Arm up nearly 7%. Nvidia up 5%. Microsoft up 2%. Intel down over 3%. It’s not hard to spot the winners and losers from yesterday’s reportage of Nvidia preparing to (re)enter the desktop CPU market, using Arm’s architecture rather than Intel’s platform.
First Reuters and then Bloomberg reported that both Nvidia and AMD—Intel’s traditional rival in CPUs, and Nvidia’s in GPUs—were quietly working on Arm-based desktop CPUs. While Nvidia’s stock rose on the reports, AMD’s slipped by more than 1%, perhaps indicating investor nervousness at the prospect of facing down $1-trillion Nvidia in yet another market. (AMD is trying to loosen Nvidia’s firm grasp on the high-end AI chip market, and as always there are those GPUs.)
Nvidia has experience in this space, albeit quite a while back—its Tegra 3 system on a chip powered Microsoft’s first Surface tablet, which was a flop, over a decade ago. These days it also has a data center CPU called Grace, which it describes as a “superchip.” That’s definitely at the other end of the price and performance spectrum from the sort of desktop CPUs being talked about now.
At the moment, only two companies make Arm-based desktop CPUs. One of them is Apple, whose M-series of in-house processors has been crushing it in desktops, laptops, and tablets—having come of age in the mobile context, Arm’s architecture offers much better power efficiency than Intel’s offerings. But the only one addressing the Windows market is Qualcomm, which has been working with Microsoft on Windows-on-Arm since 2016.
XDA Developers reported a couple years back that Qualcomm actually had an exclusivity deal with Microsoft, and it was likely to expire “soon.” The termination date now seems to be 2024, with both Nvidia’s and AMD’s Arm-based desktop CPUs reportedly set to hit the market the following year.
Intel’s been betting on the integration of AI capabilities into its upcoming CPUs as the way to pull itself out of the doldrums. Microsoft is also keen on those capabilities, which will in the future probably power much of the functionality of the Copilot AI assistant that’s being integrated into its operating system.
But it now looks like Windows fans will have many other options if, in a couple years, they want something with AI in it that can get closer to the efficiency of a MacBook. And what’s more, Nvidia and AMD both really know how to integrate a CPU with a GPU—Qualcomm’s graphics drivers reportedly have compatibility issues—and both know their way around AI.
The desktop market continues to get interesting again. More news below.
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David Meyer
NEWSWORTHY
Foxconn falters. Foxconn’s share price slipped a few percent after Chinese reports that the country’s tax and land-use authorities are on the Taiwanese iPhone maker’s case. As Al Jazeera reports, Foxconn’s Chinese subsidiaries are reportedly being audited and on-site investigations have taken place. The government hasn’t officially announced any probes. Of note: Taiwan’s election is in a few months’ time, and Foxconn founder Terry Gou is a (poorly polling) presidential candidate.
Apple’s climate claims. Apple’s assertion that its new watches are “carbon neutral” is based on its purchase of carbon credits, and many see this as greenwashing. As the Financial Times reports, the EU plans to ban what Apple just did by 2026. Climate experts also suggest the environmental effects of e-waste are being downplayed, and question the quality of the credits themselves.
Spotify, but profitable. Spotify has posted its first quarterly profit since 2021, thanks to its recent price hikes, across-the-board subscriber growth, and cost-cutting layoffs. “We believe moving forward, we should see pretty consistent growth in our operating income,” said CFO Paul Vogel, according to Reuters.
SIGNIFICANT FIGURES
22%
—The increase between the share price of Elon Musk’s Boring Company at a recent employee share sale, and the price at a funding round last year. The Information reports an implied valuation of $7 billion for the privately held tunneling company, whose investors seem to be looking past recent setbacks.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Elon Musk’s Tesla subpoenaed over its FSD self-driving feature, admitting there is ‘the possibility of a material adverse impact on our business,’ by Christiaan Hetzner
Elon Musk lost a fortune on Tesla’s earnings, but ARK’s Cathie Wood says the ‘intensity of his brain cells’ takes him to new levels when facing hardship, by Eleanor Pringle
PayPal rival used by Uber and Spotify has lost so much market value in U.S. push that it’s cost its founders $2 billion this year, by Prarthana Prakash
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek says he couldn’t have built the platform if he came up with it today—and he’s blaming Apple, by Ryan Hogg
BEFORE YOU GO
How to poison AI. Artists have recently begun fighting Big AI—whose data-training practices they see as exploitative—in the courts. But now they may also get a tool to help them target the AI more directly.
As reported by MIT Technology Review, the Nightshade tool “lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it’s scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways.” In a sense, is that not in fact art?
The team behind Nightshade is apparently planning to open-source it and also to integrate it into a separate tool called Glaze, that stymies AI attempts to learn an artist’s style. And yes, this all points to insecurity in current AI models.
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