the EPYC 9965 would be more than happy to pay AMD's $58 ask, but that might be a moot point here; AMD's pricing is essentially guidance before OEM discounts and negotiations kick in for consumers who generally want chips in the hundreds or thousands for a typical deployment.

Interestingly, $14,904 might be where AMD's pricing caps out, but it is not the most anyone has historically asked for a server CPU; Intel's 128-core Xeon 6980P launched at $17,800 in 2024, making it considerably more expensive than its competition.

With a mammoth 600W power rating (AMD has retired its TDP rating for a 'default CPU power' figure that provides a more accurate power consumption under specific workloads), a gigabyte of L3 cache, and 256 Zen 6c 'compact' cores under the hood, the AMD EPYC 9996 is one of the fastest CPUs money can buy.

It also offers PCIe 6.0 connectivity and MRDIMM support for higher memory bandwidth, both key technologies for a current-generation AI workstation or datacenter's performance needs. The former is expected to reach desktop PCs by 2030, while the latter, a registered, buffered server module, might never see the inside of one for the foreseeable future.

AMD currently holds 46% of server CPU revenue, according to Mercury Research, which can lead one to conclude that AMD's nearest competitor is, as Storage Review put it, "its own last generation," at a time when Intel is still playing catch-up and OEMs are turning to Nvidia's Vera Rubin offerings as an alternative in the same space.

A more cynical take would be that list prices have drifted so far from what buyers actually pay that holding the sticker flat costs AMD very little, even as OEM partners and hyperscalers get to see the actual costs, which might not be as simple as an additional 64 cores for a $91 increase in cost at a time when AI demand outstrips supply on various fronts.

• AMD is rumored to be hiking prices for its chips
• Industry insiders in the supply chain indicate that a rise of around 10% will be applied across AMD's "entire chip line"
• This means GPUs and processors, as well as motherboards, and the hike is expected in Q4, so it could happen next month

AMD's processors and graphics cards could soon get more expensive in the latest blow from the RAM crisis rumor mill.

Wccftech spotted that leaker Harukaze5719 highlighted a post from ChannelGate (the Board Channels over in Asia) that cites sources in the supply chain who claim that TSMC has informed its customers of a 10% price rise.

The post observes that most of AMD's chips are manufactured by TSMC, and that Team Red has in turn notified its customers of a 10% "price adjustment" across its "entire chip product line".

That means everything, so on the consumer front, we can expect AMD's GPUs and Ryzen processors to be hit with price increases — and motherboard chipsets are also affected, so the price of those AMD boards will climb, too.

It's worth noting that processors aren't referred to explicitly in the post on the Board Channels, but given the mention of the entirety of AMD's chips, I think we can take that as real (as the leaker Harukaze5719 indicates).

The sources believe that AMD will enforce this new policy in Q4, so it could happen next month, in theory (although all of this remains a rumor).

In other RAM crisis bleakness, the Steam Frame arrived earlier this week with a much-inflated price tag compared to what Valve first envisioned for the VR headset. It starts at $1,059 / £889 / AU$1,609, which is a few hundred more dollars than what Valve was thinking originally.

As PC Gamer reports, a hardware engineer at Valve, Joy Lyons, said, "We set out to design [the Steam Frame] with one particular price in mind, but we've made choices to make sure that we're making a product that is choiceful, that people can purchase. They can upgrade with different features later. But we wanted to make sure we had a base product with really great performance. Then that price target shifted due to the ongoing RAM crisis around the world."

Analysis: a believable enough prediction

Sadly, the AMD rumor is another worrying doom nugget from what seems to be a never-ending supply of bad news in the past couple of months. Just this week, we've had a report that shows DDR5 RAM is somehow getting even more expensive, blowing past the levels I'd expected — not to mention the laptop price hikes.

The RAM crisis was forecast to worsen as 2026 rolled on, and that appears to be unfolding just as predicted — and there's very possibly worse to come in 2027, going by rumors elsewhere. If the pundits, analysts and insiders were right about this year, there's a fair chance they'll be right about next year, too.

Okay, so that's not a foregone conclusion, and some kind of more positive developments could yet happen — we can hope. This particular rumor must also be treated with some caution, as a Board Channels post may not have everything right (by any means), but the problem is that given the current climate, it's believable enough that AMD has price hikes in the works. Team Red already warned us earlier this year about pricing pain for the second half of 2026, after all.

• AMD is rumored to be working on its own version of DLSS 5
• A leaker says that the neural rendering tech will be launched with next-gen RDNA 5 GPUs
• That means we could be waiting until late 2027 or 2028 to see this debut, which might leave AMD lagging behind Nvidia considerably

AMD could be working on its own take on Nvidia's DLSS 5, and apparently this alternative attempt at neural rendering will be for its next-gen RDNA 5 graphics cards.

VideoCardz spotted that a known leaker in the GPU field, Kepler L2, posted on the Anandtech forum in a discussion around RDNA 5 speculation to say that: "AMD will have their own version of 'Neural Lighting' like DLSS5 next-gen."

Kepler then clarified that he didn't mean a version of Ray Reconstruction, but a take on DLSS 5 (neural rendering), and that next-gen RDNA 5 GPUs would be required because "this stuff is pretty heavy" (as in resource-intensive).

In a further post, Kepler elaborated: "There's a lot of issues with Nvidia's approach [with DLSS 5], but it's possible to have a version of this with minimal hallucinations and 'AI slop' look."

He then suggests a way that AMD could work its version to improve on DLSS 5, including giving the AI "direct access to 3D game data such as geometry, ray data, depth buffers, materials, etc so it doesn't have to guess and can accurately know how each object in a scene should interact with light."

Kepler's outline of a proposed alternative for AMD would have a separate model (AI) for lighting improvements, and another different model solely for the shading of complex surfaces. DLSS 5 bundles these together with its neural rendering system, and adds color-grading on top — to adopt what the AI judges as more natural colors — which Kepler advises that AMD should dispense with entirely.

Analysis: a race against time – or a chance to get it right?

I won't pretend to be able to critique what Kepler is suggesting as an alternative for AMD and the technical nuances therein, except to say that the idea is clearly to achieve a result that looks less like it's been 'messed' about with by AI and minimizes any 'slopification' therein — preserving more of the original artistic intent.

And that seems a laudable goal, of course, and it also brings up how AMD is in an interesting position here in lagging behind Nvidia with its graphics tech (which has, of course, been the case from the start, with FSR following DLSS — version 2.0 of Nvidia's upscaling tech was already in play, in fact, when FSR 1.0 arrived). Team Red can sit back for now and see how DLSS 5 plays out, as more games emerge that use it, and gauge the reaction of gamers, and forge its own neural rendering tech to tackle any perceived weaknesses.

The performance hit will be an obvious area to target, and if AMD can bring that down — it's substantial with DLSS 5 as it is now — that will obviously be a big win. That said, I'd expect Nvidia will be working with some haste to make DLSS 5 more performant, and as with DLSS 1, the tech will be improved considerably by the time Team Red has its own version out.

This is the other side of the equation here, where Nvidia could win out. With RDNA 5 GPUs not expected to arrive for at least a year, and quite possibly longer (the RAM crisis isn't helping), there's quite a lengthy timeframe on any AMD rival to DLSS 5. By the time it arrives, DLSS 5.5 may be in town with considerable improvements in tow. There's already been a notable turnaround in the perception of DLSS 5 with its official launch (compared to Nvidia's sneak preview earlier this year).

This is, of course, assuming AMD is indeed working on its own neural rendering technology, but I'd be surprised if this wasn't the case. For now, though, the word of a single leaker needs to be thoroughly seasoned, as ever, even though it's believable enough that Team Red would be aiming to use this on RDNA 5 graphics cards.

• Two AMD cards cost $18,775 yet beat GPT-5.6 Sol within hours weekly
• Multi-Token Prediction nearly doubled throughput to 320.2 tokens every second
• Twenty million monthly tokens save a team $11,738 yearly against Sol pricing

A hardware reviewer compared a dual-GPU AMD workstation against cloud subscription pricing to determine which option delivers cheaper AI inference over time.

Two AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 cards, each carrying 32 GB of memory, were installed inside a workstation costing roughly $18,775 as tested.

The evaluation measured electricity draw, token throughput, and amortized hardware cost, then set those figures against several cloud subscription tiers for comparison.

How cloud pricing sets the bar

Cloud AI providers charge customers per million tokens generated, with prices ranging from $1.20 for GPT-5.6 Luna up to $30 for GPT-5.6 Sol.

Mid-tier models sit in between, with Claude Sonnet 5 at $10 and Claude Opus 5 at $25 per million output tokens generated.

The more expensive the cloud model a team would otherwise use, the sooner owned hardware pays for itself.

Testing both AMD cards together, the workstation generated 156.2 tokens every second while serving eight simultaneous users during this test.

A speed technique called Multi-Token Prediction nearly doubled that figure, pushing throughput up to 320.2 tokens every second, with identical output quality.

At that 320.2 token-per-second speed, the machine only needs 3.5 hours of weekly use to beat GPT-5.6 Sol on cost, 4.2 hours to beat Claude Opus 5, and 8.8 hours to beat Gemini 3.1 Pro.

A team generating above 20 million tokens per month against GPT-5.6 Sol pricing gains real savings using this owned hardware setup.

At that volume, running the workstation costs about $6,262 yearly in electricity and amortized hardware, against roughly $18,000 yearly in matching Sol fees.

That $11,738 yearly gap is the actual evidence behind the claim that heavy monthly usage makes AMD's rig worthwhile.

If a company instead relies on GPT-5.6 Luna, priced at just $1.20 per million tokens, that math flips entirely in the other direction.

The workstation would then need 94.3 hours of weekly use just to match that far cheaper cloud subscription's total cost.

Since a single week only contains 168 hours total, reaching that particular break-even point remains genuinely difficult without near constant, saturated usage.

Electricity itself was a minor factor throughout, since both cards together drew between 310 and 510 watts under sustained load conditions.

Where the economics tip in AMD's favor

A smaller team producing only five million tokens monthly, priced against Gemini 3.1 Pro, would spend $6,262 yearly to displace just $720 in cloud costs, a clear loss.

That comparison shows the hardware only makes financial sense once usage climbs high enough to close a large yearly cost gap.

A single R9700 card handled an eight billion parameter AI model alone, processing 34.5 tokens every second without help from a second card.

Running just one card also lowers the effective break-even point further, since a lone card draws far less power under equivalent load.

That single card pulled between 221 and 283 watts depending on simultaneous user count, well under the 310 to 510 watts both cards drew together.

Smaller models therefore offer a second path into positive economics, letting lighter workloads justify a $1,880 single-card purchase long before a team can justify the full $3,760 dual-card upgrade.

Price alone still does not settle the question, since these locally run models measurably trail top cloud systems on complex reasoning benchmarks.

On one independent intelligence index, the 27 billion parameter AMD model scored 37 points against Google's Gemini 3.1 Pro scoring 46 points instead.

Therefore, a team chasing the cheaper token count may be trading away real reasoning quality, not just cloud subscription fees.

Via Puget Systems

• AMD is putting data center-class AI hardware inside a desktop workstation
• The Halo Station combines 96 CPU cores with four powerful AI accelerators
• Up to 2.6TB of memory gives enormous AI models more local headroom

AMD's Threadripper Halo Station could become one of the most extreme desktop workstations ever built for demanding artificial intelligence workloads.

The device combines a 96-core processor with AMD Instinct accelerators and a huge memory pool designed for large local models.

Unlike conventional workstations, AMD is building this system around data center-class computing hardware inside a single deskside machine.

AMD packs data center hardware into a desktop

At the heart of the Halo Station is the Ryzen Threadripper PRO 9995WX, based on AMD's Zen 5 architecture and carrying 192 threads.

AMD lists up to 2TB of RDIMM system memory, while the accelerator side can add as much as 576GB of HBM3e memory.

Together, the system's CPU and accelerator memory can reach 2.6TB, giving large AI models far more room to run locally.

AMD also claims up to 16.4TB/s of combined memory bandwidth, giving large datasets rapid access to both system and accelerator memory.

The accelerator configuration can use four Instinct MI350P units, with each device carrying 144GB of HBM3e memory and 4TB/s bandwidth.

That design gives the machine a far larger high-speed memory pool than typical professional desktops built around a single graphics card.

AMD compares the system with Nvidia's DGX Station, whose GB300 platform offers 748GB of coherent memory across its CPU and GPU resources.

The comparison shows why AMD is focusing heavily on memory capacity, rather than treating processor core count as the main selling point.

A machine with this much memory can keep larger models and datasets close to the compute hardware instead of constantly shifting them elsewhere.

Halo Station is built for local AI work

AMD says the workstation is intended for researchers, model developers, engineers, creators, and organizations that need intensive workloads handled locally.

Its main role is running, training, and fine-tuning large AI models that would normally require access to expensive remote computing infrastructure.

The system can handle frontier-class models while supporting hundreds of AI agents operating within the same local environment.

That capability makes it useful for development tasks where repeated cloud transfers create delays, added costs, or data control concerns.

AMD also says the design allows sensitive data and intellectual property to remain on premises instead of moving through external cloud services.

The company unveiled a prototype at IFA 2026, with commercial availability planned for 2027.

AMD senior vice president Jack Huynh described the device as “the most powerful workstation in the world,” emphasizing its unusual computing scale.

Industry estimates suggest fully equipped systems could cost around $150,000, although AMD has not announced an official retail price.

Rack-mounted systems can cost far more than desktop workstations, so the Halo Station is not necessarily the world's most expensive computer.

The estimated price reflects the cost of combining a high-end CPU with multiple AI accelerators and several terabytes of memory.

• Japanese retailer warns of further GPU price hikes
• The retailer doesn't specify which GPUs will see increases
• Consumers are urged to buy now, but GPUs are already overpriced and unaffordable in many cases

The PC hardware market is still in disarray, with RAM shortages impacting almost every component, and unfortunately, matters could get even worse for GPU hunters.

As reported by VideoCardz, Japanese retailer Applied has warned consumers about potential price hikes for GPUs (yet again). It's unclear which GPU models this might apply to, but the retailer urges PC owners looking to upgrade their GPUs to buy as soon as possible.

VideoCardz also highlights that Japanese retailers only recently adjusted GPU prices upwards. In August, stores in Akihabara warned that pricing would be around 20% to 30% higher than usual.

Considering the recent rumblings of price hikes from Nvidia's board partners, it's fair to suggest that these increases will likely apply to other regions outside of Japan (assuming there's anything in these rumors).

If it wasn't exactly clear already, these price hikes are caused by the RAM crisis which is affecting all manner of PC components. Graphics cards are hit due to the rising cost of the video RAM on board.

Panic buying still isn't the best solution

PC owners are now hard-pressed to find affordable hardware upgrades, and it's been that way since the start of 2026. The RAM crisis is showing zero signs of slowing down, too, especially with reports from Samsung and industry analysts suggesting that the memory shortage will last past 2027 or beyond that, even.

Despite that, I still don't think it's the best idea to panic buy now when it comes to a GPU. Many Nvidia GeForce or AMD Radeon third-party GPUs are either unaffordable or overpriced at various major retailers. Prime examples of the former are the RTX 5080 at $1,699 at Best Buy in the US currently, while the RTX 5060 remains overpriced between $450 and $500, despite its $299 MSRP.

The same goes for AMD's Radeon RX 9070 XT, which has a $599 MSRP but can now cost up to $929 (specifically the Gigabyte overclocked model). The Radeon RX 9060 XT (16GB) also sits at least $200 to $300 above its MSRP, and the list goes on (in the US and elsewhere).

Simply put, buying a new GPU doesn't seem worth it unless you're a gamer looking to dive into the PC ecosystem for the first time. That's a harsh reality to accept, but panic buying might do more harm than good by increasing demand (which could lead to further short-term price hikes).

• GMKtec NucBox M5 Ultra pairs an eight-core Ryzen 7 7730U with dual 2.5GbE, Wi-Fi 6E, and triple-display output while starting at just $330 a pop for a barebones configuration
• The underlying 2023-release CPU is capable, but a rebadge of the 2022-launched Zen 3 Ryzen 7 5825U, which is, in turn, a 2021-launched 5800U with a 100 MHz bump to base and boost clocks
• The price can be reduced to as little as $280 per unit for users buying 5 of the RAM- and SSD-less SKU

GMKtec has put its NucBox M5 Ultra back in the limelight, and the offering is familiar for the Shenzhen mini PC maker's mid-range lineup.

It comes with an eight-core AMD processor, two 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet ports, upgradeable memory and storage, and a price starting just over $300.

The catch for any prospective buyer is that you must bring your own DDR4 laptop RAM and SSD to get it going.

A capable NUC that is hiding its underlying CPU's age

The M5 Ultra runs the AMD Ryzen 7 7730U, an eight-core, sixteen-thread part clocked from 2.0 GHz to 4.5 GHz with 16 MB of L3 cache, built on TSMC's 7nm process with a default 15W TDP. Despite the 7000-series badge, it belongs to AMD's Cezanne lineup via the Barcelo-U refresh announced in January 2022.

The CPU it most closely matches in clock speeds, core configuration, and performance is the Ryzen 7 5825U, which is a slightly higher-clocked version of the January 2021-released Ryzen 7 5800U, which runs 100MHz lower on both base and boost clocks.

This is interesting because prospective buyers might feel they are buying a Zen 4-based CPU thanks to its 7000-series badge but would end up getting a CPU that was first available more than half a decade ago, even if it does hold its own in its price and performance segment.

A well-rounded offering with plenty of expansion under the hood

The M5 Ultra offers two DDR4-3200 SODIMM slots supporting up to 64 GB, and two M.2 2280 slots, allowing for a variety of configurations based on the user's needs.

It does have its limitations due to the underlying CPU, however: while GMKtec claims each M2 slot can support up to 8 TB, for a nominal 16 TB ceiling, speeds are capped at PCIe 3.0 because the 7730U provides only 16 usable lanes and no Gen 4 support out of the box.

Connectivity is where the unit particularly shines: it comes with two Realtek RTL8125 2.5GbE controllers, Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2, and a 10 Gbps, 100W USB port in addition to two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports and two USB 2.0 ports, a very formidable offering for a Nuc-tier PC.

The system, which is powered by a 65W PSU over a Type-C connector, also offers HDMI 2.0, DisplayPort, and USB-C for up to three simultaneous connections for power users looking to run a multi-display setup.

One could argue that pricey RAM and SSD options make sourcing them considerably less appealing and a tall order, but even with that in mind, at today's prices, the NucBox has plenty of connectivity under the hood, decent power, and a raw customizability that is hard to argue with in 2026.

• Lenovo announced the ThinkCentre X Ultra at IFA 2026, a 1.6-liter desktop with its max configuration offering up to AMD's top-of-the-line Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 495 APUs
• It launches in November 2026, starts at $3,699, and comes with up to 128GB of unified memory under the hood
• Users can configure four of these together to leverage as much as 512GB of unified memory for local needs

Lenovo announced the ThinkCentre X Ultra at its Innovation World event during IFA 2026: a 1.6-liter desktop built around AMD's Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 495 with up to 128GB of unified memory, starting at $3,699, shipping in November 2026.

The company calls this offering a new class of desktop for agentic AI, and it can be configured to cluster up to four systems, effectively pooling processing power and memory to run large AI models locally.

The added compute and memory capacity lets users run longer context windows and multi-agent workflows without turning to cloud-hosted alternatives, while keeping data localized.

Plenty of scalable power under the hood

The Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 495 is the flagship of AMD's Gorgon Halo refresh, pairing 16 Zen 5 cores with a 40-compute-unit Radeon 8065S integrated GPU and an NPU rated at roughly 55 TOPS. Its defining trait is the shared memory pool: the CPU and GPU address the same LPDDR5X memory under the hood, so it can effectively hold and run models that a discrete, consumer-grade GPU with 24GB or 32GB of VRAM cannot.

Lenovo pairs it with its enterprise-class ThinkShield security, AMD's PRO technologies, and DASH out-of-band manageability, plus the self-healing BIOS that runs across the ThinkCentre line, and integrates the AMD Ryzen AI Developer Center for preconfigured tools, models, and workflows across both Windows and Linux.

The Yoga laptops unveiled alongside it also reach 128GB of unified memory, but they don't offer the ability to cluster together for more memory or the additional hardware you may not need for a localized AI server. The price might be an issue for many looking to hook up four of these devices together; however, assuming a device cost of $3700 for a 128GB model, one would need nearly $15,000 before factoring in connectivity costs to build a 512GB memory cluster based on the ThinkCentre X Ultra.

Lenovo has not, however, said how connectivity will work, what bandwidth units will have when running four in tandem, or what the performance implications will be for such a configuration, even as its listed specs include dual Thunderbolt 4 ports rated at 40Gb/s each. The larger memory pool also might not translate to performance; while AMD's 16-core Zen 5-based configuration is fast as processors go, the integrated GPU is considerably slower, even when running together, versus something like an Nvidia H100 that can be rented for a few dollars an hour online.

For those looking for something visually attractive that doubles as a monitor for what the system is up to, the ThinkCentre X Ultra also has adaptive lighting under the hood that provides real-time visual feedback. However, whether it stacks up two months later, as an increasing number of Ryzen AI PRO 400 APUs make it to developers and AI users across the world, joining an ever-increasingly competitive fray, remains to be seen, even if you can rig four of them together, in addition to Lenovo's enterprise offerings being integrated in tow.

• HUR identified 140 components linked to the upgraded Iskander missile system
• American manufacturers supplied 63 of the missile's identified electronic components
• Only one-quarter of all components came from Russian domestic manufacturers

Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence (HUR) has released details about foreign-made parts it says were found inside Russia’s upgraded Iskander-1000 ballistic missile.

The disclosure said American companies, including Xilinx, part of AMD, Atmel, part of Micron Technology, DM&P Electronics, Winbond Electronics, and Analog Devices, supplied critical parts for the missile's guidance and processing systems.

The agency also identified 140 components linked to the missile and said only a limited share came from Russian manufacturers.

Foreign chips remain inside Russia’s upgraded missile system

The disclosure points to continued foreign technology use in a weapon system developed by Moscow despite efforts to reduce outside dependence.

According to Ukrainian intelligence, 35 companies are connected to the production network supporting Russia’s Iskander-M missile family.

The agency said the updated 9M723-2 variant, also called Iskander-1000, has appeared during recent attacks and forms part of the Bora-M missile system.

The newer missile version reportedly uses a larger engine and modified launcher design, allowing it to reach distances of up to 550km.

This compares with the 390km range attributed by Ukrainian intelligence to the earlier 9M723-1 missile model.

HUR stated that Russia continues to use imported electronic parts in key missile areas despite attempts to replace foreign technology with domestic alternatives.

The agency said only about one-quarter of the identified components were produced by Russian firms.

The intelligence report lists 63 components linked to manufacturers from the United States, while Switzerland and Belarus each account for eight components.

Germany and Taiwan were each linked to four parts, while China supplied three components according to the information released by HUR.

“The most critical components—microprocessors, FPGAs, memory, digital-to-analog and analog-to-digital converters—come from American and Taiwanese manufacturers…” said Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence.

The missile’s guidance system was described as one of the areas with significant foreign dependence.

HUR claims only five of 43 parts inside a flight information processing unit connected to the missile’s laser gyroscope were Russian-made.

Sanctions face challenges as supply chains remain complex

The identified components include field programmable gate arrays, memory chips, microprocessors and conversion devices used for handling digital and analogue signals.

Such parts are common in many electronic systems, making their movement across global markets difficult to monitor completely.

Ukraine’s intelligence service has called for stronger restrictions against companies, organizations and facilities it believes are linked to Russia’s missile production network.

The agency said international cooperation would be necessary to limit access to important technologies.

However, controlling the movement of advanced electronic components remains difficult because many parts have civilian uses and can pass through several countries before reaching final users.

The presence of international suppliers does not alone establish whether companies directly supply military programs.

The report comes as Ukraine continues efforts to disrupt Russia’s missile operations through sanctions pressure and attacks against launch equipment.

Ukrainian officials have also reported strikes against Russian missile launch platforms before they could be used.

“To counter the aggressor’s plans, it is important to consolidate efforts aimed at restricting Russia’s program for the development, production, and modernization of ballistic weapons,” HUR said.

Via United24media

• Intel shows three agentic AI architectures at Hot Chips 2026: the 256-core Diamond Rapids Xeon, the Crescent Island inference GPU, and the already-shipping Wildcat Lake client SoC
• Diamond Rapids matches AMD's EPYC Venice on cores and bandwidth but arrives in 2027 with half the threads, while Wildcat Lake's 17 TOPS NPU falls short of Copilot+'s 40+ TOPS certification
• Intel's Crescent Island will support up to 480 GB via third-party partner cards, but the Intel-branded variant will be limited to 160 GB, even as it currently does not publish the memory bandwidth that determines its token economics.

Intel used its slot at Hot Chips 2026 to lay out three architectures it says will carry agentic AI from the rack to the laptop.

The already-shipping Wildcat Lake Core Series 3 SoC is for mainstream client and edge machines, Crescent Island is an inference-optimized data center GPU, and Diamond Rapids is its next-generation enterprise-class data center CPU that can be configured with up to 256 cores.

Pushkar Ranade, Intel's chief technology officer, said in a statement accompanying the announcement that agentic AI is changing how the company designs computing from the transistor upward.

Plenty of compute promises, sans some GPU numbers

Intel's Diamond Rapids, which it plans to brand as Xeon 7, is where the chipmaker provides the most information, unsurprisingly, in an industry that plans purchases and upgrades years in advance.

Its flagship offering can encompass as many as 256 cores, backed by 1.28G of fast last-level cache, 16 memory channels, 128 PCIe 6 lanes, and CXL 3.0. ServeTheHome reported that the maximum configuration uses 16-core chiplets, built on Intel's 18A-P process node.

Rival chipmaker AMD also offers a 256-core trim: the EPYC 9996, built on TSMC's 2nm node, keeps hyperthreading in play, effectively doubling its thread count versus Intel's flagship.

Its Crescent Island GPU is arguably the most interesting design of the three, but the least detailed: a 350W air-cooled PCIe card built on its Xe3P GPU architecture, with 32 cores feeding 256 third-generation XMX engines and 32 MB of unified L2 cache. It surprisingly uses LPDDR5X rather than HBM, but the choice seems rationalized to offer capacity at a power and cost profile that lets Intel compete meaningfully with Nvidia and AMD.

Interestingly, the 480GB figure Intel touts in its press release isn't what it will ship; Intel-branded cards cap at 160GB, and 480GB is a ceiling available to ODM partners building their own configurations. Intel also remains mum on memory bandwidth specifics and told Chips and Cheese it won't disclose the figure; this is crucial for many AI applications, as memory bandwidth determines decode throughput, and decode throughput essentially determines token economics.

Of the three architectures that Intel talked about, Wildcat Lake is the only one you can pick up off a shelf (as a miniPC or laptop) today; it launched as Intel's Core Series 3. Intel stated that it replaced the Foveros packaging used in Panther Lake with an organic multi-chip package, eliminating the base die and, with it, assembly cost and yield loss. Compute die area fell by 38 percent, and I/O tile area by 15 percent.

The 17 TOPS NPU available to such CPUs sits well below the 40 TOPS Microsoft requires for Copilot+ certification. The 40 TOPS Intel cites is a platform total across CPU, GPU, and NPU, which arguably can be met elsewhere, but it's a sticking point for the chipmaker's AI push, which has otherwise been concentrated on capturing enterprise and hyperscale customers.

• Desktop CPU shipments dropped over 20% amid rising memory and GPU costs
• AMD now holds nearly 35% of the entire desktop processor market
• Mobile CPU shipments jumped as Intel finally closed its capacity gap

Global processor shipments fell in the second quarter of 2026 compared with the same period a year earlier, new figures have claimed.

Mercury Research found, the decline stemmed mainly from weaker system-on-chip and embedded volumes tied to AMD's shrinking games console business, along with a steep drop in desktop CPU volumes.

Even as the overall market contracted, AMD continued to take share away from Intel across nearly every product category tracked by the research firm.

Desktop demand buckles under higher prices

Desktop CPU shipments fell by more than 20% year on year, a decline Mercury links to weaker demand for high-end gaming PCs rather than typical seasonal softness.

Rising memory prices, driven by chipmakers prioritizing more profitable high-bandwidth memory for AI servers, have pushed up the cost of finished PCs.

A shortage of consumer GPUs appears to stem from similar supply pressures within the broader chip industry.

"Higher PC prices and limited GPU supplies are having a significant impact," Mercury Research said in its report.

AMD's decline in desktop shipments was smaller than Intel's, allowing it to grow its desktop share to nearly 35%, up from about 32% a year earlier.

AMD extends its lead in mobile and server chips

Mobile processor shipments told a different story, climbing strongly compared with the previous quarter after Intel expanded output during two heavily supply-constrained quarters.

Intel added millions of units of mobile CPU capacity in the second quarter, narrowing the earlier gap between supply and available demand.

Despite that expansion, AMD's share of the mobile segment rose to nearly 29%, up from 20.6% during the same quarter last year.

Server processor shipments increased by 20% year on year, with Mercury citing stronger demand for both datacenter—class chips and processors built for networking and storage.

AMD's share of server processors climbed to 34.5%, compared with 27.3% a year earlier, and would reach 46.4% if the comparison were limited only to Intel's Xeon SP and AMD's EPYC lines.

Mercury also tracks the smaller Arm-based CPU market for PCs and servers, cautioning that its estimates carry more uncertainty due to the absence of centralized revenue reporting for Arm chips.

The firm recorded strong growth in Apple's Mac lineup, including its newer lower-cost Neo models, alongside solid gains for Arm-based Chromebooks.

Arm-based systems reached 15.3% of the client market during the quarter, a record high and an increase of 0.9 percentage points.

In servers, Arm's share also hit a record of 13.6%, up 0.5 percentage points from the prior period.

Taken together, the figures suggest a processor market driven less by shifting consumer taste than by supply-chain pressure from the AI boom.

Memory and GPU scarcity appear to be squeezing traditional desktop buyers even as data-center and mobile demand hold up, leaving AMD well placed to keep benefiting from Intel's uneven recovery.

Via The Register

• AMD says its rack-scale AI systems are now about four times more energy-efficient than its 2024 baseline, beating its own threefold interim target by 33%
• The company offers two alternative outcomes for that gain: the same compute in far fewer racks, or twenty times more compute for the same power, something that
• AMD's own figures can also be reverse-engineered to imply that each 2030 rack draws roughly 14.25x the power of a 2024 one

AMD has published a progress report on the efficiency goals it set in June 2025, revealing the numbers are already better than the company was aiming for.

Against a 2024 baseline, AMD says its rack-scale AI systems are now roughly four times more energy efficient, ahead of the three times it had projected for this point, a trend that, by its own calculations, represents more than double the historical industry trendline.

This aligns with a six-year commitment by the chip design giant, in which it has pledged to deliver a twenty-fold improvement in rack-scale energy efficiency for AI training and inference by 2030.

Efficiency gets center stage as AMD aims to secure more AI customers

This is not the first time AMD has set itself a performance and efficiency goal. Its previous target, internally known as 30x25, aimed at a thirtyfold node-level improvement between 2020 and 2025, and the chipmaker finished ahead of its projections, clocking in at 38x,

AMD's efficiency and performance gains, if they hold as intended at 20x, can be flipped two ways: one could consider sizing down to larger, but singular racks to get their job done versus legacy hardware.

The flipside is easy to make at a time when everyone from AI startups to hyperscalers is pushing to increase compute whenever possible. AMD's efficiency gains could, in principle, allow its latest offerings in 2030 to deliver 20x the compute for the same power draw.

At a time when nobody in the industry is trying to buy less compute, AMD's offerings might be particularly appealing thanks to their efficiency gains, as projections indicate global data center electricity demand will more than double by 2030 to around 945 terawatt-hours, roughly what Japan uses today as a nation.

AMD's gains come from its newest GPUs being an order of magnitude more efficient than their predecessors; the MI300X that anchors the baseline was a 750-watt part delivering up to 2.6 petaFLOPS of dense FP8.

For context, each current-generation MI455X in Helios offers between 7.7 and 15.4 times the floating-point performance, 2.25 times the HBM, 4.4 times the memory bandwidth, and four times the chip-to-chip interconnect bandwidth, while consuming three times the power.

Its chief sustainability officer, Justin Murrill, told Trellis that every AMD team carries efficiency-per-watt targets for new products and that progress is tied to company-wide bonuses.

For now, AMD is ahead of schedule on a real, well-documented engineering goal. Hitting it, however, will not reduce the amount of electricity the AI industry consumes, as the efficiency and performance gains it offers will only fuel more demand for AI hardware that can use the saved power, even as demand for AI compute power continues to soar.

• GPU price hikes are coming later this year, PC Partner Group warns
• The parent company of Zotac notes that entry-level GPUs will suffer 'more severe shortages'
• A manufacturer of gaming monitors, KTC, has also warned on price hikes

PC gamers should be aware that there are further signs that GPUs could get more expensive, and gaming monitors too, so you might want to consider buying now rather than waiting.

First off, the gloomy GPU news which comes from PC Partner Group (PC PG), an Asian graphics card giant based in Singapore and the parent company of Zotac, Inno3D, and Manli.

VideoCardz reports that PC PG just published its latest fiscal results that came with a warning on GPU pricing as part of the trends and conditions which are likely to affect the company's finances in the upcoming year.

PC PG notes that "graphics memory costs are expected to rise further, leading to a substantial increase in VGA Card costs in the second half of the year." VGA Card simply refers to discrete PC graphics cards, and although it's a well outdated term now, it's one still used behind the scenes in the industry.

PC PG says that shipments of GPUs "declined substantially" in the first half of this year, and that they're likely to drop further in the second half of 2026. The firm writes that: "Beyond the price increases, entry-level VGA Cards are expected to face even more severe shortages, which may further drive ASP [the 'average selling price'] upward in the second half of 2026."

The company also highlights that other PC components, including system RAM and CPUs, are taking longer to get hold of.

VideoCardz also noticed that monitor pricing could be on an upward trajectory, too, as manufacturer KTC has issued a notice of a likely 'product price adjustment' in the future.

KTC observes that the "production cost of monitors has increased significantly" and that it can no longer absorb those pressures, therefore: "KTC's monitor product line may see a price increase in the future."

While that's just a 'may' rather than a 'will' or a certainty, it sounds like there's a high likelihood of it happening. Particularly because KTC advises: "For users with a clear need to purchase a device [monitor] in the near future, the current pricing window offers excellent value for money, and we recommend planning your purchase time accordingly."

And at the end of its statement, KTC talks about price adjustments being a "necessary measure", so it sounds pretty much like they're coming no matter what.

Analysis: is anything immune to the component crisis?

This isn't the only warning on monitor price increases, as AOC recently said that the rising cost of components for its products will mean price hikes starting from this month. Is this the start of a growing trend? The bigger monitor producers will, of course, have more financial wherewithal to weather component rises, but it may only be so long before even those firms start to jack up prices.

The way things are going, I wouldn't bet against it, and this latest news has people on social media asking what isn't immune to the RAM crisis – and what might we expect to see hit next?

How about pricier PC cases, one Redditor jokes: "Wouldn't you enjoy a simple case costing like $300?"

The crisis does feel rather relentless at this point, but the clearest worry is now GPUs. PC Gamer is tracking graphics card prices on a weekly basis, and there have been some clear cost increases coming through in the last few weeks, which suggests that PC PG's prediction is on the money here. And there are multiple other rumors of late warning that graphics cards are set for considerable price hikes. For me, this noise is becoming too consistent to ignore.

As I recently advised, if you need a graphics card upgrade, or think you will in the next year or two, I believe now is the right time to get in and buy. It's particularly notable that according to this latest rumor, entry-level GPUs are mentioned as apparently coming under more pressure, meaning that mainstream buyers are going to be suffering.

The effects of pricier video RAM, and other pressures besides, are no longer going to be mostly about high-end (or 16GB) cards becoming ridiculously expensive, and we could see some unfortunate hikes with lower-end GPUs.

There's very little good news of late across the gamut of PC components, and as we've already seen today, RAM and SSDs are getting even more expensive.

• Gigabyte graphics cards are rumored to be set for a big price rise
• It could be a hike of 20% to 40%, and other rumors are also pointing to major price hikes for GPUs more broadly
• This means now is likely a good time to make a purchase, particularly with certain cards which have avoided the worst of the hikes so far

Desktop GPU prices are set to rise if the rumor mill is right – with yet another prediction to that end being aired – and while graphics cards are already costly in some cases, now might be the time to buy certain models, based on a fresh roundup of average pricing.

First off, let's deal with the latest gloom nugget from the grapevine regarding GPU pricing, courtesy of @momomo_us on X (via Wccftech) who picked up a notice from CFD (a Japanese components supplier) warning of substantial price hikes on Gigabyte graphics cards.

The claimed rise (add seasoning, of course) is in the order of 20% to 40%, so at the latter end of that scale, we're looking at prices shooting up by almost a half in some cases. Existing orders from retailers buying boards from CFD may even be cancelled, the notice states.

I perhaps wouldn't put as much stock in this, except that it echoes a rash of recent reports contending that large price hikes are about to happen in the GPU world, which makes it all the more believable.

Only yesterday I reported on the situation in South Korea where RTX 5000 models are rumored to be getting price increases of up to 30%. So again, that's a hefty hike, and it follows other speculation about Nvidia charging its partners more for video RAM (which will push up costs, of course).

This apparent Gigabyte move will affect both Nvidia and AMD graphics cards in Japan, and there have been rumors about Team Red having Radeon price hikes in the pipeline due to more expensive VRAM, too. That only makes sense, as if VRAM is getting more costly for Nvidia, it will be for AMD too. And while some of these reports are based on regional activity, the cost issues will surely apply globally – none of these markets exist in a bubble.

Analysis: I think it's time to buy – especially with certain GPUs

The RAM crisis has a lot to answer for, and it very much looks like graphics card prices are going to be jacked up considerably during the remainder of 2026, with video memory being the primary driver here. Given that, it seems that if you are thinking about a GPU upgrade, now is likely the time to go for it, rather than waiting and being hit by price hikes.

That's especially true if you're considering a 16GB graphics card (as more gamers are these days), as the products with more VRAM are going to get hit the hardest for price rises as memory modules become even more expensive.

If we want a snapshot of the current GPU market as price tags stand, fortunately enough, TechSpot has just furnished us with an extensive (multi-region) pricing roundup as of the end of July which highlights some key points.

Firstly, low-end GPUs are still relatively unscathed, with offerings like the RTX 5050 and RTX 5060 8GB, and the 8GB spin on the 5060 Ti, not having been bumped up by all that much in the RAM crisis thus far. However, as for the 16GB incarnation of the RTX 5060 Ti, that has seen major price bumps, reinforcing that observation on 16GB pain (this card is up over 40% since November 2025 in the US, for example – and shows a 14% rise since April 2026).

In the tier above that, the RTX 5070 is holding at a reasonable price, and even if the sub-MSRP levels of late last year are well and truly gone, it remains a decent buy. (As long as you can stomach 12GB of VRAM at this price bracket, of course – and that's one of the reasons why this GPU hasn't been hit so hard, no doubt).

Above this level, Nvidia GPUs have witnessed some of the nastier price increases, as you've probably noticed.

On the AMD side, matters look more promising, particularly in the case of the Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT, with TechSpot finding that the 16GB models in the RDNA 4 family haven't suffered as much as Nvidia's GeForce offerings. The price of both these 9070 models has remained steady over the last few months, and in many regions, they're only up 10% or so compared to late 2025. (The 9070 XT is an exception in the US, mind, where it has risen by closing on 20% since last year).

If you're inclined towards one of these Radeon mid-rangers, or Nvidia's RTX 5070, I'd strongly suggest you buy now rather than wait based on what we're hearing from the rumor mill. Lower-priced graphics cards are likely worth grabbing, too, because they may be heading upwards in the pricing stakes before long – although notably the RX 9060 XT with 16GB has already become a good deal more costly, much like its RTX 5060 Ti 16GB rival.

As noted, Nvidia's higher-end graphics cards (RTX 5070 Ti and upwards) have already been hit with alarming price hikes, but they're likely to get even worse. So, this could be a case of keeping your wallet shut and holding out for possibly a lengthy time, as I can't really recommend them even at the current pricing.

The trouble is, we don't know how long the RAM crisis will continue, and some of the guesswork on that front is very bleak indeed – suggesting it might be the rest of this decade effectively. At this point, I'm inclined to believe we're in it for the long haul with PC component pricing woes, which is why I think it's best to buy a GPU now, at least with the mentioned models, assuming you're in a position to do so.

• The latest Steam survey shows GPUs with 16GB are the most popular
• They're on 25.9% and have overtaken 8GB GPUs which are just behind on 25.32%
• There's been quite a shift towards 16GB boards over the past year, but with news of more price hikes incoming, upgrading to this loadout could be a painful process for gamers

Graphics cards with 16GB of memory are the most popular GPU among Steam gamers now, although the way GPU prices are going means that people aiming for a board packing plenty of video RAM (VRAM) are looking at a rather depressing future.

TweakTown spotted that the latest Steam hardware survey for July shows that 16GB of VRAM is the most prevalent memory configuration at 25.9%, up 1.4% over last month. That means it just dethrones the previous top of the VRAM table, which was 8GB, a loadout that slipped slightly from last month down to 25.32%.

There's not much in it, of course, but nonetheless, it's a telling stat (bearing in mind the usual caveats about variance in Valve's hardware report based on how the survey is distributed).

Of course, the majority of Steam gamers are still running with less than 16GB, and only 36% have a GPU with 16GB or more. So, almost two-thirds are running less than 16GB, and just under half (47%) have a graphics card with 8GB or less.

But it's a hefty rise in the count of 16GB GPUs when you consider that less than a year ago, in August 2025, just 6.8% of Steam gamers had boards with that VRAM loadout (based on a Notebookcheck report from the time). Compared to July 2026, that's nearly quadruple the number of 16GB-equipped rigs, with a close to 20% increase — pretty eye-opening.

Analysis: 16GB ambitions and the ever-worsening RAM crisis

It seems that, at least based on Steam's stats, RTX 5060 Ti 16GB and RX 9060 XT 16GB graphics cards (and 9070 models) must have been selling well — and of course higher-end Nvidia cards. The RTX 5070 is doing well for itself, too, and is now in third position in Steam's GPU ranking (although that's a 12GB offering and it should really be 16GB).

The ranks of the 16GB GPUs on Steam will also be bolstered by older models, of course, from past generations. Also, the visibility of AMD Radeon graphics cards with 16GB of VRAM was improved by Valve earlier this year, when an issue was fixed whereby these cards were misreported (not detected and lumped in a generic Radeon category), so that will have boosted numbers too.

At any rate, the fact that more gamers are looking at future-proofing their GPU purchases only makes sense, as 8GB in particular is looking too lean at this point. But there's a problem with GPUs that have heavier VRAM configurations, and this is, of course, that the memory crisis hits these models hardest.

We've already seen that GPU price hikes are making themselves felt, and just a couple of weeks back, Nvidia seemingly told its card-making partners that the price it charges for memory supplied with its graphics chips is going up (for both GDDR6 and GDDR7). A fresh report from Tom's Hardware also talks about price hikes for RTX 5000 models in South Korea beginning this month, driven not just by the increased cost of video RAM, but also the GPU chips themselves.

We're told the upshot is that Nvidia's Blackwell GPUs could see price increases of up to 30% in the country, and similar hikes may happen elsewhere. AMD price hikes are expected for its Radeon line-up, too, and Team Red has already warned us that the second half of 2026 is going to be a tough one for PC gamers.

With those gamers craving 16GB of video RAM more often, and prices heading inexorably upwards — and the memory crisis expected to worsen as this year rolls on, with the misery to continue into 2027 by all accounts — it's a gloomy picture for beefier graphics card upgrades.

• AMD and Cerebras will split inference across two machines, with Helios racks handling prompt processing and the Wafer-Scale Engine generating tokens, available through Cerebras Cloud in H2 2026
• Nvidia is also doing something similar by licensing AI chip startup Groq's SRAM decode technology for $20 billion
• The move sees AMD and Cerebras claim 5x higher tokens per watt versus a standalone Cerebras WSE configuration

AMD and Cerebras Systems have announced a technical partnership which pairs the former's Helios rackscale system with the latter's Wafer-Scale Engine in what both companies call a disaggregated inference solution.

The move has enabled a combined AMD Helios and Cerebras WSE configuration to deliver up to five times the tokens per second per watt (TPS/W) in internal testing by both chip designers.

The move aims to address a Cerebras WSE efficiency challenge by offloading prompt processing to AMD's rackscale offering.

An efficiency gains-centric play?

Both AMD and Cerebras Systems are painting the news as a win, and it very well might be, given the latter's efficiency gains in play and the former's ability to get access to SRAM decode technology without spending the $20 billion Nvidia shelled out at the end of last year for a non-exclusive deal.

It must, however, be noted that the efficiency claims of 5 tokens per second per watt are compared against an existing Cerebras WSE (Wafer-Scale Engine) as the baseline, while running the open-source Kimi 2.6 1T model, making them impressive, but without a direct comparison to figures for an Nvidia rackscale offering, one that lacks context, especially when efficiency is the metric.

The idea itself is sound and well established in the industry, with WSE known to struggle with the 'prefill' part of the equation while handling the 'decode' segment relatively well, essentially substituting AMD's hardware where Cerebras' equipment falls short.

The choice of Kimi 2.6, however, deserves a second look. Moonshot AI's model, released on 20 April 2026, is a mixture-of-experts design with one trillion total parameters but only 32 billion active per token, and it ships natively in INT4. At INT4, the full weight set runs to roughly 500 GB. A single Cerebras wafer holds 44 GB. Even before KV cache, a Cerebras-only deployment needs somewhere north of a dozen wafers just to hold the model, while one Helios rack could hold it around sixty times over.

That asymmetry means the five-times figure is measured on a model that is close to the least favorable for a WSE-only configuration. A dense model small enough to sit resident on a handful of wafers could flatter Cerebras considerably more. None of this makes the number wrong, but it does make the case for additional testing to demonstrate both its strengths and weaknesses for different models.

A partnership without numbers, for now

More importantly, the absence of any financial information might very well be a future story, especially at a time when there are increasing concerns about 'circular financing' in an industry where Nvidia's recent move to backstop OpenAI's data center purchases was seen as a net negative by Wall St, which is already concerned about AI spend and the sustainability of such transactions.

AMD has also, in the past (and more recently with Anthropic), linked purchases of its own hardware to investments or stakes it would take in AI companies, moves that the market welcomed earlier but might view with a bit more hostility lately.

The announcement comes at a time when Cerebras might need it more than AMD: Cerebras listed on Nasdaq in May, priced at $185, opened at $350, and closed its first day at $311.07 before falling back to around $227 by late June 2026.

AMD stock, on the other hand, is up 121.48% year-to-date (YTD) as investors continue to bet heavily on its new Instinct AI processors, and the Cerebras partnership allows it to further consolidate its gains, as this might be seen as another vote of confidence in its current direction by one of its prospective customers.

• AMD's Helios beats Vera Rubin NVL72 on memory at rack level, with 31TB of HBM4 against roughly 20.7TB
• AMD also claims it beats the competition by 15% on FP4 compute on a 'per-GPU' basis even as Nvidia comes out ahead on published 'per-rack' figures
• AMD claims Helios also offers 30% more tokens per dollar spent versus the competition

AMD has launched its Helios rackscale offering, outlining five comparisons in which it claims wins over what it calls "the leading competitive solution."

While the company skipped naming Nvidia, the market leader's Vera Rubin-based NVL72 rack-scale solution is the only real competitor to Helios and the one it continues to compare itself against.

While its memory claims hold, its GPU FP4 claim might fall short when comparing rack to rack, and many of its calculations are based on peak performance rather than Nvidia's published numbers, making Helios an interesting "win" but one that does encourage potential adopters to look more closely.

A numbers game that continues to grow complex even as AMD ekes out some wins

While AMD claims a 15% win versus Nvidia's Rubin on a per-GPU basis for FP4 compute, its 72-GPU rack-scale solution falls short of Nvidia's published rack-level numbers: 2.9 exaflops versus 3.6. AMD does not specify whether it is counting Nvidia's individual dies or its two-die packages, and the distinction matters: against dies the gap runs in AMD's favor by far more than 15%, while against packages AMD trails.

The two figures also use different formats, AMD's MXFP4 against Nvidia's NVFP4, so they are not measuring identical arithmetic.

This might, however, be indicative of a very real situation that hampers both vendors' headline numbers: real-world FP4 workloads rarely reach hardware peak ratings due to memory movement constraints, scheduling overheads, and software kernel efficiency. AMD conceded as much at its own event, putting measured FP4 throughput at roughly half its peak rating.

Nvidia may sustain more of its peak thanks to its custom Vera CPU, a mature NVLink 6 software stack and a larger pool of what it calls fast memory, 75 TB per rack once 54 TB of LPDDR5X is counted alongside 20.7 TB of HBM4. AMD's 31 TB is all HBM, which is better suited to models that must be held entirely in high-bandwidth memory, and Helios offers higher capacity and bandwidth per accelerator at 432 GB and 23.3 TB/s.

On raw scale-up fabric, the two are level, both delivering 3.6 TB/s per accelerator and 260 TB/s per rack.

Despite this, Helios is an exceptionally strong product on paper, and it may be the first time AMD has produced a credible rack-scale answer to Nvidia since the AI race began. Seventy-two MI455X accelerators, 18 EPYC Venice CPUs, 31 TB of HBM4, UALink over Ethernet inside the rack and Ultra Ethernet out, on an OCP Open Rack Wide chassis with merchant Broadcom switch silicon, is a serious response to a company that had a two-year head start on the form factor.

More importantly, its fabric specifications are publicly available, enabling hyperscalers to build customized variants that meet their requirements. Nvidia's platform offers no equivalent latitude.

AMD frames openness as the platform's central advantage, with Vamsi Boppana, senior vice president of AI at AMD, saying that Helios "brings together leadership compute, high-performance networking and open software in a unified rackscale platform."

The more important question for AMD, however, might be memory supply. Nvidia has had Vera Rubin in full production since Q1 with partner availability this half, while AMD's first Helios deployments are not due until Q4. AMD may be further gated by HBM4 supply, much of which is reported to be already committed to hyperscalers, which could keep its deployment volumes well below Nvidia's this year.

• AMD EPYC 9006 "Venice" offers mammoth 256-core, 512-thread configuration that incorporates up to 1GB of L3 cache and PCI-E 6.0 and 16 DDR5 memory channels under the hood
• It's the first time AMD's EPYC lineup sees high core count CPUs push past the 5GHz barrier
• AMD is claiming a win by stating that its newest EPYC CPU offers the "most agents per watt, per dollar, per rack"

AMD's newly-announced 6th Gen EPYC 9006 "Venice" seems to be a genuine silicon milestone (the first x86 server CPU on a 2nm-class node, up to 256 cores and 512 threads) which sees the company aim to secure its position in the AI data center CPU market.

The launch comes at a time when AMD has caught Intel on the back foot but finds its position threatened in turn by Nvidia's Vera CPU, which it touts as a faster, more efficient alternative to traditional x86 offerings, including AMD's own EPYC lineup.

With a staggered launch in place for the four CPUs AMD showcased at the AAI event, the stack is expected to be fully available to consumers sometime in 2027, even as its beefy 256-core CPU targets a Q4 2026 launch.

A massive upgrade on multiple fronts

AMD's Venice is a serious generational step. It is built on TSMC's N2 process, the foundry's first move from FinFET to gate-all-around nanosheet transistors, and Team Red says the family is the first high-performance computing product in the industry to reach volume production on the node.

AMD's recently announced flagship model, the 256-core, 512-thread EPYC 9996, features its new SP7 socket, offering 16-channel DDR5 memory, PCIe 6.0 support, and boost clocks that push past 5GHz.

This effectively doubles what is currently on offer for AMD's current-gen EPYC CPUs: memory moves to 16 channels of DDR5-8000, or MRDIMM at 12,800 MT/s, for roughly 1.6 TB/s per socket.

AMD goes one step further with the 9006X lineup (expected 2H 2027), which replaces the cores it cuts down on with a much larger L3 cache per core, a design that it touts makes it much better than rivals at workflows including HPC, technical computing, and data-intensive workloads, which benefit from the larger cache (and memory bandwidth) on offer.

“6th Gen AMD EPYC delivers workload-optimized compute for the full spectrum of modern data center needs; from running more agents and feeding GPUs across rack-scale AI infrastructure to powering the business-critical applications and services organizations rely on every day," noted SVP & GM of Compute and Enterprise AI at AMD, Dan McNamara.

AMD argues that the shape of the data center is changing into a three-tier agentic architecture, with each tier creating distinct CPU demand, which results in workflows centering around agent sandbox execution, AI host nodes, and general-purpose servers, all of which its EPYC CPUs are designed to handle.

The EPYC 9006 series also powers AMD's rack-scale Helios, as it aims to take on Nvidia's Vera Rubin NVL72 rack-scale offering with its own solution.

With AMD also offering a more mainstream 9006 SP8 and the EYPC 9006 LP as an AI host node CPU that uses LPDDR memory, it is aiming to capture all ends of the AI data center CPU market and cement its current lead in a segment that is sure to be increasingly competitive in the days to come.

• AMD's MI400 press release publishes exactly one performance figure
• 288 TFLOPS of hardware FP64 on the MI430X, a GPU it positions as its go-to for sovereign AI and HPC
• Unlike the MI455X, which it launched alongside, the MI430X will have researchers and sovereign AI clients waiting longer, with AMD targeting early 2027 for its first shipments

AMD has launched its latest Instinct MI400 series, unveiling two new chips which bring performance gains, larger, faster HBM4 memory, and a continued promise to support its open-source ROCm stack.

While both chips come with 432GB of HBM4 memory, they both have very different use cases: the MI455X is AMD's attempt to dominate AI data centers and run training and inference for frontier models, while the MI430 is positioned as a high-performance compute (HPC) alternative that offers superior precision thanks to it being tuned for superior FP64 performance at a hardware level.

Both GPUs are based on AMD's CNDA 5 architecture, but the MI430X offers FP64 performance that dwarfs both the MI455X and Nvidia's Rubin-based offerings.

Frontier AI demand comes first

The launch, which was effectively on paper, still showcased where AMD's focus lies: the Instinct MI455X. There is a simple reason for that: AI data centers prioritize faster FP4 and FP8 performance for most tasks, such as inference, and the MI455X delivers on that front.

AMD is simply responding to market demand by aiming to ship the MI455X first, even as it has sovereign AI buyers lining up, both directly and indirectly, including the U.S. Department of Energy, Oracle, and even the UK government, to name a few.

AMD stated that the MI455X delivers up to 34 times the token throughput of the MI355X at 18 times lower cost, showcasing a significant performance and efficiency upgrade. It is also arguably AMD's most heavily drummed-up release to date, even as it continues to play catch-up to Nvidia's market dominance in the AI data center space.

The MI455X ships with the recently announced Helios, AMD's first rack-scale AI system that launched alongside the new Instinct chips. One of these has 72 MI455X GPUs and 18 sixth-gen EPYC server CPUs, configured in a 1:6 ratio per compute node.

The MI430X, on the other hand, seems to be competing specifically to score buyers who require higher precision, such as science researchers or even government departments where correctness is required at the edges, and memory limitations apply even with the MI series accelerator's 432GB of HMB4 in play.

“The next generation of AI will span frontier AI, sovereign AI and scientific computing, and each requires infrastructure optimized for its unique demands," said Vamsi Boppana, SVP AI at AMD.

"The AMD Instinct MI400 Series extends our AI portfolio with purpose-built solutions optimized for the full spectrum of AI and HPC deployments, built on an open software foundation that gives customers the flexibility to innovate at every scale.”

AMD also has an important buyer for the MI455X in its Helios rack-scale form that will also grant it further exposure to it pre-IPO: Anthropic. The company has agreed to invest $5 billion in the AI giant, with the latter agreeing to deploy 2 GW of AMD's MI450 accelerators, even though its AI head wasn't exactly enthused recently by a perceived drop in performance on Claude Code in early 2026.

• Nvidia's Olympus core architecture prioritizes single-thread IPC over frequency, using a 10-wide decode front end, deep out-of-order mid-core, and a graph prefetcher tuned for agentic AI's branch-heavy, pointer-heavy workloads
• Vera trades chiplet-style core density for a monolithic 88-core die and single-NUMA-per-socket design, a deliberate bet on agentic AI workloads that Nvidia's own engineers admit comes at the expense of legacy workload performance
• Self-reported SPEC CPU 2026 results by Nvidia paint a per-core advantage figure of anywhere between 70% and 80% versus AMD's EPYC 9755 server CPU

Nvidia's Vera CPU has a lot to prove, representing the company's first real attempt at the AI server CPU market, where traditional vendors Intel and AMD, along with third-party Arm-based providers, are all gunning for a piece of an increasingly lucrative data center pie.

To that end, Nvidia has published its most detailed technical account yet of the chip, promising substantial performance gains over the competition. Vera is the company's first server processor built around a fully in-house core design, a departure from the stock Arm cores that powered its Grace predecessor.

As Vera heads toward general availability in the second half of 2026, Nvidia is making its case on a specific front: not raw core count, but sustained per-core performance under load, the metric it argues matters most for agentic AI.

What's actually under the hood of Nvidia's Vera CPU?

At the core of every Vera CPU is Olympus, Nvidia's first custom server core, built to the Armv9.2 instruction set but designed in-house rather than derived from Arm's stock Neoverse designs, as its predecessor, Grace, was.

Nvidia's second-generation data center CPU is a completely reworked design built around a single goal: to lead in agentic workload performance.

Rather than following Intel and AMD down the chiplet route, Nvidia packs all 88 cores (176 threads) onto a single monolithic die, with a dual-socket configuration delivering 176 cores and 352 threads in one system.

Nvidia has detailed the core design extensively, and several publications have since dug into the microarchitecture. The front end runs a 10-wide decode engine paired with a neural branch predictor that can resolve up to two taken branches per cycle, designed to handle the large instruction footprints and irregular control flow of interpreters, compilers, and agent runtimes.

The mid core combines a wide rename-and-allocation engine with a large reorder buffer and dependency-breaking techniques including memory renaming and value prediction.

The execution engine schedules dynamically across integer, vector, floating-point, cryptographic, load, and store resources, while the cache subsystem adds a graph prefetcher targeting the pointer-chasing access patterns that defeat conventional streaming prefetchers.

That design has not gone unanswered. AMD has countered with estimated figures for its 256-core Zen 6 "Venice" part, claiming a 3.3x rack-level advantage over Vera, though those numbers are extrapolated rather than measured.

AMD responding first isn't surprising. Within x86, it continues taking ground from Intel, reaching 33.2% of x86 server CPU shipments in Q1 2026 per Mercury Research, up from 27.2% a year prior.

With Arm reporting that its architecture now accounts for roughly 50% of CPU compute among top hyperscalers, competition is building from several directions at once. Vera may well set a new bar for agentic AI.

Intel is one of the most ubiquitous companies in the world, let alone the technology industry, with its technologies powering many of the computers most people have used for generations. Central to its success was a philosophy from its former CEO Andy Grove, who was a part of the company from day one and ran it from 1987 to 1998.

Inside Intel

Andy Grove was setting out the foundational theme for his management book 'Only the Paranoid Survive', which he wrote toward the latter years as CEO of Intel.

Grove, who is widely recognised as one of the most successful tech executives of the late 20th century, advocated strongly for putting paranoia at the heart of business. Worrying about various risks that can affect your business — from new competitors to macroeconomic shocks — means you can prepare for them.

But what's worse, as he described it, are 'strategic inflection points' that signal a massive shift in fundamentals that could either lead to staggering growth or a grave decline by an order of magnitude. It's fair to say, in the years since he left Intel, that the company has endured its ups and downs, putting it mildly.

Sliding doors

Although Intel enjoyed incredible success in the 20th century and into the early 2000s, the company stuttered in recent years with rival chipmakers including Nvidia and AMD gaining ground and eating into its market share.

Ironically, from the outside, it appears that the company had succumbed to the sort of complacency that its former CEO had been warning against.

That said, the company is in the midst of a remarkable comeback under the leadership of new CEO Lip-Bu Tan, who has overseen a dramatic surge in the company's stock price that underlines its improved overall outlook as well as new ventures to support the AI buildout.

• AMD's Versal Premium Gen 2 Memory on Package launch formally ends HBM in its adaptive SoC lineup
• The move represents a ~65% bandwidth cut from the discontinued Versal HBM's 840 GB/s, clocking in at just 288 GB/s
• AMD is painting this as a win, citing better availability, a smaller form factor, efficiency wins, and guaranteed memory supply for the next 15 years

The AI boom may have just eaten AMD's own lunch, thanks to an HBM shortage that forced it to resort to lower-bandwidth LPDDR5x for its Versal Premium Gen 2 Memory on Package offerings.

AMD recently announced the Versal Premium Gen 2 Memory-on-Package family, which leverages up to 32GB of LPDDR5x memory directly onto the chip package.

The move, which effectively cuts bandwidth by 65% compared with previous-generation Versal offerings that use HBM, is seen by many as the need of the hour as memory supplies dwindle amid overwhelming demand.

A needs-based move to lower-bandwidth memory

AMD's move is calculated, even if it comes at a significant performance cost to the chip designer. HBM memory supply is strained, and even within AMD's own lineup, its more profitable (and more demanding) Instinct datacenter GPUs have priority for HBMs' current and future iterations.

AMD is therefore both a beneficiary and a casualty of the same AI demand wave that creates opportunities on one end but constrains supply for other segments, such as its consumer-grade hardware, gaming, and SoC divisions.

AMD's Versal lineup stems from Xilinx, which it acquired in 2022. Xilinx shipped its first on-package memory FPGAs, the Virtex UltraScale+ HBM parts, in 2018 with up to 16 GB of first-generation HBM. The follow-up Versal HBM series, a variant of the Versal Premium line, supported up to 32 GB of HBM2e with 840 GB/s bandwidth.

The problem for AMD isn't just sourcing supply for its new Versal FPGAs, something it calls an Adaptive SoC (System-on-Chip), but the fact that these are extremely long-tail products. In other words, support, dedicated supply, and accessories must remain available to consumers for a long time if they are to embrace and continue working with a particular FPGA class, which complicates matters.

AMD discontinued its last-generation Versal lineup in September 2025, citing HBM2E supply constraints rather than any issues with the chips themselves, and offered no alternatives to customers, stating only that "final orders (LTB) for Adaptive SoC parts will be accepted until June 30, 2026, subject to material availability."

The new Versal lineup effectively addresses this gap, stating that it has a 15-year lifecycle and citing "memory longevity" as the reason for its pivot to LPDDR5X.

AMD's move does bring it some other advantages despite the obvious bandwidth chokepoint: LPDDR5X has better availability than HBM for the foreseeable future, and it also operates at industrial temperatures, whereas HBM tends to be stacked in ways that require advanced cooling. Not only does LPDDR5X run cooler, often passively so in most configurations, but thanks to sporting only 4 memory chips onboard, it is over 60% smaller than comparable FPGAs.

The newer FPGAs will be considerably cheaper to manufacture than their HBM alternatives in current market conditions, and with Chinese memory suppliers such as CXMT also eyeing the same market, Versal Gen 2 might be the long-stay that its predecessor was initially intended to be in a rapidly changing market.

• AMD is reportedly preparing a 10% price hike on graphics memory kits for Radeon GPUs
• This means retailers could increase prices of Radeon GPUs from the likes of Sapphire or Asus
• This case is yet another example of just how hard the RAM crisis is hitting the PC market

Gaming is becoming an expensive hobby for both console and PC gamers, and it's all because of the ongoing RAM crisis. Unfortunately, another manufacturer's GPU components may be the next victim of price hikes.

As reported by VideoCardz, AMD is planning a 10% price increase on graphics memory kits for its Radeon GPUs this July, according to a new post on a Board Channels forum. This means that AMD's AIB partners, such as Sapphire and Asus, will pay more for components, which might result in higher retail prices for Radeon GPUs.

The Board Channels post states that these price hikes are a result of 'tight global supply of graphics memory chips,' including the noticeable trend of 'continuously rising market prices'.

Of course, there's no confirmation from AMD on the matter just yet, but if true, it doesn't help AMD's position in the GPU market up against its fierce rival, Nvidia. Frankly, both are in a tough spot due to higher memory costs across the board, which is well established for effectively every PC manufacturer at this stage in 2026.

While most of Team Green's RTX GPUs are fairly expensive for consumers, the advantage of better upscaling technologies and raw performance when using ray tracing in games makes them more appealing, in comparison to newer Radeon GPUs.

While we await confirmation from AMD, consumers should start buying new hardware now. Both AMD and Nvidia GPUs are still expensive across several retailers, and it's a tough spot for any gamer to be in when searching for an upgrade.

However, if you don't own a gaming PC at all, it's worth keeping an eye out for several deals — and fortunately, Best Buy's 4th of July sale is already underway, and this iBuyPower Slate Intel Arc B570 gaming PC is only $899.99 on sale.

It also comes with 16GB of DDR5 RAM (which would be expensive to buy separately), and most importantly, it's using a GPU that's perfectly capable of great gaming performance at 1080p and 1440p resolutions.

When acknowledging the messy state of the PC hardware market and the prospect of more price hikes, it's hard to ignore a deal such as this, especially when Intel's XeSS upscaling has improved over the last few years — so if it were me, I wouldn't hesitate to purchase.

GMKtec EVO-T2: 30-second review

Mini PCs rarely arrive with fanfare. The GMKtec EVO-T2 is an exception. It debuted at CES 2026 with Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan visiting the booth, testing the unit in person and signing a prototype. His signature wasn’t on my test version, and you can imagine my disappointment.

That kind of endorsement is unusual for a compact desktop from a Chinese OEM, and it signals something real. This is not a routine refresh.

At its core sits Intel's newest Panther Lake architecture. The Core Ultra X7 358H is built on Intel's own 18A process node, making the EVO-T2 one of the first consumer products to ship that fabrication technology at volume. The question every reviewer has to answer is whether the real-world performance justifies a price tag that sits above £1,500 for the standard retail configuration.

The review unit supplied by GMKtec uses the Core Ultra X7 358H with 64GB of LPDDR5X RAM and a 1TB NVMe SSD, but some SKUs offer the Core Ultra X9 388H for those willing to pay extra.

What GMKtec has here is cutting-edge Intel technology that’s ideal for power users, AI LLM fans, and creatives, all in a remarkably compact package that doesn’t cost a fortune.

With so few brands offering products with Panther Lake silicon, this is easily one of the best Mini PC machines available today.

GMKtec EVO-T2: Price and availability

• How much does it cost? $1899/£1521/€1,700
• When is it out? Available now
• Where can you get it? Currently, this machine can be obtained directly from GMKtec

The GMKtec EVO-T2 is available direct from the GMKtec US and GMKtec UK websites. I'm also seeing a configuration on Amazon.com.

There appears to be plenty of confusion about the pricing of these products on the GMKtec website, and pricing on Amazon seems only to compound things.

The USA pricing for the X7 is $1,899 for the standard model, but oddly $3,299.99 for the 853GB model. That second price is obviously a mistake, and I’d assume that’s the dollar pricing for the X9 version.

What I can say with some certainty is that on the GMKtec UK website, there are four SKUs: two X7 and two X9 models. And, the X7 358H design with 64GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, as per my review, the hardware is £1,520.99.

There is another X7 version with an 853GB drive, which I’m going to assume is a special partition for running LLMs, and it sells for £1,629. There are two corresponding X9 388H models, which are both priced at £2999.99, curiously. That seems like a ridiculous markup for only a few hundred MHz extra across a couple of clock settings, but that’s what they’re asking.

As a slight sweetener, UK customers are being offered a code that gets them a further £60 off at the time of writing.

European prices are €1.699,99 for the X7, with no X9 stock currently available.

Comparing these prices to anything else is a fraught exercise, since this is the first Mini PC to use this platform, even if Asus has a new NUC 16 Pro planned that uses this chip. And, Minisforum has a new AI X1 Pro model in the pipeline that uses an advanced AMD chip using its Gorgon Point core.

What I might point out is that the GMKtec EVO-T1, which uses the Arrow Lake Core Ultra 9 285H, is only $1,279.99 with 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, but it can also be bought barebones with no memory or storage for close to $900.

From a performance perspective, the GMKtec EVO-X2 Ryzen AI Max+ 395 is more powerful, and that, with 64GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, is only another $100 more.

On that basis, the EVO-X2 seems to be a better value than the EVO-T2. And, GMKtec offers a 128GB version of the EVO-X2, for those wishing to blow $3,299.99 on one.

The big issue here is patently the cost of memory, and these platforms all need the faster soldered modules that are currently 400% more than they were only months ago.

I’ve given this a score of 4 out of 5 since you can’t get this hardware anywhere else at this time, and when Asus and Minisforum do come to market, they’re unlikely to undercut GMKtec's price.

• Value: 4 / 5

GMKtec EVO-T2: Specs

GMKtec EVO-T2: Design

• Same enclosure as EVO-T1
• Easy internal access
• No memory upgrades

The case of the EVO-T2 is oddly familiar, as it seems relatively unchanged from the EVO-T1 that I reviewed in August of 2025.

The EVO-T2 continues GMKtec's established squared, compact form factor. The chassis uses a precision surface finish and houses what GMKtec calls its Ice Storm 3.0 cooling system, an active solution with a visible RGB fan. It sits comfortably on a desk or mounts via VESA behind a monitor.

Port placement is well considered. The front panel carries the USB4 port with 100W Power Delivery alongside two USB-A 3.2 connections and one USB-A 2.0. These are the ports users reach for most often, and they are exactly where they should be. The rear houses the second USB4, dual HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 1.4, dual Ethernet, the OCuLink port and the audio jack.

That rear panel is dense. It rewards deliberate cable planning rather than improvisation. Quad 4K display support is a genuine differentiator at this size. Creative professionals and multi-monitor users will appreciate having that headroom without needing an external dock.

This hints that the EVO-T2's connectivity specification is exceptional for the category.

Dual Ethernet with 2.5GbE and 10GbE ports on a machine this small opens it to homelab, network-attached storage and professional networking roles that most mini PCs cannot fill. The 10GbE port alone makes this worth serious consideration for anyone who moves large files regularly.

Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 cover wireless needs for the foreseeable future. The front-panel USB4 port carries 40Gbps bandwidth and supports Power Delivery at 100W, which is genuinely practical for desk setups where the EVO-T2 acts as a hub. DisplayPort Alt Mode via USB4 adds display flexibility beyond the two HDMI outputs and the dedicated DisplayPort at the rear.

The OCuLink Gen4x4 port provides a direct PCIe pathway to external GPU enclosures without the bandwidth constraints of USB4. For users who plan to add a discrete GPU later or need GPU-accelerated compute for specific workloads, this is a meaningful long-term expansion option, though not all systems include it.

Internal access requires removing the feet and then four screws. It’s not difficult, but it might have been easier. Inside, you can access the three M.2 slot positions, two already being occupied by the Wi-Fi 7 adapter and the 1TB NVMe drive. One oddity about the two M.2 slots allocated for storage is that the one GMKtec filled with the supplied Gen4 drive is the PCIe 5.0 slot, leaving the PCIe 4.0 slot free. That seems silly, but this isn’t the only mini PC maker doing these things.

For testing, I moved the provided drive to the Gen4 slot and put a Gen5 drive in a slot where it works best. And, if anyone buys one of these, I’d recommend doing that and cloning the drive to the Gen5 module. I’d also suggest you get a Gen5 drive with a heatsink or add one before installation.

There are no memory upgrade options, because all the memory here is soldered to the mainboard.

• Design: 4 / 5

GMKtec EVO-T2: Features

• Intel Core Ultra X7 358H
• Soldered memory
• 180 TOPS AI

Panther Lake is easily Intel's most architecturally interesting mobile platform in years. The Core Ultra X7 358H uses a chiplet design built across three separate tiles. The compute tile is manufactured on Intel's 18A process and incorporates RibbonFET gate-all-around transistors alongside backside power delivery using PowerVia technology. Intel states this reduces voltage drop by around 30 per cent and improves transistor density over the prior generation.

I have a not-unreasonable feeling that this was what the 100 series was meant to be from the outset, and not what actually arrived.

The processor carries 16 cores across three tiers. Four Cougar Cove performance cores handle peak single-threaded workloads and boost to 4.8 GHz. Eight Darkmont efficiency cores manage sustained parallel tasks. Four low-power efficiency cores handle background activity.

It is a sensibly layered approach, and the trickle-down from mobile laptop silicon means the EVO-T2 benefits from extensive driver and platform maturity work done for notebook OEMs.

The gap between the X7 358H and the flagship X9 388H is modest in practice. The 388H adds 0.3 GHz of peak boost. For most productivity and AI workloads, the difference will be within the margin of thermal variation. The X7 is the right choice for a machine where value matters.

The soldered RAM configuration is the most significant design decision to understand before purchasing. Retail units ship with 64GB of LPDDR5X-8533. The review unit carries 16GB. Neither configuration can be upgraded after purchase. Buyers who anticipate needing more capacity should look at the GMKtec EVO-X2, which uses AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 with up to 128GB of unified memory.

Soldered LPDDR5X enables the higher bandwidth speeds that integrated graphics depend on heavily. The Arc B390 needs fast, wide memory access to perform at its best. The trade-off is permanent capacity. For most professional workflows and AI tasks at the 64GB retail tier, the ceiling should be workable for several years.

Storage is considerably more flexible. The primary M.2 slot runs PCIe 5.0, offering sequential read speeds above 10 GB/s with compatible drives. The secondary slot is PCIe 4.0, still capable of strong throughput for a second drive or overflow storage. Combined capacity can reach 16TB, which opens the machine to NAS-adjacent roles that most mini PCs cannot consider.

GMKtec's headline claim is 180 TOPS of combined AI performance across the CPU, GPU and NPU. The NPU alone contributes 50 TOPS, which represents a meaningful step up from prior Intel generations. The remaining compute performance is divided between the Arc B390 and the CPU cores themselves.

The 180 TOPS figure is a heterogeneous combined total. Real-world AI workload distribution depends heavily on the framework and the model. Not all applications can efficiently split inference across three compute blocks simultaneously. The NPU handles fixed-function acceleration well. More general local inference typically leans more on the GPU or CPU, depending on quantisation level and context window size.

The aiDAPTIV+ AI SSD technology developed with Phison is worth mentioning. It extends available memory by intelligently paging model data between DRAM and NVMe storage. GMKtec claims this allows the EVO-T2 to run models with up to 70 billion parameters locally. For a machine with 64GB of RAM, that is an extraordinary claim. The paging mechanism will introduce latency penalties for data not resident in DRAM, and the practical throughput impact under sustained inference loads has not been verified by me, since I don’t have an aiDAPTIV+ AI SSD.

One thing that did make me wonder about the design of the EVO-T2 was that GMKtec claims that the USB4 port on the front can push out 100W for recharging a laptop. As the PSU is only rated at 148.2W and the system could take 60W, there appears to be a voltage shortfall in that calculation.

Overall, the X7 358H is a dramatic uplift from the 200 series chips that came before it, although AMD has such a significant lead with its Ryzen AI 395 series that it's perhaps too much to ask in one generational change.

• Features: 4.5 / 5

GMKtec NucBox EVO-T2: Performance

Normally, I compare AMD and Intel Mini PCs against their ilk. But as this is a flagship design of a new silicon generation, and the best Intel has to offer, I thought it would be useful to compare it to the top-of-the-line AMD platform.

For those who like the fine details, the EVO-T2 was set into ‘Performance’ mode in the BIOS, rather than balanced or silent. According to GMKtec, there should be a mode above this that consumes 80W, but it was missing from my BIOS. Therefore, it might be possible to get even more out of the EVO-T2, and the BIOS certainly has plenty of features for overclocking some aspects.

The Arc B390 GPU is the headline graphics story in Panther Lake. It uses twelve Xe3 cores built on TSMC's N3E process and clocks up to 2.5 GHz. Intel positions it as delivering 76 per cent more performance than the Arc 140T from the previous Arrow Lake generation and 82 per cent more than AMD's Radeon 890M found in Ryzen AI HX 370 platforms. As usual, Intel ignores the Radeon 8060S in the Ryzen AI 395 Max, which is its true competitor.

And, as the results show, B390 might make Arc 140T and Radeon 890M look poor, but it still can’t run with the Radeon 8060S, not even close.

Obviously, you could use the OcuLink port to add a discrete GPU, but that’s the only way that the EVO-T2 would compete with a Bosgame M5 AI.

And, while all those extra cores in the Intel Core Ultra X7 358H CPU do boost the multi-processing considerably, it still falls short of the AMD Ryzen AI 395 Max.

It did well in the PCMark score, and it also had a better SSD than the Bosgame machine. I inserted a Crucial P510 Gen5 drive into this hardware, and it delivered 10,587MB/s reads and 8,977MB/s writes in the Gen5 M.2 slot, so it could be dramatically better with a small investment.

Overall, Intel is moving in the right direction, but AMD don’t need to worry yet.

• Performance: 4.5 / 5

GMKtec EVO-T2: Final verdict

The EVO-T2 is an impressive piece of equipment that exploits the dramatically better silicon Intel has released with Panther Lake. However, given the modest differences between the X7 358H and the X9 388H, I wouldn’t be rushing to spend the extra on the top model unless money isn't a concern for you.

Where this rig excels is in providing a punchy platform for software development, video editing and running AI LLMs. It would have been nice to have seen Thunderbolt 5 ports on this PC, but the cost of adding this feature appears to be putting mini PC makers off.

At least it has USB4 and an OCuLink port if you want more GPU power.

But the focus here is foremost AI, with GMKtec even deploying a version of OpenClaw to the desktop along with Herdman. While there are free tokens to be had, these are a portal to monthly subscription packages for those who want to fully exploit AI agents.

That seems slightly at odds with the premise of having hardware like the EVO-T2 that can run powerful local AI at no other cost than electricity, and your time to get it trained in your workflows. But agents will always come with extra costs, regardless of where they are launched from.

Getting back to the hardware, this is an exceptional piece of gear that nearly brings Intel back up to AMD’s current level. Although with new AMD hardware soon to launch, this might prove to be a false dawn for them.

What it comes down to here is the price, since all memory and storage costs are artificially inflated.

For those who, for whatever reason, don’t trust AMD, then this is quite clearly the best Intel mini PC technology available, especially for those running local LLMs.

Should you buy a GMKtec EVO-T2?

Buy it if...

Don't buy it if...

Also Consider

For more professional hardware, we've reviewed the best business computers.

• AMD Zen 5-based EPYC 9965 is on sale on eBay for just under $6,000
• With 192 cores and 384 threads in tow, AMD's offering can handle as much as 6TB of RAM per processor for AI-centric workloads
• The CPU not only offers the highest core count in all x86 CPUs to date, but also holds its own against the competition

When AMD unveiled its new EPYC CPUs in June 2024, one particular chip caught everyone's eye, given how outrageously powerful it was compared to the competition.

The AMD EPYC 9965 CPU was also the company's most ambitious server-grade offering to date, and one that has held its own against the competition with relative ease thanks to its yet-unmatched 192-core, 384-thread x86 configuration.

At a suggested MSRP of $14,813 (now $11,988) at launch, it is also one of AMD's most expensive products across the board, with only a few of its server-grade GPUs pushing noticeably higher.

Why the eBay listings are somewhat hard to digest

Despite being unveiled over two years ago, the EPYC 9965 CPU remains largely unchallenged by the competition, thrashing most benchmarks with relative ease. It remains the flagship server chip for AMD-based systems worldwide, with Team Red shipping it globally, including China.

The chip itself is a genuine monster. The EPYC 9965 packs 192 Zen 5c cores and 384 threads onto a single SP5 package, with a 2.25 GHz base, a 3.35 GHz all-core, and a 3.7 GHz maximum boost, 384 MB of L3 cache, twelve channels of DDR5, 128 lanes of PCIe 5.0, and a 500 W default TDP, AMD's highest yet. It is the densest part in AMD's 9005 stack, built for cloud providers aiming to cram the maximum number of virtual machines into a rack.

All in all, it is designed primarily to serve hyperscalers and cloud providers, with a focus on low-power, efficient cores that dominate such setups.

Even at its reduced reference price of just under $12,000, eBay listings selling the same CPU for just under $6,000 seem inexplicable, offering a sub-50% discount over current advertised prices and over 60% off its original launch price.

This is even lower than the last time we tracked this CPU in 2025, but there might be an explanation of sorts for what would otherwise be seen as an anomaly. Most server-grade CPUs trade at prices below MSRP, with OEM and negotiated discounts that quickly add up to significant savings for large-scale deployments.

The other explanation that often applies to older server-grade CPUs that often get cycled out or decommissioned by data centers does not apply here, however; the EPYC 9965 does not have a successor yet, and it is hard to imagine a currently available CPU replacing AMD's most capable chip yet in a data center just yet

Other reasons prices are low could include excessive inventory, canceled orders, or simply someone liquidating hardware in an industry that is increasingly GPU- and memory-focused to meet its AI needs.

Most industry players prefer a direct OEM solution, especially given AMD's support for PSB-locking (secure boot) on their CPUs for certain vendors, which makes them unwilling to purchase from 3rd-party sellers. This also raises the risk profile for buyers, who could unwittingly end up purchasing a vendor-locked CPU, making for a rather annoying testing and return process.

With a shift in spending towards GPUs and memory becoming prohibitively expensive, hardly helping matters, while enterprise consumers are still buying up the EPYC 9965, prices might reflect a market reality: they are unlikely to be scouring eBay for their next 192-core monster CPU purchase, even assuming they have a compatible motherboard and memory modules to match.

• AMD has 'relaunched' three processors that use legacy cores to address demand at the lowest end of its mobile and desktop CPU offerings
• The CPUs range from 2 to 8 cores and leverage its older Zen+ and Zen 2 core technology as the chip designer grapples with memory and storage shortages to serve an increasingly cash-strapped budget segment
• All three processors support Microsoft Windows 11 and leverage cheaper DDR4 memory as manufacturers aims to 'hold the fort' in the face of rising AI demand creating challenges for entry-level PC buyers

AMD's latest Ryzen CPU offering might not be one that most of its performance-centric consumers would appreciate in 2026.

The company is looking to reintroduce three budget-centric mobile CPUs that were last seen over half a decade ago, using legacy Zen+ and Zen 2 cores.

The move comes at a time when assemblers and consumers alike are grappling with increasing chip, memory and storage costs, even as lower-end options continue to grow increasingly limited for price-conscious users.

A Dual-core CPU in 2026?

AMD is reintroducing the Ryzen 3 3100U, Ryzen 5 3501U, and Ryzen 7 4700LE to consumer markets, according to reports. The CPUs offer dual, quad, and octa-core options.

While the Zen 2-based desktop-class Ryzen 7 4700LE has a listed launch date of 25th March 2026, the other two SKUs were launched more recently, in June 2026, according to AMD's own listings.

The Ryzen 3100U and the 3501U both use AMD's legacy Zen+ architecture on a 12nm process node, making them less power-efficient than the 7nm-based Ryzen 7 4700LE.

In an emailed statement to PC World, AMD stated, "The Ryzen 3100U and Ryzen 3501U are additional SKUs based on AMD’s existing Picasso architecture that were developed to support specific OEM requirements in the value segment. These processors are intended to address targeted customer demand for lower-cost solutions and will be available in limited volumes through select OEMs".

As OEM components are made directly available to laptop assemblers, AMD does not disclose prices for these models, even as rival chipmaker Intel seems to be taking a similar route.

What might rankle some users in particular is not the fact that the 3100U and the 3501U are rebadged CPUs that will still lag behind pretty much even the most basic laptop CPUs available in the last few years, but the fact that AMD might be thinking it is acceptable to offer a 2-core, 4-thread CPU in 2026 as a baseline for new, entry-level laptops.

The Ryzen 3 3100U is getting considerable ire, as Redditors are already drawing unfavorable comparisons to current-generation Athlon CPUs. While it offers the same iGPU (Vega 8), TDP (15W), and memory configuration (DDR4-2400), along with the same socket (FP5) as its quad-core sibling, it is noticeably weaker than most, if not all, recently launched mobile CPUs.

Unsurprisingly, it does make the cut for Windows 11 by offering support for fTPM, allowing for secure boot, and just pulling ahead of Microsoft's stated requirements for its OS (1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster with 2 or more cores), even as most users will struggle to do anything but the bare minimum on a laptop sporting a CPU essentially rebadged from 2019.

AMD's move, however, is predicated on the fact that rising RAM, SSD, and cutting-edge silicon prices all create a void that must be addressed for the foreseeable future, even as its target audience seems to be getting an increasingly short end of the stick as part of the solution.

AMD has seen its Instinct GPUs continue to get traction in an increasingly competitive marketplace, as it continues to take data center market share from new and existing players and ekes out wins with gaming-centric CPUs in the consumer market.

Its most recent acquisition of MEXT, an AI-centric startup that currently deploys software that allows users to treat NAND flash as DRAM at an operating system level.

AMD says Santa Clara-based MEXT a "pioneer in AI-driven memory optimization technology".

SSD storage to DRAM for data centers?

The idea that MEXT builds on is hardly a new one, but one that it seems to have refined considerably, making it an important acquisition at a time when hyperscalers continue to struggle with limited DRAM availability, even as an even worse SSD crisis looks to be on the horizon.

MEXT's Predictive Memory is essentially a tiering engine that monitors which memory pages applications tend to access, treating regularly accessed sections as "hot" working sets kept in DRAM while offloading "cold" or less frequently accessed sections to SSDs.

This allows for a far lower performance offset than using all of one's flash memory as DRAM, with the latter being an order of magnitude faster for access, even as speed becomes a driving factor for newer chips that are increasingly memory-bound.

There is also an important economic factor at play here: DRAM is nearly 50 times more expensive than the corresponding NAND flash, making cost and scalability key considerations for most data centers looking to avoid an already expensive DRAM market that is slated to only get worse over time.

The move itself is not AMD's first foray into the storage segment, with its consumer-focused StoreMi offering essentially allowing a faster SSD to work as a cache, making up for slower drives on one's system by essentially creating a copy of files that regularly need to be loaded or accessed on the fastest possible storage solution.

Its lesser-known (and since abandoned) Radeon RAMdisk offering allows users to do the exact opposite of what MEXT is offering: creating a very fast virtual disk on existing system memory. even as enthusiasts have replicated the idea on AMD's ultra-fast 3D V-Cache tech.

AMD's purchase makes sense given how deeply embedded its hardware is expected to be in datacenters over the next decade, and one could argue that MEXT's team, which offers expertise in AI infrastructure and memory systems, could be a much more prized acquisition than the underlying technology it offers.

AI and chip talent have become increasingly difficult to lock in, with companies splurging to attract some of the biggest names in both segments, and MEXT's acquisition could help both AMD's short-term and long-term goals in the data center segment.

• Nvidia is pitching its upcoming Vera CPUs to Chinese clients while advertising availability soon
• Move into data center CPUs pits Nvidia against traditional rivals Intel and AMD, which currently control the bulk of the market in China and other regions
• Nvidia's move comes at a time when the Chinese government continues to advocate for home-grown chip solutions, and the US's chip controls have effectively reduced its share to 0% of a lucrative Chinese data center market

Nvidia is apparently pushing to win Chinese customers for what its CEO regards as the next multi-billion dollar frontier for the company: data center CPUs.

The firm has spent the past two years watching the 2nd-most important chip market in the world effectively cut it out with a mix of consumer-grade chips and homegrown solutions such as Huawei's Ascend offerings, backed by a Chinese government push for self-reliance.

While Chinese officials have held the line with soft barriers - no official restrictions on Nvidia's chip exports to China exist in the mainland - Nvidia is seemingly betting on a reset in relations when it comes to its Vera CPUs for the data center.

Why CPUs and why now for Nvidia?

Nvidia's Vera CPU is more than just another competitor in the market. It threatens to upend the existing status quo, with Intel and AMD chips dominating the market, by adopting an AI-first approach to its design.

Nvidia is presenting Vera as a CPU that is up to 1.8 times faster than current x86 CPUs from Intel and AMD in certain workloads, offers 4 times the memory bandwidth, and delivers up to a 50% increase in performance versus traditional rack-scale CPUs.

According to a Reuters report, at least one major unnamed Chinese cloud company intends to purchase 300 servers, each containing 2 Vera CPUs. The CPUs themselves are estimated to cost upwards of $20,000 before bulk discounts kick in.

However, whether this results in an order remains to be seen. Chinese regulators seem to be making a stronger push for self-sufficiency in their chip sector, prompting many of their AI startups and giants alike to opt for local chip options, such as Huawei's Ascend and T-Head's Hanguang.

Nvidia's salvation however, might come from an unexpected place, as battle lines might be different this time around: the same AI export controls that crushed its Chinese business might work in its favor now.

Not only are CPUs considerably less regulated by US export rules, but the Chinese market is also reeling from a squeeze on server CPUs, with Intel pushing delivery lead times to as much as 6 months in some cases, even as AMD noted that the CPU market remains tight, with demand outstripping supply.

If Nvidia can navigate past the politics and the incumbent x86 architecture's software advantage, as well as the ecosystem built around it, it might carve out an important piece of the lucrative Chinese data center market, even without the CUDA 'stickiness' that makes its GPUs so sought-after in this segment.

Whether that is enough to overturn the obvious advantage that both well-placed chipmakers (Intel and AMD) have in terms of an ecosystem, as well as the edge the domestic champion, Huawei, enjoys in terms of government-level backing, however, remains to be seen.

• AMD has a new marketing campaign criticizing the MacBook Neo
• The main thrust of the argument is that the Neo fails as a gaming laptop
• That's a highly confusing angle to take, seeing as this isn't what MacBooks are about – and especially not the budget-friendly Neo

AMD appears to be getting defensive about its Windows 11 laptops and the threat posed by Apple's MacBook Neo.

Tom's Hardware noticed that AMD has a new marketing campaign that intends to take the Neo down a notch or two, promoting the benefits of Ryzen AI CPUs instead.

AMD insists that: "The competition made compromises. You don't have to." It then adds that: "Everything MacBook Neo leaves out, built in with AMD Ryzen AI processors."

The main thrust of the compromise messaging is that the MacBook Neo isn't up to scratch for gaming. AMD notes that 15 of the top 20 PC games don't run natively on a MacBook Neo, and that you need 'workarounds' (emulation) to play them. The games are picked by Team Red itself, although it's a fair enough selection of esports classics and more modern efforts such as Cyberpunk 2077, Battlefield 6, and Black Ops 7.

It's not just about games, of course, but that's the lead item here. AMD also points out that Windows 11 laptops with its Ryzen AI CPUs can have touchscreens (which the MacBook Neo doesn't), and a better port selection than the MacBook Neo's two USB-C connectors.

AMD then highlights benchmarks of the Ryzen 5 220 against Apple's A18 processor as seen in the Neo, where both laptops have 8GB of RAM, but the Ryzen is up to 57% faster for multitasking, and 38% faster for content creation as measured in Blender and Cinebench, among others.

Analysis: confusion over compromises

This is an odd one, really, because what plenty of confused people on Reddit have been saying – echoing my own first thought – is: "I didn't buy a Mac to play games. That's not really what they're for."

Someone else on that thread agrees: "Ok, but no one is buying a MacBook for gaming, right?"

And a further Redditor observes: "Imagine if 'Macs don't game' is the best you've got, lol. I'd fire my marketing team."

These folks are, of course, quite right. You don't buy a MacBook for gaming, and moreover, you especially don't buy a MacBook Neo for PC games. This isn't just an Apple laptop, but a low-end one with a mobile chip designed entirely around being affordable (for students, mainly) and able to cope with daily computing workloads – and that's all.

Okay, so you might want to do a spot of casual gaming, but the MacBook Neo can cope with that just fine. What you aren't going to be looking to do on a Neo is play the top PC games, not unless you're very misguided, and okay, probably a few people out there do fall into this category.

So why AMD has led with this gaming angle in its Ryzen AI laptop marketing, versus MacBook Neo marketing, really is a head-scratcher. It isn't like the kind of Windows 11 laptops AMD is using as comparisons to the Neo, in a similar price bracket, can run those top PC games all that well, anyway.

Of course, AMD has chosen its 'top games' very carefully, which goes without saying. But still, the Radeon 760M integrated graphics (used in the comparative benchmarking) can't come close to running some of these games with any kind of fluidity, even with low details (at the Full HD resolution in which the testing was conducted).

The same cherry-picking applies to the productivity and creativity benchmarks, and the thing about the MacBook Neo is that, as we've seen at TechRadar, despite only having 8GB of RAM, it runs smoothly and responsively in everyday tasks. That's not something you can always say about a Windows 11 laptop with 8GB of RAM in the same price bracket.

Granted, Microsoft is busy working on making Windows 11 better with lower RAM loadouts, but Apple isn't standing still either, providing quite a performance boost with the recently launched beta of macOS 27.

AMD should've thought more about the positioning of this marketing piece, especially seeing as it's the Neo the company is going after. The truth is that, as far as gaming is concerned, you shouldn't expect much out of any budget-friendly laptop – even if what you get from a Windows 11 machine is obviously a better deal, thanks to the mentioned game compatibility with no need for emulation tricks.

• Researcher Paul found RCE via MITM in AMD’s auto‑updater, but bounty denied
• AMD imposed extended embargo, later changed disclosure rules after criticism
• Security community pushed back, saying new policy discourages transparency and undervalues researchers

A security researcher discovered a remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in an AMD product, but the company allegedly denied him the bug bounty it promised for such findings.

In February 2026, a researcher called Paul discovered a potential RCE flaw via a man-in-the-middle attack (MITM) in AMD’s auto-updated software. He reported it to AMD and published a blog post about his findings.

However, AMD said MITM attacks are not covered by the bounty (despite this being an RCE flaw) and asked the researcher to pull the blog offline, which he did.

Google files a lawsuit

The company asked for a 100-day embargo on breaking the news, since additional tools were allegedly vulnerable as well. That embargo later ended up being 124 days, significantly longer than the usual 90-day window.

In its writeup, Tom's Hardware argues this alone merits reconsideration over denying the $10,000 bounty reserved for such flaws.

AMD addressed the issue by reengineering the download code in the autoupdater, but then another issue arose: the updater was actually broken and unable to update itself.

To make matters worse, after news broke that it denied the researcher the bounty, AMD allegedly updated its bug bounty disclosure rules to extend the non-disclosure requirements to cover bugs deemed out of scope. According to TechSpot, critics “immediately pointed out it appeared to be a direct response to the public criticism rather than a pre-existing policy.”

The same publication also said that the security community “pushed back hard”, since the change effectively “tells future researchers that even if a bug falls outside bounty scope, they cannot immediately disclose it publicly, removing one of the only tools researchers have to pressure companies into taking their findings seriously.”

On Reddit, the community discusses if AMD “values the researchers who bring it critical vulnerabilities”.

• AMD's RX 9070 XT GPU is finally in the Steam hardware survey
• As of May 2026, it's suddenly the most popular AMD GPU
• It has a 1.33% market share, but Nvidia is still way ahead of AMD overall

While Nvidia's current focus certainly isn't on its gaming graphics cards, it still has the desktop GPU market firmly in its grasp — although things might be looking up for rival AMD.

As reported by TweakTown, the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT is suddenly the most popular AMD GPU, according to Valve's latest Steam Hardware Survey. As of May 2026, the 9070 XT has leapt to 1.33% of Steam's market share, placing it above the likes of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4070 Ti (whereas previously the AMD card failed to register at all in the survey).

As always, it's worth noting that Valve's Steam surveys are only a limited perspective on the whole market. Not everyone runs Steam, of course, and the survey is limited to a relatively small slice of gamers on the platform. That said, Valve's survey results are an interesting glimpse into the state of hardware and software popularity.

The RX 9070 XT's popularity shouldn't come as a huge surprise, considering its raw performance capabilities, with the additional benefit of FSR 4 (FSR Redstone) providing solid image quality and performance when upscaling.

What's more surprising is why this GPU wasn't present in Steam's GPU rankings at all before now. TweakTown theorizes that the sudden appearance of the 9070 XT could be down to recent updates to the survey regarding how GPUs are classified, which is one possibility.

Still a one-sided battle

Since the GPU market is still in disarray due to the RAM crisis and its impact on video RAM, both the Radeon RX 9070 XT and 9060 XT (which is also now present among Valve's May survey results) are arguably the most value-packed GPUs available. They're not as cheap as Nvidia's low-end RTX 5000 series GPUs, but these Radeon graphics cards are still affordable and provide much better performance.

Still, it's hard to see Nvidia's GeForce GPUs falling out of favor anytime soon, and they remain clearly dominant in the desktop arena. Team Green's DLSS upscaling technology remains superior to AMD and Intel's equivalents, and it really impresses on the image quality and performance fronts.

Nvidia's RTX 3060 is still leading as the most popular GPU, as it has for years in the Steam survey results, but it's good to see Team Red's latest GPU line-up putting up a fight finally — even if the competition is still very one-sided.

• AMD's David McAfee expects DDR5 RAM prices to 'recover slowly in the future'
• However, the exec added that DDR5 won't return to 'normal' pricing levels for some two years
• Meanwhile chatter from the rumor mill claims Lenovo is going to implement another sizeable round of price hikes with its PCs

An AMD exec has told us that DDR5 RAM pricing isn't likely to normalize until 2028, and in other news, fresh from the memory and wider component crisis, Lenovo seemingly has more price hikes in the works for its PCs.

Let's start with the AMD story. VideoCardz flagged up the interview that 4Gamers conducted at Computex 2026, in which the Taiwanese site spoke with David McAfee, who is VP and general manager of Ryzen CPU and Radeon Graphics.

When questioned on the memory shortage (bearing in mind translation issues with the article), McAfee said he expects prices to 'recover slowly in the future' but that DDR5 RAM won't return to normal pricing levels for about another two years.

VideoCardz also highlighted a post on X from leaker Harukaze5719, which in turn points to a report from Sina Finance in China that tells a separate tale of the Lenovo price hikes.

Obviously, this is just whispers from the rumor mill, but the theory is that Lenovo plans to jack up prices in China by the equivalent of $150 in July. This applies to its PCs and laptops, and, in fact, to every product line Lenovo sells, we're told (though common sense would indicate that cheap peripherals, like a basic Lenovo mouse, won't get a $150 price hike).

While this is a (rumored) move over in Asia, it would clearly make sense that mirroring cost increases in the same order (perhaps even a bit more) would be implemented in other regions.

Analysis: more urgency for laptop buyers?

The AMD exec has essentially thrown his lot in with the forecasters who see the RAM crisis ebbing away during 2028. While that still means it has a fair way to go, this is actually a relatively optimistic prediction compared to some more recent thoughts – notably from Nvidia's CEO. Jensen Huang said the memory crisis will last "quite a few years", suggesting that we may have to be patient until 2029 or 2030 to see the worst of this over. Others have guessed that we'll be sailing rough waters with RAM pricing until 2030, too.

The sad truth is that at this point, if I could have a guaranteed end-in-2028 outcome for these RAM woes (somehow), I'd take that prospect – and run. Of course, there's the question of what McAfee means exactly by returning to 'normal levels', complicated by the fact that this is a translated interview. Broadly speaking, I assume this means that prices will drop back down to more palatable levels relative to now – though I don't see them ever returning to pre-crisis levels, frankly.

It's a bleak old outlook, for sure, although there is some hope in Chinese memory chip makers tackling the RAM shortfall to some extent with increased production from these Asian giants. McAfee alludes to this when mentioning Changxin Memory in China increasing its DDR5 production capacity, but others – notably Huang – seem distinctly unswayed by such arguments.

A lot, of course, could rest on what happens with AI going forward. However, with predictions of increased memory demands one way or another in that sphere – and no remote indication of the AI 'bubble' bursting, or clever tech innovations helping out as much as some folks think they might – I'm not optimistic on the whole.

On top of this, the news from Lenovo is a further blow. If you recall, the computer giant already hiked PC prices earlier this year, and so this is another helping of RAM crisis-related cost rises for laptops and desktops (and other hardware besides, apparently).

As I've been discussing recently, after the Nvidia CEO's recent end-of-decade prediction for the extent of the memory crisis, now really does seem to be the right time to buy a laptop. The news that Lenovo may be about to pull the trigger on yet more substantial PC price rises only puts more urgency into that theory, because this surely won't happen in isolation among PC vendors.

• AMD CEO Dr Lisa Su praises AI capabilities and promise at London Tech Week 2026
• ‘We're here to use technology to solve some of the world's most important problems, to do things we never thought were possible’, she says
• But Su also cautions, “we are still so so early in the process”

AMD CEO Dr Lisa Su has hailed the early progress made by AI in just a few years, but also warned the technology still has some way to reach true usefulness for everyone.

"I love talking about AI, because it has so much capability and promise,” Su told attendees at London Tech Week 2026, “if you look at the last few years there has been so much progress, and we’ve clearly seen AI go from what was research initiatives to something that everybody is using.”

“But what I like to say is that we are still so so early in the process...I think we're early in the research and development phase, as we think about new models and where they’re going, we’re early in AI for science…in terms of what AI can do to really push the frontiers of science, and we’re still very early in what AI can do for enterprise - I can tell you that every month we’re seeing in enterprise, that we’re taking AI from something that we experiment with, to something that actually changes the way we do business.”

"Compute actually equates to intelligence"

Su was speaking at London Tech Week, where she also revealed AMD would be “substantially” increasing its investment in the UK.

The company plans to spend up to £2billion over the next five years, including support across the fields of advanced computing, scientific research and workforce development, as it looks to support what Su called the “incredibly vibrant ecosystem” in the UK.

“Overall, we want to invest in the UK as it's good for business overall for AMD,” she declared.

Elsewhere, Su noted how AMD's goal is, "to build the highest performance chips", and how the company was using AI extensively through our own research and development to achieve this.

“What I’m very passionate about is ensuring that the AI infrastructure is enabling capability that everybody in the world has access to,” she noted, “we’re in this phase where compute is actually the foundation - I like to say compute actually equates to intelligence - and so when I sit in a room with entrepreneurs and dev people, everyone’s like, ‘you know, I’d like more compute’!”

“I think compute is a foundation - but I think what’s important, and what we’re learning, is that there is no one type of compute that will satisfy every AI application - in fact, we need a whole host of compute, whether you’re talking about the latest accelerators, you’re talking about Agentic AI, the CPUs, or general AI infrastructure in terms of networking - that’s what this is about, because you need the entire ecosystem to come together and collaborate across all of those foundational elements - that’s what we really believe at AMD.”

“My view is we're here to use technology to solve some of the world's most important problems, to do things we never thought were possible,” Su added.

“AI is the tool that helps each of us become a better researcher, or a better engineer, or a better entrepreneur…technology is only as useful as the problems we solve.”

“It's an exciting time, but it's important for us to realise it's also an early time.”

Computex 2026 happened this week, and the computing extravaganza brought with it a raft of interesting hardware revelations, questions and commentary. As well as the shiny new gadgets, some of the speeches or interviews given by key players in the tech industry made us all sit up and take notice — and below we've picked out the five most pertinent quotes that tell us about the future of computing.

From Qualcomm's boss through to Nvidia's leather jacket-toting chief, we heard some weighty utterances, and there was no shortage of talk around one particular subject. AI wasn't the only topic mentioned regarding the future of computing, though — thankfully — as you'll see, but there's no denying it was a very prominent subject indeed.

1. "Resistance is futile" (Cristiano Amon, Qualcomm)

No, the Borg didn't turn up at Computex 2026 this year (though sources tell me there's a mysterious cube-shaped booth booked for 2027), but rather it was Cristiano Amon, the chief executive at Qualcomm, who told us that "resistance is futile".

What should we not waste our energy resisting, then? Well, predictably enough it's the inevitable advance of AI, and more specifically, Amon sees the irresistible force that'll pervade our lives as AI agents.

As The Register reported, the Qualcomm CEO believes that in the future, these agents – fancy AI bots that will automate tasks, do things for us, and organize our lives – will have their tendrils everywhere, in all our devices.

From your phone to your earbuds to your smart glasses (if big tech's campaign to make the latter an acceptable gadget succeeds), all of this hardware will feed data of one kind or another to the AI agent.

Amon explained: "The agent isn't tied to the device, it actually moves with the user. It's there with the user, regardless of the device that you have. Once you understand that change, you understand how the whole mobile industry is going to change."

In short, we're all going to turn into walking sensors and cameras, with 6G connectivity enabling all this to be piped back to AI which will gorge itself on this data – all for our benefit, of course. (Ahem – what could possibly go wrong?)

The 'camera' reference isn't mine, by the way, as Amon explicitly stated: "If you have smart glasses, they see what you see, so the connectivity needs to enable a very fast uplink. 6G is going to make all of us into walking cameras in this world."

Don't want your every waking moment, and probably your sleeping moments too, to be shadowed by AI? Hate this idea with every fiber of your being? Well, tough, because Amon explains that this vision of the future – which is seemingly inevitable, as this is where the "resistance is futile" remark was made – can only work by leveraging the power of all our devices.

These sophisticated agents can't be run only in the data center, and so future devices— with ever-more powerful CPUs, and of course NPUs for local AI acceleration — will take the load off with on-device processing in various degrees. And unsurprisingly, Qualcomm's hardware, in various forms, will figure in this dystopian-sounding future of omnipresent surveillance.

2. "Our goal is to deliver unmetered intelligence to every home and every desk with Windows" (Satya Nadella, Microsoft)

Qualcomm's chief exec wasn't the only CEO to be heavily pushing AI, and to no one's surprise, Satya Nadella got in on the act here. As part of Computex 2026 – or GTC 2026 Taipei therein, strictly speaking – Microsoft and Nvidia got together for the big reveal of Team Green's RTX Spark Arm-based 'superchip' which is set to drive the reinvention of the Windows PC, no less.

I'll come on to Nvidia's big quote on this project next, but Microsoft had two telling soundbites for us, one of which was from Nadella, who observed: "Our goal is to deliver unmetered intelligence to every home and every desk with Windows. RTX Spark marks a real breakthrough towards that vision."

Unmetered intelligence refers to AI, and elsewhere, Microsoft's head of Windows, Pavan Davuluri, talked about a new chapter for Windows PCs, and said: "We are building toward a future where Windows provides a unified foundation for AI, from the device in your hands to the infrastructure behind it."

So, while Microsoft has promised to cut back on AI as part of the big drive to fix Windows 11, that may mean that some Copilot options are pared back from various menus – but it absolutely doesn't mean that Microsoft is minimizing AI within the OS. As we see from these quotes, when it comes to AI agents – with agentic AI being something Microsoft has been pushing in a big way of late – Windows is very much being developed with these firmly in mind.

Much like Qualcomm's Amon, Nadella envisions AI being present in every home — and on every desk — thanks to Windows devices. (And again, are you distinctly not stoked about that idea? Well, don't worry, AI will surely be happy to listen to your feedback).

3. "We're really focused on doing something that is just such a big deal, reinventing the PC after 40 years" (Jensen Huang, Nvidia)

Naturally, Nvidia's boss had some weighty quote material to throw around at Computex 2026, and the highlight for me pertained to the Arm-based RTX Spark CPU (as mentioned above).

Huang said: "We're really focused on doing something that is just such a big deal, reinventing the PC after 40 years."

Of course, this is a collaborative venture between Nvidia and Microsoft, who according to the joint press release for the project, want to "reinvent Windows PCs for the age of personal AI".

It is, of course, a big move for Nvidia to launch a new processor for the PC, the gravity of which is reinforced by the kind of changes Microsoft is making to Windows 11 for this chip. We're talking about specific optimizations in Windows 11 for Nvidia RTX Spark, and not small moves either – sizable changes, some of which advance the cause of all Arm CPUs (like Qualcomm's) considerably with the OS. That includes a drive to support more software with Arm-based Windows 11 devices, and even to improve game compatibility (with some notable anti-cheat stumbling blocks being resolved).

As it happens, Huang's above quote actually came as part of a response to a question about whether a gaming handled might be made with the RTX Spark CPU. As PC Gamer reported, the full quote was: "If somebody wants to do it [a gaming handheld], you know, we'll work with them on it. But right now we're really focused on doing something that is just such a big deal, reinventing the PC after 40 years."

So, the idea of a handheld was brushed aside, as what this is all about, really, is that 'reinvention' of the PC around AI.

As Huang further enthused: "Can we help reinvent the PC? And, boy, if you get a chance to reinvent the single most important instrument, the single most important tool of humanity, what you and I grew up with defined just about everything about our lives, and we have an opportunity after 40 years to go reinvent it for the age of AI. Wow, we're not going to sit around, not let it get done."

When you put this together with Nadella's comment, and Amon's vision of the AI-centric future, there was a clear vibe at Computex 2026: agentic AI is coming, and you might as well accept this now.

Of course, more than most, Huang has a vested interest in promoting this line of thinking. Nvidia's done quite well out of AI so far, I believe.

4. "We know the pressures that are there in building systems aren't going away anytime soon" (David McAfee, AMD)

Not everything about the future of computing at Computex 2026 revolved around AI, of course, and there was some commentary on the dire situation around PC component price hikes — and what might be done about that going forward.

When questioned about why AMD had just released a last-gen 3D V-Cache processor as an alternative budget offering — as a reaction to rising PC build costs — rather than a current-gen Zen 5 model, AMD's VP and general manager of Ryzen CPU and Radeon Graphics, David McAfee, had something pertinent to say.

McAfee teased: "I think as we go through the rest of this year, I mean we're always looking for ways to, you know, create as many options as we can, and that [Zen 5 X3D CPU] may become… maybe something that we look at doing as a runway product later this year, simply because you know we know the pressures that are there in building systems aren't going away anytime soon."

So, we may see a Ryzen 5 9600X3D CPU (or similar) emerge as an affordable engine for a gaming rig later this year.

More broadly, this is a signal that AMD is actively thinking about how to help ease the demands that price hikes on RAM, storage, CPUs and GPUs (and more besides) are exerting on the wallets of consumers. Although it also serves as a depressing acknowledgement that pricing woes aren't going away for quite some time yet.

It was also good to see AMD underline its commitment to the AM5 chipset with support guaranteed through to 2029 at Computex, for those who aren't planning on building a new PC anytime soon. Waiting out the worst of the pricing crisis may well be the best approach, frankly, if that's a viable option in your circumstances.

5. "Longer term, I think something has to give, right? The over-inflation, we will have to keep an eye out" (Nish Neelalojanan, Intel)

Like AMD, Intel also had thoughts on the current PC component pricing nastiness which it shared at Computex 2026.

Specifically, in a chat with Tom's Hardware, Intel's Nish Neelalojanan, who is senior director of product management for client computing, said of the RAM supply crisis and spiking costs: "Longer term, I think something has to give, right? The over-inflation, we will have to keep an eye out."

Neelalojanan elaborated on this, noting that Intel was adapting its strategy to help frustrated consumers in terms of maintaining support for last-gen (DDR4) memory and older (more affordable) CPUs. The exec noted: "We do have products that support DDR4 on both desktop and mobile. Raptor Lake [13th-gen CPUs that first emerged in 2022], we're not end-of-life-ing any of them; they're there. We'll continue to make sure that there are products which can take care of older memory technologies if they're available and cheap."

With laptops, Neelalojanan pointed to Intel's new Wildcat Lake mobile silicon, of which the exec promised "we are validating lower configs", meaning lower-end notebooks starting at 8GB RAM.

Neelalojanan said: "Wildcat Lake is a single-channel product, so there are products which can leverage low memory and give reasonably good performance."

This range of mobile silicon does indeed seem like a promising addition for more affordable laptops, and so it's not all bleak news for the future of PCs in terms of the undoubtedly painful price hikes we've all sadly become accustomed to.

• AMD's David McAfee has hinted that a Ryzen 5 9600X3D could be in the cards for later this year
• This follows the launch of the Ryzen 7 7700X3D as a response to pricing pressures
• McAfee said that "we know the pressures that are there in building systems aren't going away anytime soon"

AMD appears to be considering making a new addition to the family of current-gen Zen 5 CPUs in the form of a wallet-friendly 3D V-Cache (X3D) processor.

Tom's Hardware spoke to AMD's VP and general manager of Ryzen CPU and Radeon Graphics, David McAfee, at Computex, and questioned the exec on why the company decided to release a past-gen X3D chip rather than one from the Zen 5 (Ryzen 9000) range.

The backdrop here is the launch of the Ryzen 7 7700X3D, which has just happened, and Tom's is essentially wondering why Team Red didn't go for a Ryzen 5 9600X3D.

McAfee responded that the launch of such a contemporary CPU "may be something that we look at doing… later this year."

The exec elaborated: "I think as we go through the rest of this year, I mean we're always looking for ways to, you know, create as many options as we can, and that may become… maybe something that we look at doing as a runway product later this year, simply because you know we know the pressures that are there in building systems aren't going away anytime soon."

Analysis: under pressure

Obviously this is far from a confirmation that AMD will produce a new budget X3D chip for Zen 5, but the admission that it's possible the CPU maker could start rolling such a product off the assembly lines is a hopeful nugget that Team Red is still looking to further ease the pressure on PC builders.

Right now, building a new computer is a depressing task consisting of shopping for various components, most of which have had substantial price increases applied. (And the price hikes for certain parts, notably RAM and storage, are positively astronomical in some cases). A wider choice of more affordable processors obviously won't hurt for those carrying out a DIY build, and for that matter, it'll help with pre-built computers too, as another option for PC makers looking at building cheaper gaming rigs.

Of course, McAfee's comments don't come without an element of concern, namely the casual acknowledgement that "we know the pressures that are there in building systems aren't going away anytime soon". In other words, don't expect PC component pricing pressures to ease for quite some time, and that's a prediction that has been widely made elsewhere. Most notably in recent times by the major RAM chip manufacturers – with one especially bleak forecast.

Indeed, AMD's CEO, Lisa Su, recently predicted that demand is going to wane on the consumer and gaming side for Team Red due to "higher memory and component costs" in the second half of 2026. Adding to that is further uncertainty around the global shipping situation, as continued disruption in the Strait of Hormuz is now affecting the RAM supply chain in other ways.

All in all, it's not a pretty picture, and we'll take what relief we can in terms of the prospect of more affordable components.

• AMD has announced it will be supporting Socket AM5 for CPUs through 2029
• It's following in the same footsteps of its decade-long support for Socket AM4
• The AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D has also returned for the AM4 socket platform

AMD has consistently supported its Socket AM4 for CPUs over the last decade, with new additions to its Ryzen CPU lineup — and, fortunately, its current CPU socket platform is receiving the same treatment.

Announced at Computex 2026, AMD is set to extend its support of the Socket AM5 platform through 2029, after the launch of the new Ryzen 7 7700X3D processor. This comes after Team Red has offered a decade of support for AM4, as the manufacturer adheres to longevity.

It's also worth noting that the popular AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D has returned as a '10-Year AMD AM4 Anniversary Edition', serving as AMD's way of celebrating its lengthy AM4 support — and frankly, it's one of the best gaming CPUs available, and the best AM4 gaming CPU.

"For gamers, the support extension represents more time to build, upgrade, and improve a system around the same platform," AMD says in its blog post.

"A longer platform roadmap can reduce the need for full system replacements and gives PC builders more confidence when choosing AMD Ryzen processors, AM5 motherboards, and compatible memory."

Both announcements are great news for AM4 and AM5 CPU users; not only is AM5 confirmed to have at least three more years of support, but it's highly likely we'll see irregular cases of new CPUs launch for Socket AM4.

The latter means PC gamers, like myself, using AM4 motherboards can continue doing so comfortably, especially since AMD's AM6 platform doesn't seem to be launching any time soon — and it's probably better if it doesn't release for another few years, at least until this RAM crisis disappears.