That’s a lot of vagueness though.

I’m interested in something physical. Something I could buy, that could realistically upgrade an Arc B580 in (say) indie games, or KCDII, or llama.cpp.

This is nowhere close yet.

And I dont doubt they’re getting investment, but I’m just skeptical because I’ve seen this story a hundred times before, even in China. And even then, what’s promised to be general hardware often evolves into something for a very nich need. As a recent example, see Tenstorrent.

What’s stopping you?

My feelings:

• Neat.

• Future is interesting.

• But proof is not in the puddin’ yet.

It’s easy to say “they’ll scale it up. They’ll get to optimizing the software,” but I’ve seen waaay too many hardware makers mess up that step, and fade into the vast graveyard of their peers.

Like, does anyone remember Centaur’s exciting, 8 core x86 CPUs, with a huge block for ML inference, from about a decade ago?

https://chipsandcheese.com/p/via-part-4-a-deep-dive-into-centaurs-last-cpu-core-cns

It was competitive with Zen 1, not even counting the accelerator.

The answer is “probably not.” Even the Wikichip Fuse writeups on the architecture are gone.

It’s focused on ML inference now, TBH its not very fast, and it’s still vendor dependent.

I love the effort, but it’s not a fix to much yet.

That’s exactly what they think. They literally think Elon Musk is going to take them to Mars and automate work with AI robots and such, because nothing in their information sphere ever contradicts it.

It’s not fair to expect the average person to understand orbital mechanics, but putting them in an information bubble like Musk has is not fair to them.

And it’s a technical marvel. It’s like CryEngine was built for KCDII.

Also, it is so medieval it hurts.

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My controversial opinion:

We did this with sci-fi.

Too many people think their future actually looks like Star Trek or Mars terraforming movies or whatever, and buy Musk’s claim he’s going to make humanity an interplanetary race.

But it doesn’t work like that.

Space travel is impossibly hard. It is just impractical for human bodies, as they exist now, outside of specific scientific missions. Physics dictates that it is expensive. Quantify it, and basically, civilization woukd have to advance to a point where our Earth problems are already trivial to even begin mass manned space travel.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for drone work in space, crazy science missions, and beautiful, hopeful speculative sci fi.

But I feel like the population needs a cold bucket of water. Space travel is not going to save us; Earth is all we got for now.

Doesn’t matter(for this, specifically) if it’s not performant on LLM inference engines.

And I’m not just talking about CUDA. Even GGUF Vulkan (for example) has all sorts of vendor quirks that can absolutely trash performance. VLLM is often a joke on AMD, with certain models, on certain cards, even with dev support.

Of what, though? Huawei NPUs are datacenter hardware.

As much as we hate it, Nvidia gaming GPUs are ultimately cheap consumer devices, and they’re very good at hybrid CPU+GPU inference.

I think Intel has the best chance of pulling a rabbit out of a hat with Arc. They have a usable platform already, hardware “close enough” to Nvidia that LLM compatibility isn’t a nightmare. And they have nothing to lose, no illusion of “protecting datacenter cards” like AMD has.

They’ve released two open weights LLMs, trained on AMD hardware.

…And yes. They are archaic jokes. I could have trained a better model if I was in charge of it, which is sad.

And don’t even get me started on hardware and library footgunning.

Yeah. I mean, I have a Ryzen desktop and a 2020 GPU, and Mimo 2.5 is a bit faster and mind bogglingly better than frontier models from like… two years ago? And frontier models are plateauing, I think.

Still, my worry is that we consumer won’t HAVE any hardware. Many don’t even own a laptop these days, and it feels like they’ll just drop desktops (and work will just use thin clients) if they’re too cost prohibitive for people to buy.

Oh don’t mistake me, they are not consumer friendly.

They are just trying to sell enterprise GPUs directly to “consumer” businesses and the cloud providers they use, instead of through literally fraudulent middlemen like OpenAI.

This is what pretty much everyone with hardware is doing, including Huawei, Tenstorrent, Cerebras, even AMD. Maybe I misinterpreted you, but hardly anyone cares about individual self-hosters.

Apple does, though. MLX is actually getting pretty cool. But they’ll always be quite insular, anti-consumer in other ways, and they still seem detached from what the community is largely doing.

Nvidia sees the writing in the wall too, hence the big Nemotron effort now. They’ve been pushing open models, but no one can hear them over Altman’s lies.

AMD… is… trying.

Some other companies have made pretty interesting efforts too, like LG and IBM. Huawei already publish a big model to promote their ASICs, and is planning another in weeks. Even some Russian company trained a big open LLM from scratch, though it wasn’t very good TBH.

And this is not even looking outside the LLM space, where all sorts of interesting models are published.

Eh, it seems like a nothingburger TBH.

On the 2026 Scam Scale ™, rebranding a 2024 phone as flipping it for $500 is… not even that high?

Gestures at Polymarket advertising on the White House lawn

Yeah.

Say what you will about Apple, but they are the major hedge against Google controlling much of the world, at the moment.

That sounds hyperbolic and conspiratorial. But, sadly, it really isn’t. Without them, there would effectively be one web browser, one mobile operating system, one search engine, with basically no way out of whatever Google dictates for 97% of the population.

At ~3.5% market share, depending on the statistics source. And declining, month-on-month:

https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/browser-market-share-2025-q4

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/

Ublock was already somewhat neutered on Chrome, and people didn’t seem to notice. They keep using it.

I’m just so cynical these days. It’s not like the Windows XP era, where people eventually get fed up with enshittification, and move.

Google won. Facebook won.

They have absolute control, basically.

Except they aren’t moving anymore.

I think Google finally trapped most of the web’s population, for good.

Like how they killed JPEG-XL.

All over some employee’s ego associated with his AVIF contributions, from what I’ve seen.