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Semiconductor News by Dylan Martin

@dylanonchips.bsky.social

519 followers 136 following 344 posts

News/features about semiconductors from CRN Senior Editor Dylan Martin. Send tips to dmartin@thechannelco.com or dylanljmartin.20 on Signal. Find my articles here: www.crn.com/authors/dylan-martin

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Semiconductor News by Dylan Martin @dylanonchips.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

I am back from parental leave and ready to continue reporting on the hardware hellscape (heavenscape?).

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Semiconductor News by Dylan Martin @dylanonchips.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

The AI chatbot for the CES 2026 website is doing a great job demonstrating the promise of AI.

I asked the chatbot: "How many exhibitors at CES 2026?"

It responded: "There are 20 exhibitors at CES 2026."

There are typically thousands of exhibitors at CES.

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Semiconductor News by Dylan Martin @dylanonchips.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

Dominic Daninger, head of engineering at systems integrator Nor-Tech, told me that Nvidia's acquisition of Slurm maker SchedMD has him concerned because of how the company significantly raised software support and licensing costs with its Bright Computing acquisition. www.crn.com/news/softwar...

After Bright Computing was acquired, Daninger said, the vendor’s Bright Cluster Manager software got “very expensive” because of rising licensing and support costs.

“And we just didn’t see the same level of support either, so it caused us to, for the most part, discontinue the use of Bright,” Daninger said.

Daninger said the costs increased as Nvidia merged the product into Base Command Manager software in 2023, which resulted in the company changing the way it charges for licenses to a per-GPU basis and away from Bright’s traditional per-node pricing.

Then late last year, Nvidia made Base Command Manager only available through the Nvidia AI Enterprise software suite, which costs $4,500 per GPU for a year-long subscription and includes enterprise support, Nvidia partner Boston Limited said in a notice at the time.

By contrast, Bright Cluster Manager’s per-node licenses typically cost hundreds of dollars per year before the acquisition, according to Daninger.

“The orientation changed to what Nvidia needed out of it. They can do that when they own it. And I would expect to see some of the same things here with Slurm,” Daninger said.

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Semiconductor News by Dylan Martin @dylanonchips.bsky.social · 28/10/2025

Heads up: There's a fake Nvidia GTC DC keynote stream happening now on YouTube hosted by a channel called NVIDIA Live. It appears to be a deepfake of Jensen Huang promoting a "crypto mass adoption event." Obviously don't do anything to connected to that QR code.

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Semiconductor News by Dylan Martin @dylanonchips.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

You're definitely onto something. Makes me think of this Brad Sams tweet from a few months ago.

"Microsoft has found itself in a prediament ...for roughly 4 years, they have told the world to do AI on a Windows PC, you need an NPU

"Obviously this is to make OEMs happy and to sell more hardware...but agents and browsers from openai (and all the others) will work without NPUs"

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Semiconductor News by Dylan Martin @dylanonchips.bsky.social · 29/09/2025

I've been thinking about how the Trump administration turned previously allocated federal grants into a 9.9 equity stake in Intel after demanding for its CEO to resign, then sent the National Guard to the U.S. metro area with the largest concentration of Intel employees. Normal investor behavior.

Quote from Intel's website: "Intel’s operations in Oregon are our largest concentration of facilities and talent in the world. Today, with over 22,000 employees across four campuses in Hillsboro – just ten miles west of Portland – we are developing technology that makes the most amazing experiences possible."

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Semiconductor News by Dylan Martin @dylanonchips.bsky.social · 26/06/2025

It's me, Dylan, checking in from the chip-verse

My face reflected in the die of AMD's MI355X GPU.

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Semiconductor News by Dylan Martin @dylanonchips.bsky.social · 04/06/2025

Hey look at that, I won a national business journalism award for my coverage of Nvidia and Intel last year! Pretty neat for a guy who has been covering the semiconductor industry from thousands of miles away in the state of Maine since 2019.

I won the National Bronze Award in ASBPE’s 2025 Azbee Awards of Excellence for the Online Industry News Coverage section.

- Winning title of entry: The Rise of NVIDIA, the Fall Of Intel by Dylan Martin
- Category: Online > Online Industry News Coverage > New England
- Editing by: Executive Editor, CRN, and Vice President of U.S. Content, CRN’s parent company, The Channel Company, Jennifer Follett, Managing Editor, News, David L. Harris and Managing Editor Jane O’Brien

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Semiconductor News by Dylan Martin @dylanonchips.bsky.social · 04/04/2025

What happened to Maingear with its decision to move laptop assembly from China to Taiwan to avoid tariffs on Chinese imports, only then to be subject to new tariffs on Taiwanese goods, is a good example of how Trump's tariff regime is creating chaos for businesses. www.crn.com/news/computi...

When President Trump announced in February that the United States would place additional tariffs on goods imported from China, Maingear CEO Wallace Santos knew the cost of his company’s laptops would get hit, so he decided to move assembly from Asia’s largest manufacturing hub to Taiwan.

The decision delayed the launch of Maingear’s new gaming laptops with Nvidia’s latest GeForce RTX 5000 GPUs by about a month and a half, according to Santos. And the laptops would cost about $70 more per unit due to the cost of shipping China-made components to the island nation as well as higher labor costs in Taiwan, he said.

But the Warren, N.J.-based PC system builder had at least avoided a major increase in import taxes by not shipping finished laptops out of China—or so Santos thought.

On Wednesday, several weeks after Maingear shifted laptop assembly to Taiwan to avoid higher import taxes, Santos learned that Trump had announced a new round of tariffs for countries across the world. Among the roughly 60 countries or regions targeted, a 32 percent tariff would be applied to all products except semiconductors made in Taiwan.

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Semiconductor News by Dylan Martin @dylanonchips.bsky.social · 30/01/2025

Just booked my travel for Nvidia's GTC 2025 event in March. Excited to update my self-portrait from last year.

A picture of my face reflected in Nvidia's Blackwell GPU die.

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