The Wall Street Journal marvelled at AMD's "game-changing deal" this week with OpenAI, calling it "the culmination of an extraordinary, decade-long turnaround effort, solidifying AMD's status as Nvidia's most legitimate competitor." Shortly after taking charge of the company in 2014, [CEO] Su implemented a systematic plan to eat Intel's lunch, which she accomplished by going after Intel's main product lines while it was bogged down by manufacturing problems. Now, Su has set her sights on Nvidia, the $4.5 trillion chips behemoth led by her cousin, Jensen Huang. Some analysts believe that if Su can sign up more big customers for its AI chips, AMD could join the $1 trillion valuation club before too long. "With this, it's natural to ask: Did AMD just say checkmate to Nvidia?" asks the Motley Fool investment site. But their answer seems to be "no"... AMD has increased its push into the AI market over the past few years, launching the AMD Instinct line of accelerators, and in the latest quarter, predicted its MI350 series would drive revenue growth in the second half of the year. Some analysts have said that AMD's innovations position it to compete with Nvidia's Blackwell architecture and chip — released late last year — but Nvidia's commitment to release upgrades on an annual basis could keep it a step ahead when it comes to overall GPU performance and therefore revenue. Big tech companies are looking for the most powerful compute available — and so far, they know they can find that at Nvidia... [AMD's deal this week] is indeed an interesting operation, ensuring the company a major position in this infrastructure scale-up phase. [Nvidia CEO] Huang has said AI infrastructure spending may reach $4 trillion by the end of the decade, and this represents an enormous opportunity for chip designers such as AMD and Nvidia. So, the OpenAI deal is positive for AMD — but I wouldn't say it's negative for Nvidia. This chip giant signed its own deal with OpenAI last month, and it involves the deployment of 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems across data centers... A quick comparison of the two deals: The Nvidia-OpenAI agreement involves more gigawatts, and Nvidia isn't giving up a stake in its business — on top of this, though Nvidia is offering OpenAI funding, this will result in revenue growth as OpenAI returns to Nvidia to order GPUs. This pretty much guarantees that Nvidia will be the chip designer to benefit the most as OpenAI expands — and AMD isn't about to step ahead of the market leader. All of this means that, yes, AMD should score a win thanks to its agreement with OpenAI and this may boost its growth in the market. But the chip designer can't say "checkmate" to its bigger rival as Nvidia is perfectly positioned to maintain its lead over the long term.

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Intel and AMD say the research is not in scope of their threat model because the attack requires physical access to a device.

The post Battering RAM Attack Breaks Intel and AMD Security Tech With $50 Device appeared first on SecurityWeek.

ISSUE 22.36 • 2025-09-08 PUBLIC DEFENDER By Brian Livingston The Intel Corporation, long the world’s largest manufacturer of processors for personal computers, fried investors’ money with a catastrophic loss of $20 billion in the 12 months ending June 2025. Intel’s manufacturing (foundry) division alone lost $8 billion in the same period. Meanwhile, CPUs by Advanced […]

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AMD's X3D-series Ryzen chips have become popular with PC gamers because games in particular happen to benefit disproportionately from the chips' extra 64MB of L3 cache memory. But that extra memory occasionally comes with extra headaches. Not long after they were released earlier this year, some early adopters started having problems with their CPUs, ranging from failure to boot to actual physical scorching and burnout -- the problems were particularly common for users of the 9800X3D processor in ASRock motherboards, and one Reddit thread currently records 157 incidents of failure for that CPU model across various ASRock boards. In an interview with the Korean language website Quasar Zone (via Tom's Hardware), AMD executives David McAfee and Travis Kirsch acknowledged the problems and pointed to the most likely culprit: motherboard makers who don't follow AMD's recommended specifications. Some manufacturers have historically shipped their AMD and Intel motherboards with elevated default power settings in the interest of squeezing a bit more performance out of the chips -- but those adjustments can also cause problems in some cases, especially for higher-end CPUs.

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ISSUE 22.33 • 2025-08-18 BEN’S WORKSHOP By Ben Myers The expiration of Windows 10 support is nigh. In 2021, Microsoft announced Windows 11. with considerable emphasis on its improved security compared to that of Windows 10. With announcements and promotional material, Redmond targeted government enterprises and large corporations as candidates to buy huge volumes of […]

WINDOWS By Mary Branscombe Graphics drivers remain one of the common sources of instability on Windows PCs. If your screen is glitching or flickering, if it doesn’t seem to turn on when your PC does, if the frame rate in games is unusually low, or if your mouse cursor seems to be freezing up, try […]

ISSUE 22.28 • 2025-07-14 PATCH WATCH By Susan Bradley July’s updates begin the dribble of the Windows 10 ESU offering. Consumers using Windows 10 Home or Professional editions may start to see the system offering the one-year Extended Security Updates (ESU) service after the July updates are applied. To be clear, my simple definition of […]