Intel's big bet on SambaNova appears to be paying off in a big way. This week, the AI chip startup shared benchmark results showing its latest generation of AI acceleration, which combines Nvidia GPUs and the company's accelerators, beating GPU-only inference platforms by a wide margin. The testing, conducted by the AI benchmarking gurus at Artificial Analysis, showed SambaNova's SN50-series accelerators, announced in February, churning out 763 tokens a second in MiniMax M2.7 at short context lengths (10,000 input tokens) — several times faster than competing inference providers running on GPUs alone. Meanwhile, for longer context lengths, the company says that its platform is able to sustain more than 450 tokens a second. This feat was accomplished by combining Nvidia GPUs with SambaNova Reconfigurable Dataflow Units (RDUs) to form a heterogeneous inference platform. Specifically, the computationally intensive prefill phase of the inference pipeline, during which prompts are processed and key value caches are generated, was handled by four Nvidia H200 GPUs. Meanwhile, memory-bandwidth-bound decode operations, where output tokens are generated, were done on a single SambaNova rack containing 16 SN50 accelerators. Disaggregating prefill from decode has become a key lever for reducing token costs for long-running AI agents, like code assistants. Nvidia initially demonstrated this with its NVL72 rack systems, by varying the ratio of GPUs used for prefill versus decode. The company further disaggregated this with its Groq-based LPX racks revealed at GTC this spring. Since then, just about everyone from AMD to AWS and Cerebras has announced some kind of disaggregated or heterogeneous inference platform using one or more accelerators. With SambaNova's latest performance figures, the startup hopes to demonstrate how customers can breathe new life into their aging GPU fleets by using its systems as decode accelerators. And because its systems are air-cooled, they can be deployed in existing datacenters — something that can't be said of Nvidia's latest generation of Rubin GPUs, which absolutely need liquid cooling. SambaNova plans to show off even more powerful inference configs, with 128 and eventually 256 accelerators to demonstrate its ability to maintain high token generation rates at high throughput. As we’ve previously explored, this is something that GPUs alone have historically struggled with and one of the key drivers behind Nvidia’s Groq acquihire late last year. The results come just a month after SambaNova and Intel announced Vector Core Compute would be among the first to deploy the combined GPU + RDU offering with TogetherAI as their first large-scale customer. Ramping production of any chip isn’t a cheap prospect, but for its fifth-gen part, capital shouldn’t be an issue. On Wednesday, SambaNova completed the first close of a $1 billion Series F funding round led by General Atlantic, giving the AI chip startup an $11 billion valuation. ®

In the era of vibe coding, even GitHub is having trouble keeping up with all the traffic. Now, Thomas Dohmke, the service's former CEO, has launched his own Git hosting network to meet the needs of AI agents and those minding them. His company is called Entire, which the biz has repackaged as an adverb to make the point that it is pitching "an entirely new Git hosting network" based on the 21-year-old version control software. "The question is not if Git survives through the sheer weight of its ecosystem lock-in," Dohmke mused in a recent post. "The question is how we can expand, rewire, and evolve Git hosting for a world where AI agents are the primary producers of code." Git's survival hasn't been seriously questioned – it's used by an estimated 93.87 percent of developers and remains the dominant version control system. It's GitHub, Microsoft's hosted Git platform, that's been having problems due to the unanticipated infrastructure stress arising from the proliferation of AI coding agent interactions. Dohmke admits as much when he acknowledges that his company's proposed fix for Git – decentralization – has been part of Git's design since day one. What Entire really aims to fix is GitHub and other code hosting platforms, which weren't built to accommodate AI agents. "By design, Git was always meant to be decentralized," Dohmke wrote. "Every clone contains a complete copy of the repository and its history, allowing software to be replicated across many hosts rather than controlled by a single server. But in practice, Git hosting platforms have largely routed developers into centralized systems. This was sustainable until agents came along." In its initial form, Entire.io allows developers – presently those promoted from the waitlist in the US, EU, and Australia – to mirror their public or private GitHub repos. This creates a parallel universe where AI agents can fumble their way through Entire-hosted code without putting strain on GitHub resources that might be needed for actual deployment. Users can also choose to rely solely on Entire-native branches. The Entire.io network complements the Entire CLI, a Git-integrated tool designed to collect AI agent sessions alongside code commits. "It hooks into your workflow to track prompts, responses, file changes, and other context from AI coding agents – allowing you to understand not just what changed, but why," the company explains. That provides some hint at the company's fill-in-the-blanks business model – Git hosting, agent auditing (showing why an agent made a decision), and eventually monetization of whatever data exhaust is relevant to software agents and companies managing them. The Entire network is designed for scale, low-latency, regional content control, and availability. It's intended to better handle concurrent requests, something that agents may inflict upon repos. As a point of comparison, the company cites performance stats from SpaceX's Cursor, which last month announced its own agent-friendly GitHub challenger called Cursor Origin. Entire claims that its network can handle 2.1 million pushes per hour and 570,000 clone operations per hour compared to Cursor Origin's 81,000 pushes per hour and 296,000 clones per hour. The company says in the months ahead it plans to open source its Git network and allow self-hosting. "We will continue building up and down the stack towards an open, decentralized, independent developer ecosystem for any agent and any human," said Dohmke. ®

• British wildcard will face Zverev in semi-finals

• ‘I’ve just played every match as it is. Here I am’

Arthur Fery described his run to the Wimbledon semi-finals as a product of his immense self-belief, after he defeated the ninth seed, Flavio Cobolli, 6-4, 7-6 (4), 6-0 on Wednesday.

“That’s just what I’ve tried to do for the past 10 days,” Fery said. “Just believe in myself, do the best I can do every match, give myself 100%, and see then where that will take me. Today especially, because I’ve beaten him in Australia, so I knew I could do it, and yeah I did.”

Continue reading...

Mohamed al-Wahidi died when a missile struck his taxi shortly before Egypt played Argentina in their last 16 World Cup match. He had organised the screening of World Cup games across the Gaza Strip, which had become a welcome diversion from the continuing misery of a very partly observed ceasefire and near-daily Israeli strikes

• Aid worker who organised World Cup screenings in Gaza killed in Israeli strike

Continue reading...

Andrew Giuliani claims actions of referee Raphael Claus over US player Folarin Balogun ‘very, very highly suspicious’

Andrew Giuliani, head of the White House’s World Cup taskforce, has defended Donald Trump’s lobbying of Fifa to lift the suspension of US player Folarin Balogun for Monday’s game against Belgium.

The US president claimed that Brazilian referee Raphael Claus, who showed Balogun a red card in the match against Bosnia and Herzegovina, was “a little bit suspect, if you check his past”. This was apparently a reference to a match-fixing investigation by Brazil’s senate in 2024 that examined how referees were assigned to games but did not accuse Claus of wrongdoing.

Continue reading...

Hot wheels, Joshua Vides

Giancarlo Fisichella carried the mantle for Italian drivers in Formula 1 from the mid-nineties through to the late noughties. He won three races in that time and was the last Italian Grand Prix winner until Kimi Antonelli ripped up the record books at the start of 2026.

Fable is free. But the technology desperately needs better regulations.

Europe's General Court dismissed Apple's challenge to the EU's designation of its App Stores and iOS as "gatekeepers" under the Digital Markets Act. The ruling means Apple remains subject to DMA obligations requiring it to allow alternative app stores, support interoperability with rival services, and avoid favoring its own services over competitors. MacRumors reports: Apple took its case to Luxembourg's General Court in 2024 after the European Commission designated its five App Stores -- on the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and Apple Watch -- as a single core platform service under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), a label that brings with it a set of strict obligations. Designated "gatekeepers" are prohibited from favoring their own services over those of rivals, and are prevented from combining personal data across different services. They also have to give users the option to use alternative app stores.

Apple also challenged the EU's designation of iOS as a gateway platform, a status that requires the operating system allows rival services to interoperate with it. The company also disputed the classification of iMessage as a number-independent interpersonal communications service, or NIICS, which would subject the app to EU telecoms rules. But the General Court said Apple's actions regarding the iMessage service are inadmissible.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.