Hot Chips, the annual conference where chip designers explain their newest silicon in unusual technical detail, drew an unusually varied cast this year: Intel, AMD, IBM and Waymo all took the stage.
The most exotic disclosure came from IBM. According to Tom's Hardware, IBM's next-generation mainframe AI processor packs 11 cores built on a 2nm manufacturing node, with every core running at a 5.7 GHz base frequency. More striking is what those cores can do: Tom's Hardware describes it as IBM's first dual-ISA core, able to natively execute both ARM instructions and IBM's own z/Architecture instructions inside the same core. In plain terms, one chip speaking two different machine languages without translation overhead — a bridge between the mainframe world and the ARM software ecosystem that now dominates phones and increasingly the data center.
Intel used the show to detail Wildcat Lake, aimed at budget laptops. Tom's Hardware reports that Intel is nonetheless putting advanced technology into the low end, building on its 18A process node and relying on a UCIe interconnect — an industry-standard way of stitching separate chip tiles together — which the value-focused design necessitated.
On the AI side, ServeTheHome reports that AMD opened the conference's second day with Versal Premium Gen2, pitched at edge and "physical AI" workloads, meaning computing embedded in machines that act in the real world.
Waymo, meanwhile, presented its Sensor Fusion processor. ServeTheHome says the talk detailed how the Alphabet unit is tackling autonomous driving with custom silicon — chips designed in-house rather than bought off the shelf.
Why it matters: the lineup shows how far custom, purpose-built chips have spread beyond the usual PC-and-server duopoly, reaching from 50-year-old mainframe architectures to the sensors inside a self-driving car.