Space computing

Il nostro redattore dei sistemi ha preso un aereo fino a Taiwan eppure non è riuscito a sfuggire all'intelligenza artificiale

07 giugno 2026

Sintesi redazionale: Ormai ogni fiera è una fiera dedicata all'intelligenza artificiale, e questo vale anche per il Computex di quest'anno. Fonte originale: https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/06/08/our-systems-editor-flew-all-the-way-to-taiwan-and-still-couldnt-get-away-from-ai/5251877

KETTLE El Reg's systems editor Tobias Mann has been in Taipei for the past week getting the skinny on the hottest new chips, and what he's heard has been less about actual hardware announcements and more about how chipmakers are rushing to meet the demands of AI, other customers be damned.Tobias joins host Brandon Vigliarolo to discuss what he noticed at Computex 2026, how AI has taken over yet another industry event, and whether the world is going to have to adjust to new, more expensive hardware that only the biggest datacenter operators and wealthiest consumers are going to be able to afford.Will things stabilize? Will prices return to normal? We're not so sure, to be honest.You can listen to The Kettle by clicking on the player above, as well as on Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube, or read the transcript of the latest episode below. It's been lightly edited for clarity.Brandon (00:01)Fire up the hob, it's time for another episode of The Register’s Kettle Podcast. And we're even more international than usual this week, as our systems editor Tobias Mann has been in Taiwan scoping out this year's Computex conference. If you're curious about what's coming from chip market leaders this year, you've come to the right place. Tobias, it's really good to see you from the other side of the globe.Tobias Mann (00:21)Yeah, a whole twelve hours ahead, right? If I don't have it confused in my head. But it yeah, it's good to be here.Brandon (00:29)Yeah, it's kind of late for you, so we'll try to we'll try to keep this concise so we don't keep you from from some sleep. So I think you filed a number of stories this week about Computex, like quite a few. so talk us through some of the biggest announcements or or news items that have come out of this year's show.Tobias Mann (00:46)Yeah, yeah. It's been a it's been a wild week here in Taiwan and and at least for the first half of it it was sunny and warm rather than the last half, which has been rainy and warm.Brandon (01:00)Well, hopefully that means you've been focusing more on the conference for the second half, right?Tobias Mann (01:05)Well, at least the air conditioning works in the conference center, that's certainly true. We had some we had some interesting announcements, some of which we we we definitely hadn't anticipated.I think the one that everybody had long hoped to see was Nvidia's N1X. This is their kind of Apple silicon competitor, high-end notebook SOC. They're they're finally rolling that out on a Windows platform. And you know, this is something that Nvidia had been rumored to have been working on for for years, but we only started to see inklings of what it could look like last year in some very niche products, and now that silicon is gonna be coming to to notebooks. I think that's the big PC news from Computex. As sad as that might sound, of all the chipmaking stuff we got, that's probably the biggest. Intel had someBrandon (02:01)And that's more like mainly I'm assuming consumer kind of, or are they talking about business notebooks and stuff too?Tobias Mann (02:04)They're spinning it both ways. This is a 20-core CPU with like a 5070 class GPU strapped on to it, with up to 128 gigabytes of unified memory. So this is a very, very high-end chip and it's expected to retail in notebooks that start around three thousand dollars.Brandon (02:18)So we're talking about yeah, high end hardware here. Like you said, it's kind of a Mac an Apple Silicon competitor, so to speak.Tobias Mann (02:33)High end hardware.Right. The funny thing is the chip's not new. So even Nvidia is having to recycle parts to to have something to talk about in the PC sphere. This is a part they announced back at CES in 2025. It was called the GB10, at that time, Grace Blackwell miniaturized super chip.Brandon (02:41)So this is a Blackwell derivative here.Tobias Mann (03:05)Yeah, it initially launched as part of what was originally called Project Digits, and later actually launched to the market as the DGX Spark. This was like an AI development mini PC that we reviewed back in October.Brandon (03:18)I remember when that came out.Tobias Mann (03:22)And so really the silicon is being recycled and what's new is the partnership Nvidia embarked [on] with Microsoft in order to kind of extend Windows support to this platform, and they're working on a bunch of agentic AI integrations into Windows, so maybe Copilot might be worth a damn. It's hard to say.Brandon (03:39)Of of course they are. Yeah. So now is this gonna be, I mean, are these gonna be Microsoft branded machines then? Or is this gonna be something that's available to the to the wider OEM market for PCs?Tobias Mann (03:52)So essentially every major OEM is gonna have some version of this. Whether under the RTX Spark branding. Microsoft will have hardware, they have a Surface product that they're also bringing out with it. But I think that the partnership with Microsoft and Nvidia is largely focused on kind of doing something actually interesting and useful to end users with AI versus, you know, another chatbot, which unfortunately is what most people kind of associate it with with this technology at this point and kind of roll their eyes. Or at least I do anyway.Brandon (04:24)So Microsoft had their – was it Ignite this week?Tobias Mann (04:36)Ignite is later in the year, I think. Build was this week.Brandon (04:42)Right. So at Build this week they announced new autopilots, right? So they're trying to do something useful with that AI, right? Turn it into something that's completely autonomous and always watching everything you do. But that's not what we're here to talk about. I'm sure we could go on about Microsoft and agentic AI being stuffed in everyone's faces for for a while.Tobias Mann (05:02)Right. We we we also got a couple othe announcements this week from Intel that are worth mentioning, at least on the PC side. They had some they had some handheld gaming processors which didn't get a ton of attention, mostly because everything has gotten so much more expensive that it's just kind of like, great, a new thing I can't afford.Brandon (05:25)Right. Yeah, yeah. I mean we'll get to some of the pricing issues a bit a bit later on in the podcast, but that also ties back to, right, the big factor in every trade show right now, and it seems like Computex, based on what I'm reading from what you reported and elsewhere, it was an AI show again this year, right? I mean that's kinda what it seemed like. Everything was being turned toward feeding the great large language model beast.Tobias Mann (05:52)Every conference is an AI conference now. And that includes Computex. Even Nvidia's PC hardware launch was steeped in AI. You just can't escape it. It was, every keynote was AI, AI, AI, whether it was Jensen getting on stage at GTC Taipei because they've gotten too big for Computex, so they have to hold their own conference on the sidelines as well. But everything just came down to artificial intelligence and how it's going to revolutionize the world, and also maybe turn the entire world into a surveillance state if Cristiano Amon has his way.Brandon (06:23)Yeah, what did he say? He was talking about AI agents are going to be inescapable, according to what he said in the story you covered. You were at that keynote, I assume.Tobias Mann (06:55)Yes. That was probably the most dystopian of the keynotes that I caught. And I get the message he's trying to say. He's trying to make the argument that doing AI compute inference in the cloud is just not economically viable. It needs to move down the stack, and that means it needs to move down onto our personal devices, whether that's notebooks and smartphones and, he seems to think we're gonna have AI inference happening in earbuds even.Brandon (07:27)Yeah, I saw that. Glasses, obviously, so that it can watch everything you do.Tobias Mann (07:31)And so I think the creepiest moment in all of it was when he said, basically on the topic of the economics of it all, he said "resistance is futile." It's like this is happening whether you want it or not. But in that same breath starts going on about 6G, because of course this is a you know a big connectivity chipmaker. And how 6G is gonna turn all of us into walking cameras and 6G towers are going to function like radars that let us track everything from bicycles to cars to drones in the sky and…[laughs]Brandon (08:09)Tech leaders always try to spin that as like this thing that's great for data and great for, you know, we're gonna be able to maximize every little thing we do, right? With with for the most efficient XYZ. But it right, they always kind of seem to neglect the fact that I don't think the average person really wants to be tracked by their cell phone towers, even if they don't have a phone. You know, it's it's a little intrusive to put it lightly.Tobias Mann (08:36)I certainly don't want to be tracked. You would think somebody, maybe even Copilot, could have checked over his keynote speech to see if this is it what what is the vibe here? Is it creepy? Yeah, it's kinda creepy.Brandon (08:48)Maybe you should cut this out or rephrase it a little bit.Tobias Mann (08:54)"Resistance is futile." Maybe maybe don't say that part out loud.Brandon (08:57)Yeah, drop the Borg reference, you know? 'Cause I that's a thing, right? Like anyone in this space probably is a Star Trek fan. I know I am. And I mean when you hear "resistance is futile", you immediately think, right, yeah, the the the Star Trek, the Borg, the the thing that assimilates everything and sucks it into the big collective aka big large language model.Tobias Mann (09:14)If you're gonna make a pop culture reference appealing to nerds, don't make it a creepy one.Brandon (09:20)Seriously. And I guess Marvell was also talking about, kind of on the AI front too, ditching copper finally in favor of optical connections. I know they're not the first company to take this up, but Jensen seemed dead sure that this was gonna turn them into a trillion-dollar company.Tobias Mann (09:36)This is one of the more interesting chats, mostly because of the dialogue between Jensen and Matt Murphy, the CEO of Marvell. Marvell is a company that most people probably never heard of before today, or before this week, when Jensen sends its stock prices through the roof, with the next trillion-dollar company claim. but they are a chip development company and IP house that has collected a lot of intellectual property around networking and photonics. ABrandon (10:13)They're fabless, is that correct?Tobias Mann (10:18)Yes. They design and then license out, kind of shake and bake pieces of a larger design. So you might go to them to license a piece of the chip that you don't want to spend resources on, and you just need it to work, so you're gonna spend money on engineers to do the core part that you're interested in, then buy the rest from Marvell. Broadcom also operates in this space.But we're in an interesting place where the speeds that these networks need to operate for the the AI infrastructure to work efficiently keep doubling, and doubling really quickly. And the problem with going faster is every time you double the speed, you half the reach on copper.Brandon (11:10)So I think you mentioned in your story a 400 gigabit interconnect that only moved to I think two and a half meters. Was that right in terms of length?Tobias Mann (11:18)Right, yeah. We're at the point where at 200 gig it's about two and a half meters and it's gonna get halved as you go to four hundred gig. These are lanes. So, you think about ports on a network switch today and you might see 400 gig or 800 gig or 1.6 T. But those are assembled from four to eight lanes at these speeds._(testo troncato)_