Welcome back to Paul’s Tech News. Starting 
off with some good news. My beer supply is replenished. And thanks to those who expressed 
concern last week. It’s a Japanese lager from Harland Brewing in San Diego. San Diago. San 
Diago? San Diago. You know, I only really have a couple drinks a week these days, but if anyone 
wants to send more, the PO box is listed in the video’s description. Tech news, though. Intel. 
Oh, Intel, how far you have fallen with continued layoffs and vultures circling. AMD plans to beat 
team blue while they’re down with another family of CPUs based on Zen 6 in the process of being 
locked and loaded. And PC gamers finally have Nvidia right where they want them. Positioned as 
the most valuable publicly traded company in the world, topping $4 trillion market cap for the 
first time ever, their success will undoubtedly make them overconfident. And then we strike. 
Works every time, just like the tech news. Cheers. for your next build. The NQ780 is a balanced 
drive that combines performance with value, offering impressive PCIe Gen 4 speeds as well as 
a single-sided design, SLC cache, and intelligent power control. The NM1090 Pro features blazing 
fast PCIe Gen 5 read speeds up to 14,000 megabytes per second, twice as fast as PCIe Gen 4. The 
NM1090 Pro also has a dual DRAM plus SLC cache and a six nanometer controller to minimize heat 
output even under sustained workloads. Both drives are available in capacities up to four terabytes 
and come with a 5-year warranty. For more on the Lexar NM1090 Pro and NQ780 SSDs, click the sponsor 
links in the video description. We begin today with Intel, the once proud chip giant who was 
subjected to some brutal criticism from their harshest detractors this week. Forget being 
in the top three. Intel isn’t even in the top 10 semiconductor companies anymore. And it’s too 
late to catch up with the likes of Nvidia in the AI race. And these words came from Intel’s CEO, 
Lip Bu Tan, who apparently moonlights as a tech media writer given his rosy outlook. Tan followed 
up his pep talk with another morale booster by laying off thousands more employees with the 
total number of positions axed still unknown. But this follows plans announced earlier in 
the year to trim the fat and attempt to make Intel profitable again. Intel also spun off their 
robotics focused subsidiary Real Sense on Friday, which will get them about $50 million in 
funding. But of course, no more Intel robots, which sort of goes against some other industry 
trends toward automation and investment in what will eventually become our robot overlords. But 
I guess cybernetic limbs weren’t helping balance the budget in Intel’s accounting department. Intel 
is also shutting down their automotive business, outsourcing their marketing department, and 
cutting up to a fifth of all jobs from their manufacturing operations. And to top it all off, 
their 18A process, which has been in development for years now. Former CEO Pat Gellzinger’s baby 
is losing interest from outside customers and will likely only be used for internal Intel products, 
which was not what they planned. It was supposed to compete with TSMC for third party fab chip 
designers, but now Intel will need to fall back to 18A variations or the follow-up 14A node. Consumer 
reactions to all this bleak Intel news is mixed. While some rightfully see it as the comeuppance 
that was in store after Intel spent a decade or so skating by with stagnant quadcore CPU offerings 
while investing far more into stock buybacks and drone shows than new product R&D. It’s also quite 
true that Intel is the only actual competition to AMD right now on the desktop CPU side of the 
market, and losing them would be very bad, and they’re potentially the best upcoming GPU 
alternative to the Nvidia/AMD Radeon duopoly that has existed for far too long. Gamers Nexus did an 
excellent dive into the Intel Arc GPU situation this week, which is linked in the description and 
is well worth a watch. But there is plenty to be optimistic about with some of the info that they 
dug up. B580 sales volume being five times better than Arc Alchemist is good. Intel playing nice 
with board partners who want to do unique designs is cool, too. And a focus on hitting good prices 
is also nice, even if real world retail prices are still over what they should be. The 6 to 8month 
turnaround for new factory GPU orders to get to market is less ideal, though, and it’s interesting 
to hear how challenging it is for Intel to have a launch stand out when competing with launches from 
both AMD and Nvidia. For now, Intel Arc is still a thing, though, and there’s hope for the future, 
although it greatly depends on how Intel navigates the rest of 2025 and transitions into next year. 
Even the B770 rumors are still alive. We just hope that Lit Bhutan and the executive team calling the 
shots over at Intel don’t decide that ARK should suffer the same fate as Intel’s robots. While 
Intel struggles though, AMD has been carefully planning and their nextG CPU architecture 
development is already well underway. It is known as Zen 6, the somewhat predictable successor 
to Zen 5. And there’s a lineup codenamed Olympic Ridge for desktops and Medusa Point for mobile. 
Apart from the fearsome monikers, the specs for Zen 6 are pretty exciting. Possibly 12 cores for 
CCD instead of eight, boosting core counts by up to 50%. A low latency dieto-d bridge to reduce 
or eliminate latency between cores. and a newly designed double DDR5 memory controller that is 
still dual channel by the way just to get things started. Desktop versions will thankfully still 
be compatible with socket AM5 if these rumors hold. And the early leaks from February have just 
been bolstered two times. First by an official IDA 64 update that adds preliminary support for AMD 
Zen 6 desktop server and mobile processors. And side note, this IDA 64 update also mentions an 
unreleased Radeon RX960 nonXT video card. Hm. Interesting. And second, per Yuri Bubli aka 1Smas, 
who develops the Hydra tuning software for AMD platforms, engineering samples of Zen 6 CPUs have 
already been shipped to partners and motherboard manufacturers, which usually happens sometime 
prior to launch, so motherboard manufacturers can manufacture motherboards. Mr. Bubbly says Zen 
6 won’t be a revolution. It will be an evolution, which is quite mysterious, but perhaps means 
raw performance gains will be more modest. while functionality expands. Just my guess. This 
is also where the dual DDR5 memory controller information comes from, though. AMD is 
still pretty tight- lipped about Zen 6, but given the lack of competition from Intel, they 
have plenty of wiggle room as they finish out the product development cycle. My money is currently 
on a January 2026 debut at CES. And now we want Intel to not suck, but it’s undeniable that 
Intel really sucks at this. Providing an upgrade path for their CPU buyers by staying with the same 
socket for more than one or two generations. AMD’s AM4 platform has been around for almost 9 years 
and is compatible with at least four processor families from the 1000 to 5000 series, but Intel 
still seems to think one or one and a half gens is perfectly okay. It’s already been rumored for 
months that Intel’s actual nextgen CPUs, the Core Ultra 300 series, codeen named Noval Lake, will 
be on yet another new socket, LGA1954, meaning their current LGA1851 platform will be 86th after 
only the original Aerolake Core 200 series and an Aerolake refresh family expected later this year, 
as was recently alleged by ZDNet. It’s rumored to target AI demand by adding an NPU, which will have 
dubious use for home PC applications, as well as a slight increase in operating clock, which doesn’t 
sound optimistic when it comes to boosting gaming performance versus AMD’s X3D options, or whatever 
Zen 6 brings to the table for that matter. And yes, there will almost certainly be Zen 6 CPUs 
with 3D vcache. So, we need more CPU competition from Intel. Case in point, during the big Prime 
Day sales this week, which I totally ignored, everyone should thank me for that. But there 
actually were some decent deals, but not on the 9800 X3D. That dropped to $470 from $479. $9 off. 
No competition, no deals. Speaking of competition, last week we discussed hardware unboxed findings 
that the RX970 XT has gained a good amount of performance since launch, a decent 9% by their 
testing. A couple other media outlets, including Brian from Tech Yes City, decided to verify this 
claim, and it led to some misunderstanding that borders on the dramatic. So, I just wanted to 
clarify since I also amplified Steve’s results. If you test the launch driver versus the newest 
driver right now as Brian did, it results in far more modest gains depending on the game tested or 
as testing games found about a 4% boost instead of 9%. Which is because the driver isn’t all that 
has changed. There have also been game updates, engine patches, Windows updates, and other things 
that could have improved since a few months ago. So, the gains are still there versus launch test 
results. There’s just more to it than just the driver. And now some video titles and headlines 
have been retconed to make this a bit more clear to people. So drama averted. We don’t need any 
more of that in the tech media world. Thank you very much. Let’s finish off with a couple Nvidia 
stories. Starting with Sovereign AI. What the is sovereign AI? It’s like regular AI but with 
a much wealthier customer. You see, Nvidia is now pretty much the most valuable company in the 
world, thanks to selling millions of AI chips to companies like Meta, Google, and OpenAI. But 
apparently for this story, the appetite for buying Blackwell nodes that cost multiple tens of 
thousands of dollars each is starting to dry up, at least from businesses. Governments on the other 
hand are growing more interested in sovereign AI or the ability to control and manipulate 
AI as a technology by a nation or state which has immediately increased Nvidia’s stock 
price because big government is apparently an even bigger potential buyer than big tech. And if 
your immediate follow-up question is how will the powers that be put all this AI hardware to use? 
Shut up. We’re not concerning ourselves with that. Surely it will be deployed for humanitarian goals 
to make the world a better place for all of us. So Nvidia has a bunch of new buyers. Stock prices are 
up, but the rest is still a bit murky. Speaking of Nvidia being the most valuable company in the 
world, publicly traded by market cap at least. Did you know that that is how it is? And they hit 
a mind-boggling valuation of over $4 trillion on Wednesday, which was at least in part impacted by 
the aforementioned sovereign AI development. They managed to beat Apple and Microsoft to the punch 
and somewhat humorously Intel too. Not that there was much competition there. In fact, there was a 
point in 2005 reportedly when Intel was thinking about buying Nvidia for $20 billion, which seems 
like it would have been a steal. But I think it would have just meant we got GTX 600 series 
refreshes for most of the 2010s alongside stagnant Intel quad cores. But anyway though, yeah, $4 
trillion. It’s hard to even comprehend. So, uh, I guess I’ll drink to that. Cheers. 
Four trillion. But there you have it, guys. Tech news for the week. And if you liked 
it, click that like button or leave me a comment