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 here, as well as on Spotify and Apple Music, 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 some Brandon (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. A Brandon (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. It's not the port speed, it's the link speed. At four hundred gigabit you're down to like 1.25 meters, you're at the limit of a rack….We are putting the switches in the middle of the rack for these systems for a reason, because that's the where you can get the best reach to all the stuff you get a plug in. Once we go to 800, you're gonna be supremely limited. And so you have to start talk thinking about optics at some level. There's a lot of ways to do this, but Matt Murphy is convinced that within 10 years, copper is basically going to go away. And there's a lot of companies that have been working towards this. Today the way we connect to optics is really complicated. You have a chip that communicates over copper through PCB out to a front end, some PCI interface or something like that. That has to go up to a network interface, and then you're gonna plug a pluggable optic in. And then you can go out over the fiber, and then you have to have basically the same thing on the other end, or there might be a switch in the middle, with more pluggable optics. Those pluggable optics are one of the reasons that we haven'tdone this yet. Why, if we're heading in this direction, just not move to optics now? And the reason is pluggables are really power hungry, especially at the speeds we're talking about. You need lots of them. Like 72 pluggables for one GPU potentially. And each pluggable pulls like fifteen watts. So you start doing the math – or not 72, but 18, so sorry, or 36. It's a lot of power. It adds up really, really quickly. The numbers get really confusing very quickly, but the point is you just need an absurd amount of pluggables. And to use really simple numbers, Nvidia faced this problem two years ago. They said why not just do optics? We're gonna have to go there eventually. And they did the math and it was going to add 20 kilowatts of power to a rack that was already pulling 120. And as you go faster, you need faster pluggables. Eventually we'll get to the point where the fibers go straight to the chip. You've cut out all of those copper interconnects all the way out, and the fibers just go to the chip, and you might have a little connector that goes from fiber to fiber in between. Brandon (14:39) So that's that's coming. Tobias Mann (14:41) That's coming. Matt Murphy thinks it's probably ten years out, that we're gonna get to a point where most most of the copper is gone. You'll still use it for power, but you're not gonna be using it for data communications. Brandon (14:56) Well it'd be great if that would kind of resolve our issue with with the copper shortage. Tobias Mann (15:00) It would help with copper shortage, but it would also help with memory. So today the reason everything has to go in one box. You have a CPU, a GPU, you have a bunch of memory. All of it has to go in one box and it has to be in a relatively fixed ratio of of these things. You know, one CPU to two GPUs to X amount of memory. And regardless of whether your application, your workload actually needs that ratio or not, that's what you're stuck with. When everything is optically interconnected, Murphy is contending that you could just have a box full of GPUs in one corner of your data center. You could have memory over in the other corner, and CPUs in another corner. Brandon (15:43) Basically it'd be fast enough to have a distributed system essentially. Tobias Mann (15:48) Right, and then you can then reallocate it. And there's there are protocols, Compute Express Link, this is a technology that's been under development for a long time. It allows for memory sharing on compatible components. And memory sharing is interesting because you can have two different systems doing almost exactly the same thing, and it's basically deduplicating. So they're only using the memory of like one and a quarter versus two machines. And so we can dramatically potentially reduce the memory consumption of these systems by sharing the memory like it's network attached storage device almost. Brandon (16:36) Yeah. So Marvell is putting this forward as their strategy and causing Jensen to basically cause their stock to just skyrocket, right? That to me sounds like they're getting their share of the bubble. Right? A lot of what I wonder is, what's going on there this week, do you think it's more it's more bubble inflation? Or do you think these are, you know, practical, realistic things they're saying in an attempt to move an industry forward regardless of the potential collapse. Tobias Mann (17:12) Well, I think there's a lot of industry building going on, certainly. But I think to your point, hype is something that, if you if you can't launch a product, then you can hype up your product or hype up somebody else's. Nvidia invested two billion dollars in Marvell not that long ago. So I'm sure Jensen is eager to get his money's worth out of that investment and jacking up the stock price with predictions is probably a pretty decent way of getting things going. But the reality is that for any of the things that you know Matt Murphy is talking about, for Jensen's prediction to come true, there's a lot of the industry that needs to start ramping up now in preparation of this, and if you want to keep the bubble from popping, a good way to do that is to make sure that you don't run into roadblocks too early. So if you've got capital to burn in getting…in kind of building the track further out in front of the train, I'm mixing a lot of metaphors here because it's late, but this seems to be what Nvidia is doing here. And it feels like we're seeing a lot more of this. This is not the first time Nvidia has thrown money at optics in the last couple of months. They've invested heavily in photonics companies and Marvell is just the latest example. Brandon (18:50) We've seen memory prices just skyrocket recently, right? Memory and storage prices are going through the roof. There's no reason to guess on that. It's been AI and people have been fingering AI chip needs as as the cause for a while now. What was the sense like there, right? D customers, do speakers, did the air seem to be kind of thick with concern over an an affordability, you know, or what? Like what's the finger on the pulse there? Are people concerned about pricing? Tobias Mann (19:27) Yeah, I think people are concerned about pricing, but less so on the components that we used to get excited about and more so on things that touch memory. Memory has basically eaten everybody's lunch. It doesn't matter whether you're building AI servers or you're just trying to buy a new laptop. The share of the price on either of those things as associated with memory has just become the dominant force and what's driving up memory. I was talking to AMD this week about some products that they're they have in the works, trying to build up their developer onramp for around their products, something they have kind of a deficit and they're trying to catch up with Nvidia on. And you know, the device that they're gonna do this with is $4,000. And they said 75 percent of that is now memory and storage. And you know what's crazy is the hardware in it's not new. And so a year ago, that $4,000 box could be had for under $2,000. Brandon (20:45) Yeah, it's the same with the Steam Deck, right? It skyrocketed in price as a consumer device example, right? We talked about this in last week's episode. It's gone through the roof and it's not new hardware. It's the same thing. It's just that in order to make it, Valve's markups are now gonna be have to be so much higher because of the price of the memory and the storage in the thing. It's ludicrous. Tobias Mann (21:05) Right. I was walking around some of the consumer memory vendors. They don't make the memory but they package it and they're how consumers buy it. And they were all advertising that their new SSDs with capacities up to eight terabytes and and new memory with up to a 128 gigabytes per DIMM. And I'm looking at this going, uh-huh. And so we have a $8,000 SSD that I can't afford and a memory kit that God knows how expensive that's going to be, but it's going to be probably two, three thousand dollars for that. The addressable market for these products is shrinking because you know the market can't, the consumer market simply can't bear it. And there's a lot of excitement that's lost on that. Brandon (21:36) Yeah, totally. I mean when you when you say, hey, here's the newest graphics card or the newest blah blah blah blah blah, it's faster, it's greater, it's gonna make your PC run, more efficiently, but it costs, more than three times more than the computer you bought, it's like, well I that why should I get excited about that? Tobias Mann (22:21) We used to get excited when there was a thirty percent improvement and whatever performance market generation on generation, but that was predicated on the price staying relatively…increasing by less than the performance increased. Why upgrade? Sure the performance is thirty percent better, but the price doubled. That's not a compelling sale. Brandon (22:28) So this this old machine's gonna have to work for a little longer, you know? It really makes me wonder, I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Apple's got the new MacBook Neo or whatever it's called, the the the cheap one, right? I think I just read somewhere that they've had a double production because it's been so popular, right? Cheap hardware, people want it, right? And it makes me wonder if given the cost of, you know, high performance components, getting to the point where they're going to be untenable for anyone but, hyperscalers and colo facilities that are running, all this this stuff. I mean, are we looking at kind of a new normal in computing? Are these prices going to come back down or are we are we getting to a point where this is going to be the sort of thing where companies are going to use this as an excuse to say, here's a cheap machine that you need all our services for? Are we moving that direction? Tobias Mann (23:38) It's an interesting question. There's a lot of there's a lot of shifting market dynamics around this kind of thing. New markets are oftentimes born out of necessity. I would say that the MacBook at Neo is an interesting example of this. It's like this is this is not a market that Apple has traditionally played in. But they had excess capacity of, I think it's the A19 that it's based on. And they were able to leverage that and to bring into bringing a lower cost but still premium device to to market. In that there's some relief and there's an ecosystem play. They can capture a market that has previously been inaccessible to them on and kind of that low end Mac marketing. So I do think that there's some opportunity for Microsoft to capitalize on this if they're if they're smart. But I would also say that Windows has become increasingly hostile to users and I think that they might be better served by focusing on fixing the software first. Back in April, Intel did bring some new chips to market that look like they're going to provide similar performance to a MacBook Neo at low enough prices that we should start to see notebook vendors being able to compete on kind of the premium device with just enough performance to be interesting. Brandon (25:15) So you don't necessarily think we're looking at a period where we're gonna all be sold Chromebooks and toll or something to that effect, right? Like cheap machines that are basically gonna be like, necessitating connected services that we can eventually either be handing over data or money for. Tobias Mann (25:30) Right. You know, anytime you hit a kind of you stall out on the technological, the hardware side of things, software typically is where you see the most optimization and improvement. But I do think that if this idea of local AI is going to take over as kind of an economic driver, as Amon was kind of pushing, we're gonna need memory. Like these models are not small and it needs to be fast memory. And so, right now those devices cost three or four thousand dollars for to even to get into the entry level of of of that. It's kind of two forces working against each other. And the reality is the problem that all of this comes back to is that we can't control the memory markets. And at least from talking to folks at Tech Insights not that long ago, it looks like we're in this for the next year and a half at least. And even then prices are going to settle rather than continuing to rise. It's not going to be the course correction that we've historically seen. Memory markets are historically very cyclical. You have booms and busts, prices go high, memory vendors raise enough money to ramp production again, they stop production, and when inventory gets high, prices drop because people are willing to pay less for it. That we're just not seeing that. The demand is so high that every memory module just gets eaten. Brandon (27:18) Yeah. I it's gonna be an interesting it's gonna be interesting couple of years here in the tech space as we kind of hopefully find some new balance. We'll see what comes of it. And chances are we will be right here at The Kettle to talk about it after writing plenty of stories about it. So thanks again Tobias for joining me this week and hopefully have a safe flight home. And to everyone listening, we'll see you soon. ®
